When reading dune there’s a class of women who can control their biochemistry in such a way that they can eg prolong lifespan, or anything else within the realm of feasible biochemistry.

Here I was like: how does the nervous system function in that way? How could signals from the mind control the behavior of molecules?

The mind cannot itself feel pain, similarly the mind has sensory limits within the body. As argued in a book called the body a guide for occupants: cancer is a very good example of a disease that our nervous system should be able to detect but for whatever reason we don’t, probably because cancer is something we can only now treat.

Not all of the body can be made legible to the mind.

Although maybe a better question: why don’t we have a dedicated organ that can sample blood with laboratory like precision and make anomalies available to the conscious mind beyond whatever faculties we currently have?

PS

One thing that definitely should be within the realm of conscious control: body fat. There are ways of forcing the body to metabolize more fat for energy and the biggest problem is managing excess heart (easily becomes lethal). But this could be super useful in cold climates. Imagine being able to literally burn body fat to stay warm? The amount of heat that can be released is enormous. Nowadays most of us could probably afford the otherwise superfluous expenditure of body fat (beyond essential functions).

But I was thinking some time ago I disabled algorithmically prompted content even though it had its advantages for work related content… In some ways the transition was like quitting smoking. I kept going back to such platforms, getting a blank page, closing the page, then repeating some time later and so on.

Apart from that, content wise a preliminary abstract is nice to have. I do like how the author provides a table of contents.

It’s interesting that many of us myself included once thought that the butlerian jihad was silly until now. Frank Herbert wrote something that is particularly prescient.

(Usually writers are just a decade ahead of their time. Whatever Podcasters are talking about today, has usually already been discussed in literature a decade ago. Prediction markets come to mind. Socially, over vs under population as discussed in popular books like the rationale optimist or the accidental superpower.)

Into a general purpose markup language + runtime for multi step LLM invocations. Although efforts so far have gotten nowhere. I have some notes on my GitHub profile readme if anyone curious: https://github.com/colbyn

Here’s a working example: https://github.com/colbyn/AgenticWorkflow

(I really dislike the ‘agentic’ term since in my mind it’s just compilers and a runtime all the way down.)

But that’s more serial procedural work, what I want is full blown recursion, in some generalized way (and without liquid templating hacks that I keep restoring to), deeply needed nested LLM invocations akin to how my dataset generation pipeline works.

PS

Also I really dislike prompt text in source code. I prefer to factor in out into standalone prompt files. Using the XML format in my case.

Although FYI: the UI in that demo needs some work since updating iOS but it's an interesting proof of concept that took me some time to figure out (in the future I think I'll do full page swipes of the entire downstream conversation tree and not just at the sibling level although this is less power efficient). Also that demo doesn't include my work in markdown rendering since I have yet to integrate the two. I've been working on both of those projects on and off for the past couple years plus some.

I'm now working on a fresh rewrite with iOS support... But as someone who's wasted a lot of time on side projects, could this be profitable?

I almost had a sponsor but he ghosted me. Since then other libraries and commercial apps like ChatGPT and Grok have improved their markdown UI/UX.

I'm thinking about abandoning this endeavor. However it feels wasteful to just drop this and all the experience I accumulated in the meantime. Moreover this proof of concept prototype is still superior in a few ways, notably with regard to text selection and typesetting.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747072

Points: 3

# Comments: 1