There once was a man named John and he had a dog named Jane, whom he loved very, very much.

And one day, they walked down a street—and they saw a strange thing: this strange woman, in a hat which had a huge, bright eye in the middle; and when she blinked, the world stopped.

And they followed her: it was a long way down to the bottom of the street.

And when she got there, she was standing at the bottom of the street, and an army of strange aliens, in bright blue space suits, were there with her, and they were taking her arm off and one of them had a beard and John didn't know which one it was, and they were telling this woman that the things in this world existed. But she was very excited, because she'd just had this revelation.

And she knew who she was.

It was Jesus.

And Jesus knew that she was John's wife. And Jesus knew that his name was Jane. And Jesus knew that his dog was a little, little baby named George.

The aliens told her things in the blue-blue sky: if you lose something you will be given a new one, and it will be very easy to get them.

But she was mad.

"I lost my human being, I lost my wife, and I'm going to lose the only thing that I never got. And that's not fair!"

And when she said, "No, I didn't lose my husband," then she was told, "We're going to give you back your husband, we're going to give you back your home and you're going to be happy, and your dog will be happy, your dog will be happy and you'll get in touch with your real self; you'll know your real name, and your wife's human name."

And that was what Jesus said

"She's not my true self, she's not my wife, she's just a human being, she's in the real world."

And the blue-blue aliens said, "Very well. When you've found your true self, you'll know if you're real human being."

"And that," Jesus said, "is going to make me very angry."

And Jesus came back to us.

why can I send images in an ask?

possibly just the smallest version if that needs less data?

Train on the biggest version you can, actually -- bigger ones are more data-efficient, not less.

do you know a rough lower bound on how big a corpus I would need in order for that to work ok?

It depends on what you’re going for, but 2MB is definitely enough to be worth trying.

I like Active Minds, although they tend to run out of business cereal pretty quickly.

that’s a really good question! it’s important to note that Valve is relatively small with only a few hundred employees, so their flat informal structure was practiced when they were still approximately village / war band / Dunbar number in size, which makes it a lot easier than doing something similar at an organisation with tens of thousands of people, in which structure is inevitably more explicit and formal.

they are also working in a field where the primary resource is employee time and effort, so if a small group go off to work on a cool idea they’re not putting other projects in jeopardy and it’s easier for others to see if they’re making something worthwhile, whereas if it required constructing launch facilities or redirecting a supertanker or laying fibre optic cable then it would require a lot more oversight and careful management.

of course the tricky thing about small rebellious teams is that when they succeed they grow into cantankerous bureaucracies:

In fact, we were growing so fast that we needed to move again. In August of 1983, we moved across the street to a larger building that was unimaginatively designated "Bandley 3". I had worked there before, in 1980, when Apple had initially built it to house the original engineering organization. But now it was to be the new home of the newly christened "Macintosh Division", over 80 employees strong. The building looked pretty much like every other Apple building, so we wanted to do something to make it look like we belonged there. Steve Capps, the heroic programmer who had switched over from the Lisa team just in time for the January retreat, had a flash of inspiration: if the Mac team was a band of pirates, the building should fly a pirate flag.