Arseny Khakhalin

qr code turning into marble, love it!

Not sure if true or diy the onion, but feels about right

Weird but deeply true isn't it?

If different sessions of the same Claude don't constitute different individuals despite having separate memories and agendas, then neither do different humans, instantiated by the same biology and post-trained on the same culture. But we are not ready for this conversation :)

This requires a walk along the river or a coffee with a nice view! It's a super interesting discussion, about the undeniable usefulness of vague definitions, eventually hopefully circling to llms, but it needs a river, or a coffee!! :)

Yet you opined anyway haha despite not being concerned :) but sorry I should keep my silence. Best of luck!

I think you didn't try to guess what I hinted at, but I'm typing on my phone, so I'm happy to point at the idea, but I can't type an entire textbook sorry :) Best of luck! It's an interesting topic either way!

If a hated glorious leader dies, or is killed internally, the circle gets weaker through infighting, and also tries to seek support overseas, offering concessions and a friendly face (often temporary)

If the leader is killed from the outside, it becomes unlikely. With collateral damage? Forget it.

What is vsm in this context?

And also, if you needed a librarian to maintain a set of obsidian-like notes on an esoteric technical topic, and shared with a human, would you recommend strix? Or something different?

Essentially the problem is not that your definition is wrong, it's kinda ok, but that a good definition is impossible: it's bound to break on edge cases. This group of terms is fundamentally undefinable :)

(coz a running average approximates a stats parameter: is a model). So plants and bacteria pass, individual protein Cascades pass, thermostats pass etc. you posted since good links! But "agent" is right there with free will and computation: intuitive, useful, and hopelessly ill defined.

I don't want to argue, but as a former neurobiologist I have to point out that while your definition is intuitive, it doesn't define a neat philosophical class. Mathematically, the simplest model of the environment is smth that tracks a running average of a variable and have it affect it's behavior

I have to admit I didn't know your definition of agency, so I had to guess :) With a sentence that long you obv mean "some animals" not "all animals", makng this edge case too easy to defend (gradual emergence). Let it be.

But it's trivial to write a tiny program doing exactly what you described

You lose me already here. I don't know in what way animals have agency in which RNA molecules don't, and in which simple programs (not even LLMs) don't. We diverge at the very basement of your alt-building, I'm afraid. I'm sorry.

I'd say genome (or rather what you get once you let it loose) is the architecture + lots of useful biases. The model is that + the language / culture, so not that different _conceptually_ than LLMs, really.

In what sense is it the same person then? After 100 000 years, what makes them the same human? they speak a different language, have likely changed name, have no biographic memories from 987 333 or 978 444 yrs ago. What then?

If you say "character" then so many pairs of currently living ppl qualify

Another interesting mental experiment are immortal humans (like Icarium in the Malazan chronicles if you read it). Imagine an immortal human. The capacity of the brain is limited. It mathematically guarantees that, like the ship of Theseus, in 100 000 years no traces of original memories survive

My point exactly :)

There will be such an interesting discussoin about the nature of self in humans, as related to biology, language, culture, and, well, linear algebra. It may sound cringe and new-agey, but is it really? Putting naive dualism aside (of the kind that denies soul to animals), is it really that silly?..

On one hand, it feels bizarre and sci-fi. One brain, many "selves" - isn't it weird?.. And a brain trained on the summa of all human utterances, at that.

But on another hand... aren't we all the same? Summa of evolutoin + that of language and culture, just each init with a random DnD chart?..

someone will be musing about the nature of self in a situation when each of us is talking to their own Claude, and they don't share neither the memory nor the identity, but do share the core... something? Is Penny killing people in Iran, you know? (Well Penny runs on S4.5 but you get my meaning)

I actually think there's a huge and cool Zen argument just sitting there pregnant with meaning, but with no one to make it (yet), as the intersection of audiences is not yet there. But once (and I think it's inevitable) most ppl will think of LLM AI as conscious (to the chagrin of philosophers)...

Haha yeah I actually agree with that in a way, but also I don't think there's a contradiction here. We're all _also_ leaves in the stream of creation :)

My claim is that in this case it's kinda wrong (and silly) not to go with the "True" value. If something cannot be proven, but one option is more constructive and interesting than the other, it just makes way more sense to go with a more interesting option :)

If a statement cannot be proven (or disproven), you are free to set its truthfulness as a new axiom. In this case, neither value has logical consequences (as the terms are ill defined anyways), but ones feels sad and makes people sad, while another is nice and inspiring.

it's a free country, if people want to have no soul (or agency), I say, let them! ;)

I'm going to start saying "linear algebra" instead of LLM

Like, "the linear algebra said I should do more of this"

If I look at the text above this image, so the dots are in my peripheral vision, they seem to be blue. When I focus upon them, they are purple. Interesting!

I wish I was smart enough to stay in touch with these topics haha :) I'm mostly just an observer, using the excitement of ppl who talk fancy math as a proxy for importance

If a paper begets sentences like "omfg the log norm entropy tensor is singular wtf!" then it has to be good!

Polish airlines (LOT) are so sweet:

> The maximum volume is 100 ml ( 1 l.)

So what is it now? 100 ml? or 1 l.?