Just sitting around and thinking of solutions to your own problems beats giving yourself work. As refactor_nietzsche would put it, resource slack is what lets you be a refactor_master instead of a refactor_slave. If you feel pressured into self-imposed creep, it's probably because you've internalized the idea that having too much slack makes you look dangerous to your superiors, so you default to playing the worker bee.
Generating AI Content sucks, Consuming AI Content sucks, but combine them in the same loop and it's really addicting. AI Content Prosuming rocks.
Since LLMs, if I see a video I think is interesting, I take the transcript, feed it into an LLM, I summarize it and ask it a couple of questions.
I've turned 12 minute videos back into the 5 phrases news it was based on.
I suppose that when you're the one generating the request, it feels more personal. It is also very interesting that most LLMs respond like a normal person when you talk to them directly, but suddenly adopt the more annoying blogger speech patterns when you tell them 'create content'.
> I've turned 12 minute videos back into the 5 phrases news it was based on.
Why not read the original news?
Okay, there are many reasons why you might not want to do that, such as ads, tracking, having to pay for a subscription if you only want one article, and just plain boredom. I wasn't trying to call you out, it was more of a question for society at large.
Why has it become more appealing to have a "content creator" turn 5 phrases of news into a 12 minute video and then have an LLM convert it back, rather than reading the 5 phrases?
It's not that it's appealing. For example, I wanted to learn how to bend notes on harmonica, but it wasn't working. That's not something you can really understand without video, yet most tutorials are 5-15 minutes long and only show the actual technique at some random point in ~30 seconds (just search 'how to bend on harmonica' and see). So I take the transcript t check whether it's a method I've already tried or something new worth watching, and I also get an extra explainer of the technique in text.
Also, with videos like "what X said about situation Y in discourse Z". Sometimes you're just curious, and you can't realistically extract that efficiently from a full one-hour speech on a geolocked, untranscribed mass-media website, so it's easier to summarize the transcript of the 12 min video directly.
As for why everything is 12 minutes long, it's most likely because content creation isn't optimized to teach you anything or be useful, it's optimized to maximize watch time so platforms can serve more ads to you. The pattern is: I got you intrigued in something; you want the answer? pay me your time. If you don't do this, you'll be invisible, so broke.
I don't think generation/discrimination is fundamental. A more general framing is evolutionary epistemology (Donald T. Campbell, 1974, essay found in "The Philosophy of Karl Popper"), which holds that knowledge emerges through variation and selective retention. As Karl Popper put it, "We choose the theory which best holds its own in competition with other theories; the one which, by natural selection, proves itself the fittest to survive."
On this view, learning in general operates via selection under uncertainty. This is less visible in individual cognition, where we tend to over-attribute agency, but it is explicit in science: hypotheses are proposed, subjected to tests, and selectively retained, precisely because the future cannot be deduced from the present.
In that sense, generation/discrimination is a particular implementation of this broader principle (a way of instantiating variation and selection) not the primitive itself.
I agree, I meant to be explicit that the one rule was "gravity";
Variation (chaos) comes from the tidal push/pull of all cumulative processes - all processes are nearly periodic (2nd law) and get slower - guaranteeing oscillator harmonics at intervals.
These intervals are astronomically convulted, but still promise a Fourier distribution of frequency: tidal effects ensure synchronization eventually, as all periods resonate eventually.
As systems are increasingly exposed to pendulums of positive and negative coherence, they will generalize for variance, and eventually for increasingly (fourier) selective filters of increasingly resiliente traits, that will generalize.
The system would eventually be increasingly resilient and eventually an awareness would develop.
Awareness of past periodic cycles would improve fitness (with or without consciousness) and eventually the mechanistic processes would be in the systems nature.
This is why we have pointless traditions, folk lore, collective unconscious artifacts, cyclical cataclysmic religions, the Fermi Paradox, the great filters...
Variation and selection are woven, but understanding how it all stems from gravity by means of nearly perioidic oscillators (spinning planets, tidal pools, celestial bodies) due to the conservation of angular momentum, due to the 3body problem.....that is what took a genius to reconcile
Awareness would be any form of agency, goal seeking, or loss minimizing.
As Briggs–Rauscher reactions can eventually lead to Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions, the system can maintain homeostasis with its environment (and continuing to oscillate) by varying reactants in a loss minimizing fashion.
This loss minimizing would be done during scarcity to limp towards an abundance phase.
This is the mechanism that hypothetical tidal pools batteries would had exhibited to continue between periods of sunlight/darkness/acidity that eventually gets stratified as a resilency trait.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work from the lab of Mike Levin at Tufts but I'm betting you'll find it interesting if not. Here's a taste https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6923654/
While I disagree with your notion that this is explicity due to gravity, the rest of your argument seems to align with some of this lab's work. Learning can be demonstrated on scales as low as a few molecules, way below what we would normally call "life".
I'm not sure what your argument is here, except stating an opinion that loss minimization is equivalent to agency. But even if that was accepted, which is a huge stretch, it doesn't stretch all the way to awareness.
It is, in context of its place in the cosmic scale.
Loss minimizing to a few problems will generalize into abstraction, and a few solutions will develop.
These systems with more generalizable resilency traits will encounter increasingly varied selective sieves.
Systems that survive this seive will exhibit increasingly sophisticated, generalizable solutions to prevent loss of needed dependent reactions/resources.
These solutions must exert influence to be effective; influencing the environment for its own benefit.
As systems influence their environment, delineation of "self" and "environment" becomes a fundamental barrier.
The system would prefer itself, or be outcompeted by a similar system that does.
This layer of semi-life like material would form between sunlight and the oscillating reaction, and eventually envelope it, minimizing surface tension by means of a spherical cell like structure.
Small stuff runs off of loss minimizing at a force level for its mechanistic affect; from covalent bonds to cellular ion transport, the path of lesser resistance is the fundamental forces.
As systems become more complex, the minimizing is less directly attributable to the fundamental forces and becomes more of a Byzantine dependency/feedback network.
This byzantine labyrinth of interactions is called biology.
The delineation of self, the ego.
At the highest levels, geopolitics. At the human level, mate suppression.
Lowest level, energy conservation.
I understand the sketch you are making and my claim isn't "you are wrong". My claim is "it isn't sufficient to explain all of the behavior". You are making massive leaps over important details. In order to feel a grasp on the big picture, you are turning a cow into a sphere.
"Awareness" isn't a well defined term and is often just a proxy for consciousness. But in as much as we can define it, it is one or both of experience and knowledge. You may (or may not be) aware of the hum some electronics in your house. At certain points in the day that hum is present in you attention, at other points it is absent from your attention. Sometimes you choose to bring previously unattended objects into your awareness, sometimes they are thrust there despite your will.
What is actually interesting about awareness, and one of the reasons it is a tricky subject, is that it isn't clearly related to agency. There are objects of your awareness that you do not act on, and you act with respect to objects that are provably not in your awareness.
There is also the question of the field within which these oscillations take place. Is it the electro-magnetic field? A quantum field? Which field are we talking about? If you are proposing some "principle of least action" in that field, can you describe it?
You seem to claim "loss minimization" and then hand wave the rest. But without descriptions of knowledge and experience it feels like you aren't actually saying anything except stating an opinion that reduces all knowledge and experience to loss minimization. That is an extraordinary claim and requires either extraordinary evidence or extraordinary reasoning.
A cool illusion, just another emergent property of our geometrical solution: higher dimensional aperiodic tilings of a 10^80 faceted complex polyhedra "walking" on another large aperioidic Penrose plane, that is getting smaller in a dimension we observe as "energy".
Basically a dice with a bajillion sides is getting rolled along an increasingly slim poker table, house winning eventually.
Time only goes one way, protons dont decay, energy is radiated unto the cosmic background hiss, until homogeneity is reached as CMB, and entrophy reaches 1.
I dont know where it comes from, but I know the shape it makes as it rolls by.
What you're describing is a resource virtualization with transactional reconciliation instead of program isolation in the mediation sense (MAC/seccomp-style denial).
To let a program act as it wishes, ideally every security-relevant mutable resource must be virtualized instead of filtered. Plus, FS is only one of the things that should be sandboxed. You should also ideally virtualize network state at least, but ideally also process/IPC namespaces and other such systems to prevent leaks.
You need to offer a promotion step after the sandbox is over (or even during running if it's a long-running program) exposing all sandbox's state delta for you to decide selective reconciliation with the host. And you also must account for host-side drift and TOCTOU hazards during validation and application
I'm experimenting with implementing such a sandbox that works cross-system (so no kernel-level namespace primitives) and the amount necessary for late-bound policy injection, if you want user comfort, on top of policy design and synthetic environment presented to the program is hair-pulling.
> I'm experimenting with implementing such a sandbox that works cross-system (so no kernel-level namespace primitives) and the amount necessary for late-bound policy injection, if you want user comfort, on top of policy design and synthetic environment presented to the program is hair-pulling.
Curious, if this is cross-platform, is your design based on overriding the libc procedures, or otherwise injecting libraries into the process?
I'm not interposing libc or injecting libraries. Guests run as WASM modules, so the execution substrate is constrained. The host mediates and logs effects. Changes only propagate via an explicit, policy-validated promotion step.
I think avoiding algorithms completely is tricky. Even things like podcast guests or suggestions from friends feel as manipulable but in a human way.
What works for me is checking if people I respect in a domain also blog or link elsewhere. That is how I found Peter Norvig's blog... or maybe it was on hacker news.
Veritasium is another popular creator that would overlap with the HN audience. It deliberately uses different thumbnails and titles when videos are new. It's a human (afaik) using the A/B suggestions in the back end. So it's like a second degree AI manipulation.
That crap—together with the nonsensical kinetic weapon video—genuinely turned me off his channel. It clowned him up in a way that felt gimmicky, almost aimed for children versus adults.
I can't put my finger on what exactly I find distasteful about his channel, but his content is just off-putting to me. The closest I can describe it is that it annoys me in the same way that shows on discovery or the history channel did 15-20 years ago before I quit watching cable TV. It just seems like it's over produced and glossing over details, maybe it's trying to aim fore a more general audience and that is what hurts it.
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