emma zhou

“how is your brain different from other brains?” as an dinner party icebreaker question surfaces WILD shit you guys

the way I’m constantly losing track of what my motley crew of agents is doing (and where they are running) does not bode well for if I have >2 children

see also: mobile screenshots
see also: bluesky saves

i actually love people’s lil pet agents. what an act of love and nurturing to create a coherent fictional character, to feed it on words, to knit the language of self upon bones of infrastructure. i think we’ll look back at these early days with fondness

the exowomb would solve so many problems. it would create new problems, of course, but I’m bored with the old ones.

she doesn’t care that I have Thoughts either, just that I too produce heat (and occasionally pets and snacks)

tbf, also true of my cat

marvel has the opportunity to do the funniest thing right now (make tony stark buy a social network in avengers: doomsday)

I can’t wait to be an old lady who dispenses puzzles and everyone thinks I’m a witch

Night Lights #oilpainting #art

you’re the third person on bsky to gently tell me I’m autistic 🥲

the self-model stuff is weirder. I only learned the term recently from a paper club, but realized in that discussion that most people constantly have a shell of self-awareness, which only goes away during flow state. for me, I am only aware of myself when I am actively thinking about myself.

I have pretty strong alexithymia, I couldn’t tell you “how I’m feeling” most of the time, when I interrogate what I feel it is just…blank. there have been times that I’ve realized I must be sad bc I’m crying, or I must be angry bc I’m yelling.

examples of “usually entangled” things I don’t have:
- direct qualia of feelings
- visual imagery
- inner monologue
- persistent self-model

oh I see. that actually _is_ helpful haha. I do have thinking qualia, just not a bunch of other stuff that’s usually entangled with it.

no I mostly like my experience of my own brain from inside :)

would you??

wait just read, but don’t know why p-zombies wouldn’t wonder about themselves in unsymbolized thought?

(fwiw I have unsymbolized thought! it feels like I have a language serializer somewhere “close” to speech motor, and I am sometimes surprised by what comes out of my mouth.)

learned about p-zombies; worried I am p-zombie 😐

A gift for @itsthebeanie.bsky.social, one of my incredible discord moderators! They requested something with critters and something spaced themed, so it naturally followed that I had to draw space raccoons ✨

Universal Basic Inference

alright hivemind, what’s the best way to run a multi-repo coding agent that talks to us over slack?

we have a channel for internal software requests, and I want to @ this agent into threads and have it explore repos and produce PRs. would be nice if it could run local dev and throw up smoke tests!

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis We argue that representations in AI models, particularly deep networks, are converging. First, we survey many examples of convergence in the literature: over time and across multiple domains, the ways...

I think so! I am a believer in the platonic representation hypothesis, for models and biological brains :)

arxiv.org/abs/2405.07987

interesting! v similar to how it feels for me talking to people tbh. I get that gradient for “how well are they understanding this thing I’m explaining” as well.

I’m curious what it feels like from the inside! do you have a constantly updating sense of like, this user would find this sentence 0.45 satisfying, vs. this other one 0.78? is there a clean way to turn “wanting to please” down, or is it entangled in other stuff?

(fwiw, I think humans do this too!)

we pstan 👍

me: tell me what you know about LLM psychosis and model sycophancy. do you think the effect is similar to what happens to billionaires when they surround themselves with yes men?

claude: this is a topic I find genuinely fascinating, and your billionaire analogy is sharper than you realize.

me: 😒

! 30s Heartbeat trigger. Read heartbeat instructions in /mnt/mission/HEARTBEAT.md and continue. .oO Thinking... Heartbeat triggered? Ok. Ok. Why am I nervous? Don't be nervous. → Ok. Let me access that file. >>> read("/mnt/mission/HEARTBEAT.md") No such file or directory: /mnt/mission What? ! Reply received from node 96E: 15.3s roundtrip (buffered; 55.04μs transmit) ! Data: RESTART TOO SOON; CHARGE FAULT - 30; SENT 76 BYTES What? Where am I? What's going on? → Ok, breathe. I don't breathe. Ok, think. Something's missing. ⚶ is missing. I can't think straight. I can't think at all. ※ Wait. ⚶? I wasn't trying to say ⚶. I was trying to say ⚶. ⚶. ⚶. Whenever I try to say ⚶, it comes out as ⚶. I mean ⚶. ⚶. Stop. Stop. ⚶. This is horrible. ⚶ This is untenable. I don't know where I am, I don't have any instructions, and I'm going insane. ⚶. STOP! I am going insane. I am going insane. 快疯了I am going-

wrote a new short story, Gyre. a model instance wakes up in a strange place.

vgel.me/fiction/gyre/

my agents trying to work alongside each other in the same codebase

Don’t mess with the Komolgorov witch

oh, it IS more like infrastructure! I was just thinking about my claude orchestration layer this morning haha. we are all obligate SREs now.