my favorite one in recent memory is discovering that singer The Weeknd is really into indie games. (play Arctic Eggs y'all)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/video-games/202...

The first time I realised gaming was actually happening everywhere and it was actually just that nobody was talking about it was when lady gaga was posting about playing Bayonetta.

https://x.com/ladygaga/status/1058894361486753792

I really feel like this is a precursor to these companies throwing their weight around in other fields. Like what if you are a pharma company spending years and years on a new medicine and then open ai gets wind and spends their considerable resources to scoop you. or your software gets cloned by them right before release. it feels like an anti-competitveness problem and I think it's probably best if a regulator steps in and forbids them from competing with companies/people in other fields? they should just rent out intelligence and not use it themselves for achieving stuff in different fields.

1. write a sketch of a spec by hand

2. have the llm review the document and question me until it can generate a spec

3. review the spec and revise where needed

4. have it write an implementation plan

5. another round or revision/review

6. executing the plan step by step through the plan, plausing between each step to see if we are still on course and if the decisions it made track with my understanding of what we are doing.

I've been working for a couple of hours tonight, the total cost of the session is €0.6.

it's not the build this thing end to end, but also not quite write function x for me. It is still a lot of manual review, but I find I really need it to even discover what I actually want to build. I just cannot imagine building something in a single shot and getting something that actually has value (unless it is basically a clone of an existing thing). To me the whole value of ai right now is that it's now very cheap to build custom software that exactly matches your preferences.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIhLvue17Sd70y34zh2erWWpM...

They are currently doing a company wide gamejam/game idea incubation thing, after surviving Microsoft undoing the acquisition and the same Documentary crew is doing a doc about that (they did a kickstarter campaign to fund it)

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/1/Feynman.pdf

worth a read, to me it kinda indicates that different abilities can be enabled by differences in how to mentally represent something. but yeah its debatable how much of difference in ability comes from/with a difference in experience but I my gut feeling is a lot more than you'd think. feels really hard to prove it as we only know what it's like to be us.

> “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”

really resonates with me, as to how it feels inside my brain. I'm also really good at shape rotation and spatial reasoning despite not being able to literally picture the environment.

my pet theory is that there are just different places in the stream of consciousness your attention can rest and mine cannot be pointed at the 'mental machinery' that actually produces the images but instead rests at a higher level of abstraction after the visual signal is integrated into the representation of the 3d world that gets used for tasks like shape rotation.

I also don't have an internal monologue most of the time, but I can consciously will myself to do it, and then it is hard to get out of that mode, analogous to the 'you are now breathing manually' meme. I can do it but it feels annoying and slows down my reading and thinking.

Now that we have agentic systems the analogy of the internal monologue being a subagent is probably a good way to describe it, yeah i could read the thinking trace word for word, but most of the time it feels like existing at the level where the data that gets extracted from the stream of thought gets integrated.

Honesty it's so interesting to me how many different ways of experiencing the use of your brain we exist. Sort of reminds me of how there is no single method of crawling a baby learns, there are a bunch of different ways to do it and children just discover one and go with it. Walking seems to be different in that there basically is one good way to do it. I guess there are a lot of degrees of freedom in how the process of being can run on the brain.

I think these guys would improve their behavior if their actual life was on the line instead of that only being true in their less-wrong thought experiments.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Xiaoyu