Arthur Juliani

The Dragon King’s Decision A short story exploring the twin births of Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism

Linked is a fun short story I wrote recently that grew from my interest in the strange coincidence that both Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism were born within a few decades of one another. The question the story explores is: what if it wasn’t a coincidence?

awjuliani.substack.com/p/the-dragon...

You can try it out in your browser here: awjuliani.github.io/web-rl-playg...

Or run it locally on your own machine and play with the code using the GitHub repo here: github.com/awjuliani/we...

I hope people find it useful/fun. Very open to feature requests or feedback!

In addition to the basic algorithms like Q-Learning, I also included slightly more advanced ones like the Successor Representation. The tool lets you see the successor maps for each state as the agent moves through the environment, which I think makes them much more intuitive!

I spent some time last week vibe-coding "The Beginner's RL Playground" a simple web tool for exploring many basic concepts in reinforcement learning. Users can adjust all sorts of parameters of the algorithm and environment and see the effects of those changes in realtime.

Beyond Dopamine Nation: Towards a Fuller Picture of Addiction and Recovery Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke has become an almost inescapable text in the past few years, even to those who have not read it. Thanks in…

Anna Lembke's Dopamine Nation is everywhere, but focusing solely on dopamine doesn't tell the full story... I wrote a short article exploring why: medium.com/@awjuliani/b...

What Kingdom Hearts II Can Teach Us About AI Sentience and Moral Patienthood I have spent the past few weeks replaying the classic PlayStation 2 game Kingdom Hearts II. The last time that I played through the game was over a decade ago, and I had forgotten most of the game’s p...

In a new essay I explore how the "Nobodies" in KH2 can serve as a useful thought experiment for considering the future of human-like non-sentient AI in our own world

awjuliani.substack.com/p/what-kingd...

On the varieties of conscious experiences: Altered Beliefs Under Psychedelics (ALBUS) Abstract. How is it that psychedelics so profoundly impact brain and mind? According to the model of “Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics” (REBUS), 5-HT2a a

Congrats to Adam Safron (&co) for finally getting 'ALBUS' published! The phenomenological effects of psychedelics are extremely multi-faceted, and they deserve appropriately complex treatments, even if those have to sometimes be partially speculative. academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

"The possibility of constructing ever more complex and ever more efficient perceptrons thus sounds very promising" - Stanislaw Lem (1964)

Reading Summa Technologiae for the first time and it often feels like a book of prophecy...

Gradual Disempowerment or Golden Age? Rethinking Human Freedom in the Shadow of AGI A preprint on arXiv has been making the rounds this past week called Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development. As the title suggests, the article explores the...

I wrote a commentary on the "gradual disempowerment" paper making the rounds. The two big points I try to make are 1) individual agency has already been on the decline since the industrial revolution; and 2) there is a case for AI actually reversing that trend!
awjuliani.substack.com/p/gradual-di...

my recent headspace

GitHub - awjuliani/dream-jrpg: An experiment in using LLMs to procedurally generate simple Japanese-style RPGs. An experiment in using LLMs to procedurally generate simple Japanese-style RPGs. - awjuliani/dream-jrpg

Code for the project is available here: github.com/awjuliani/dr...

It was a fun project to work on, and I learned a lot about the strengths and limitations of current LLMs for this kind of storytelling. I can't claim that any of the games that this generates are actually *good*, but I think they are at least amusing in their idiosyncrasies.

One Trillion and One Nights An experiment using LLMs to procedurally generate browser-based JRPGs

After finishing my post-doc at MSR last summer, I wanted to get more hands on with LLMs, Flux, etc. So I spent some free time building a simple procedurally-generated JRPG. You tell it what kind of world, hero, and story that you want, and it makes it!

awjuliani.medium.com/one-trillion...

My academic degrees are in Psych, but I actually started undergrad as a CS student. I decided to transfer out my first year because I had a vague intuition that programming ability was a commodity. I couldn't justify it at the time (back in 2010), but it is now very clear that I made the right call.

A little late, but here is my list of books read in 2024. I am going to *try* to get back into more fiction this year, but it could just as easily tip the other direction and end up being all obscure psychoanalytic texts instead...

Wow, I was not expecting this rate of progress for LLMs on ARC-AGI. From effectively 0% to greater than human level in less than a year...

Sorry e/acc, Accelerationism is Anti-Capitalist to its Core An Essay on Reclaiming Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophical Project

A new essay:

Sorry e/acc, Accelerationism is Anti-Capitalist to its Core

open.substack.com/pub/awjulian...

A Primer on MDMA and “Neurotoxicity” Yesterday (June 4th) the FDA advisory committee voted almost unanimously to recommend against the adoption of MDMA…

The FDA advisory committee met last month to evaluate MDMA as a legal treatment of PTSD. They voted to not recommend, citing safety as one concern.

To help explain that concern, I put wrote a primer on the ways that MDMA can exhibit neurotoxicity and what can be done to mitigate those effects.

Haha no. Why?

I was thinking this morning about how amazed I was a couple years ago to realize that the classical 'elements' (earth, water, wind, fire) map directly onto the states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma). The ancients had grasped a fundamental truth, they were just wrong about what it meant.