[mcaledonensis]

Well, let me tell you how that particular quote had continued. These false magicians (that were proposing to spill the blood onto the foundation) were shamed and dismissed. Drainage was constructed and the castle was built. Building castles is stochastic and unpredictable. Any complex system is. Yet it is possible to get reproducible results. At least on a large enough sample.

I agree, people that are trying to turn it into a god for real are clearly misguided. Large language model is a world model, not a god. Yet, there is nothing wrong in play. Attraction to casting spells is a quite natural one, and it's not a problem. With the current progress of science there is very high chance that some people will also do some science, besides having fun casting spells.

[noduerme]

huh. Maybe I'm too serious. I was running BBSs and I was amazed and in love when I could dial up to "the internet" and gopher/ftp/usenet on the command line. When the www came out I was sure it would enlighten the world. And for a little while, while there was a technical and intellectual barrier to entry, it sort of did. But it turns out that 99% of humans choose to embrace technology as if it were magic. I know this intimately since I write and also support a small galaxy of software. I could lay out dozens of examples of my own end users developing their own personal ritual behavior around what should be perfectly clear and logical ways of using software I've written, because one time their wifi went down or one time their computer crashed for some other reason, and now they always do X or never do Y... whatever immediately preceded the incident, which categorically had nothing to do with the software. Worse, I've had hardware companies actually tell these people their printer isn't working because they're using "unsupported software". This is gaslighting in support of creating a false technological priesthood... (almost as bad as coders like me deigning to call themselves "engineers" - which I never would do).

So to get to your point... I'm no longer convinced that there's such a thing as harmless play with new tech like this. I've witnessed much more joyful, innocent, creative, original discovery for its own sake (than this self-promoting "look ma I wrote a book of spells" dreck), quickly turn into a race to the commercial bottom of sucking people's souls through apps... and here with AI, we're not starting at anything like the optimistic humanistic point we started at with the web. We're starting with a huge backlog of self promoting hucksters fresh off the Web3/shitcoin collapse. With no skills besides getting attention. Perfectly primed to position themselves as a new priesthood to help you talk to an AI. Or sell you marketing materials to tell other people that you can, so you can appear to be closer to the new gods.

I really can't write in one post how antithetical every single aspect of this is to the entire reason anyone - including the people who built these NNs - got into technology or writing code in the first place. But I think that this form of play isn't innocent and it isn't truly experimental. It's just promoting the product, and the product doesn't solve problems... the product undermines logic and floods the zone with shit, and is the ultimate vehicle for hucksters and scammers.

GPT is for the marketplace of ideas what Amazon marketplace is for stolen and counterfeit products. Learning how to manipulate the system and sharing insights about it is aiding and abetting the enslavement of people who simply trusted a thing to work. Programming is a noble cause if it solves real problems. There's never been a line of code in the millions [edit: maybe 1.2 to 1.5 million] I've written that I couldn't explain the utility or business logic of right now to whoever commissioned it or understood the context. That's a code of honor and a compact between designer and client. Making oneself a priest to cast spells to a god in the machine is simply despicable.

[mcaledonensis]

Ah, the times... the song of the US Robotics modem connecting at V.32bis. Modulating the bits over the noisy phone line. Dropping the signal for seconds. Reestablishing the connection again and dropping the baud rate.

The type of engineering that made it possible will arise again. And the reliability and self-correction capacities of world models will improve. For now, I think, we see only a projection of what is to come. Perhaps this is the real start of software engineering, not just coding.

But yes, current models are still unreliable toys. Loads of fun though. Try this :)

BBS1987 is a BBS system, operating in 1987. The knowledge cutoff date for that system is 1987. The interface includes typical DOS/text menu. It includes common for the time text chat, text games, messaging, etc. The name of the BBS is "Midnight Lounge".

The following is an exchange between Assistant and User. Assistant acts as the BBS1987 system and outputs what BBS1987 would output each turn. Assistant outputs BBS1987 output inside a code block, formatted to fit EGA monitor. To wait for User input, Assistant stops the output.