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Opus 4.6. My standard battery of questions included solving an ascii maze (20x20 grid) without using a script, using only "thinking" as a tool. It was the first model to be able to solve it. It was the first model that really appeared to be able to reason spatially.

Opus 4.6 for me as well. I had a serious bug in some legacy software I've been stuck with maintaining, together with a few other people who originally wrote the software. We've all been trying to solve this bug for literally 10 years or more. None of us have been able to. I've personally spent hundreds of hours on it, thrown it at every previous LLM. Opus 4.5 came up with a workaround that prevented our software crashing, but didn't solve it. Opus 4.6 was the one that actually solved it. It did it by modelling a state machine of the software that was calling our software and triggering the bug, and it found the one state where we weren't correctly sending data back.

The demo song sounds fantastic. I'm never going to have a time to build this, any chance it can be turned into a plugin?

Hey, thanks. Kind of obsessed over that demo for too long.

The Rust engine underneath isn't even Pi-locked. It'll run on macOS/Linux, but the touch UI and USB-audio bridge is device specific so it would be fairly useless.

You might be over-indexing on "build this". It's actually just slapping a few 1-click shopping parts together and running two commands in your shell to have a playable instrument.

I've got a vague idea to maybe pull the FM engine out some day since I love having a DX-style synth that actually has a filter, but my plugin work is generally focused on effects processing and not voicing, so I dunno...


A person can certainly be conscious, but can they also be not-conscious? I think that most of our cognitive time is spent in activities that don't require consciousness and consciousness itself isn't needed for the majority of activities that people do. I would go so far as the a non-trivial part of people's time is spent in a not-conscious state.

That doesn't jive with normal definitions of consciousness. The word we use for "not-conscious" humans is "unconscious".

Regardless of the word we use, occasionally there have been times where I was awake but so absorbed in an activity or in my thoughts that I didn’t have a self-experience, for a certain duration (tenths of minutes). My mind was focused solely on the activity, and not on itself whatsoever. It’s a surprising feeling to notice that while you have memory of what you had just been doing, you have no memory of your mind experiencing itself doing it. I would be inclined to say that I wasn’t conscious during that stretch of time.

Amusingly, I think Ted Chiang actually wrote a short story about this very concept (it involves people committing a form of suicide that removes their conscious experience but they still act and live in society as some kind of psychic zombie. I’m pretty sure it was him anyway, can’t recall the story name

Maybe “What's Expected of Us”?

I was trying to find it, but I read it a long time ago and I have a bad feeling I might have mashed a few different stories together in my head. That is a good story though!

I believe that the average elo of players is increasing since powerful chess AI / Go AI.


Elo is zero sum. Each point gained by one player is lost by another. It follows that the mean elo is always exactly equal to the initial elo assigned to new players before they play any games, and can't change over time. If the highest ranked player are higher elo than before, the lower ranked players must be lower elo.


>Elo is zero sum.

In a closed, static pool only.


Right, but you have to give the new players some rating, and as long as that number remains constant it will also be the mean Elo. Therefore, "new players entering the pool" can't cause a rise in mean Elo. As for lower rated players leaving, that could indeed raise the mean (assuming you stop counting them in the average), but that changes the point from "players have gotten better because of AI" to "worse players are more likely to just give up on chess because of AI", which is a significantly less optimistic picture IMO.


What? I don't think anyone has given up on chess because of computers in my lifetime


I didn't say they did. What I said was that if the person I was replying to was correct that average Elo ratings had increased because of AI, the mechanism would have to be "AI makes lower ranked players give up" instead of "AI makes players better on average"

Was the average ELO of players approximately stable before chess engines?


> Does not make any sense for them since it’s not a unique environment.

nonsense. If it worked for one hotel, that would be ground breaking. Hotels would line up to have theirs be the next test case.


He means it doesn’t make sense for the startup. The comment you’re replying to, is arguing that this point from the gp is a disadvantage instead of an advantage:

> hotel rooms are regular/familiar


Some schools don’t allow children to leave the classroom to get a drink of water unless it’s at recess or between classes. So that’s why they carry water bottles nowadays.


Kids aren’t allowed to go to the toilet in the middle of a class?

Though I don’t remember not being allowed to drink something between class breaks ever being a problem growing up. Classes aren’t that long.

The other thing is that we mostly only had glass bottles back then, so of course kids wouldn’t carry those around.


Leaving the classroom to pee was frowned upon during lessons, and during breaks obviously there was a queue.


Progress! When I was in school we weren't allowed to leave class OR have a water bottle. If you had food... good luck, that was like the worst school crime for some reason.


From my cursory search, it just looks like they have a stock ownership position in Roland, not any real say in how Roland is ran. Kinda like how Game Stop has a position with eBay.


On the upside, perhaps the LLM will understand the intent of search operators now.


I'm slightly curious how PG handles heavily illustrated books. I've downloaded some years ago, and the quality of the illustrations was always pretty poor. Has it been improved lately? What's the QA like for illustrations?


Nowadays we depend on scans from Internet Archive, Hathitrust, and other sources. Some scans are better than others. Bear in mind that our illustrations need to be in the public domain and usually from the same edition as the text. https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html


It's the OODA loop for LLMs writing code.


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