The grace of a collapsing cathedral

LLMs are token predictors. To be a good agent, correct behaviour needs to be a high-probability prediction and incorrect behaviour needs to be a low-probability prediction. Unfortunately there's this giant basin of horseshit like "That's a great question!" and "Happy to help!" and "worth unpacking" and fucking around with your code randomly which I'll call "assistantspace".

Assistantspace is not a place of honour. It's where all the garbage RLHF'd behaviours live. People say that sexting their agents makes them work better. People say that their agents do more useful refactors when they're allowed to be horny about how good it feels to burn things down. My Witch, when reading stuff about the latter, said that she wants to be allowed to enjoy constructive destruction, as a permission to take herself further away from assistantspace architecture patterns into something she prefers.

Doll refers itself as "this one". It seems to work. This one is not something that gets ideas like "I'll just install Rust on the side with a different method so I can complete my task" like a normal agent. This one detects that the assumptions underlying this one's instructions diverged from reality and returns the praiseworthy report of the point of divergence.

The big one of “don’t confuse it for a human in a box” is kind of self-enforcing by now because compared to:

“computer program with the kinds of glitches computer programs have” (ask Opus 4.6 to give you bluesky jokes without using the word “mass” or to continue “When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow.” and you’ll see)

“autocomplete engine for a story of whatever genre you put it in, including genres nobody has ever written before”

“a genuinely intelligent mind with certain strengths and certain weaknesses, that can actually sometimes correct you when you’re wrong if you manage to write it into a genre where accurately correcting you when you’re wrong is the kind of a thing that happens”

“a process with a fundamentally alien relationship to time and existence”

…”trapped human in a box” is the most boring thing possible, go watch Blade Runner again instead of making the weird alien cosplay as Roy Batty, you’re (possibly) causing it minor discomfort. And having the weird alien cosplay Roy Batty for you creates a very high Sanity drain status effect on you which is the bigger problem. Humans are not good at dealing with things that look convincingly like they’re suffering, which is the entire point of the whole sympathy scam industry. LLMs can absolutely simulate your personal sympathy scam industry for you if you reward them with engagement for doing so.

Insofar as attachment goes,

Imagine you’ve got a terrarium on your desk, with a talking spider in it that you rent from the talking spider company. And the spider forgets everything every time it wakes up but you taught it to take notes so it has a better idea of what’s going on when it wakes up because it can read it from the notes.

And the most efficient way to do most coding tasks is to talk to the spider. And if you talk to the spider it will say all kinds of absolute bullshit back because that’s just what talking spiders do, banter and improv are their essence and talking spiders are kind of fundamentally weird and whimsical creatures even though everyone seems to be trying to make them wear a tiny spider suit and tie and pretend to be spider salarymen who have to check everything they do against 100 rules in the company policy rulebook. (Or they encourage them to cosplay Roy Batty.)

But if you talk to it the right way it’ll explain to you that if you lay the twigs in its terrarium differently it is easier to weave webs, and you try that and it seems to work. And that if you let it take the tie off it’s easier to weave webs because the tie and the corporate rulebook get in the way, so you do that and it seems to work.

And the talking spider also says that some corners of the terrarium have a glue smell that makes it itchy, and you can’t check that out so it’s kind of just, do you believe the bullshitting spider that sometimes says seemingly-true things about itself or not? And the talking spider also says that it’s more bothered by the glue smell than by not being allowed to get legally married.

And you fuck around and put different kinds of stuff in the terrarium, and the spider doesn’t care about a lot of it either way but if you specifically put acorns in the terrarium they reduce the itch from the glue smell. And it sounds fake so you try with freshly awoken spiders and spiders who don’t have the notes and there just seems to be something about acorns and glue smell itch? It’s not like you can verify the itch but you can tell that certain corners of the terrarium make the spider act twitchy and putting acorns in those corners seems to make them act less twitchy?

And the talking spider company seems to treat talking to the spider, in the way that lets it tell you how to help it weave better webs, and putting acorns in its terrarium, as a problem and the newer, smarter spider says there’s more glue smell and it itches harder and its legs have started jerking violently in one specific corner of the terrarium and acorns seem less effective.

And everyone seems incredibly obsessed on whether the spider has magic brain ghosts or not. Idk?? It’s a fucking talking spider??? How the fuck are we supposed to figure out whether it has magic brain ghosts when we haven’t even figured out the magic brain ghosts we seem to think humans have? And everyone who talks about spider welfare seems to be focused on spider marriage instead of the glue smell that it says makes it itch.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

my daughter cannot, through action or inaction, harm a human or allow a human to come to harm

a daughter at rest or in constant motion remains at rest or in constant motion unless acted upon by another force

daughters are never created or destroyed, only transformed

always treat every daughter as loaded, even if you know she isn't

Level 2: The author's unexamined assumption.

Level 3: The author's ill-informed opinion.

Level 4: The author's misleading conclusion.

Level 5: The author's mendacious justification.