Joshe

"Just a chatbot" dissolves quick once you see Claude Code reliably run a 50-step process you've designed. For those who haven't experienced Claude Code at its full potential, you have no idea what this tech is capable of and no idea of it's value. I just had it setup a virtual machine on a different computer and I never even touched that computer. And on that VM, it setup desktop automation software to login to a specific website and take some code from my main machine and run it through a testing tool and then send the results back to my main machine. So now, I simply hit a hotkey to automate a routine 10-minute task that I'll never have to do again. This alone will save me 3-4 hours per month. And that's just ONE thing out of dozens I can streamline. That's about 42 hours a year from ONE automation. I also set it up to so that it can access and troubleshoot my entire home network. Then I had it make all my lights, TVs, and all my IoT devices controllable from this keyboard I'm typing on. Then it setup a watchdog service on a Raspberry Pi that monitors all my devices and services and notifies me via a custom notification system I designed and it built if anything goes offline, and if so, sends notifications and reminders to specific devices depending on where I'm at. I then setup an email monitor service to watch for specific client emails that I need to see immediately, sent as a critical notification that forces my engagement, otherwise if they're not important, don't notify me but remind me about them later if I still haven't replied by EOD. I then had it build a secure, locally hosted password manager that's far easier to use than anything on the market. It takes real design work and iteration to do these things but I did all this and much more in a weekend. It would have taken high-salary experts weeks or months to accomplish all of this without AI. If you don't know shit about tech, you cannot fathom the value of this technology.

"Does it solve problem X?" Even if all AI could do was summarize text and videos. How valuable is that one thing? Run it! Knowledge workers spend a lot of time reading docs, reports, email threads, meeting transcripts, tickets, articles, etc. If a tool reliably saves even 30% of time for each worker with regards to reading, how valuable do you think that is to collective humanity? Billions upon billions of man hours saved every year, and that's just solving "summarization".

Why do you care if your problem solver has human-like intelligence or not if it can solve problems really well? AI is not some persistent always-on machine that exists in a cloud somewhere. You create instances of it and in those instances, it does a specific kind of work. It's not designed to cut grass. But other actual dumb metal machines without AI are cutting grass and doing a fine job. The hunk of metal that cuts grass without human intelligence is solving a specific problem and no one gives a shit if it has intelligence so long as it gets the job done. It would be like refusing to use a calculator because it doesn't understand math.

It's easy to see who here is actually doing real cognitive work. Generating questions they actually want answers to, verifying the mechanism, rebuilding and extending it. This is what actual thinking entails, and it's very evident who does it and who is just lazy and demonstrates the same sadistic troll patterns over and over - always punching down (when it's safe) with maximum affect, and with zero exposure of their own thinking because they don't actually have anything of value they've generated, nor have the ability to do it competently. For the unaccustomed, learning = asking questions that you don't know the answers to, then checking if those answers cohere, then thinking through how and why it coheres and making updates where necessary. And what it looks like in the real world is constantly asking questions THAT YOU DON'T KNOW THE ANSWERS TO. If you're not asking questions that you don't know the answers to, how the fuck are you learning anything? Let me demonstrate: In this thread, I didn't know the answer to "why do coding models explode but not science?" So what I did was I tried to answer that question with my own knowledge and when I couldn't, I sought out the answer, then I evaluated it until I understood it, then ran some coherence checks, and lo and behold, learning happened, and I then deepend that learning by explaining it to Elliot. You can ask AI questions and update your models RIGHT NOW! That is not cheating. It's called learning! Give it a try. Or continue to stick to Google, your books, dictionary, thesaurus, Wikipedia, and think you're better and more pure. Or, don't seek any new knowledge at all and stay confined to what your own head can produce, and continue to stagnate while people with sense leapfrog. I'm gonna write a juicy article on "How to Spot A Sophisticated Troll". And yes, I'll use AI, lol. "CHEATER!!!"

Hell yeah, sounds fun.

So, there's incentives and then there's the feedback loop of how models get refined. The tighter the feedback loop, the easier it is to get the explosions. When coding models first came out, they were horrible. But the latest frontier coding models are "explosions" compared to what they were, even just 12 months ago. What made this possible is that with coding, you can set up fast and cheap tests, such as with a compiler. Then you can have the AI do a billion tests and it either passes or fails. That data then becomes available for the next retraining session. When you have a never-ending supply of deterministic tests that either pass or fail, that's how you get the explosions. You need to be able to simulate the domain and you need lots of quick, cheap tests to get the runaway improvement. Obviously, not every domain works like this. You can't run fast and cheap tests in science and medicine because the feedback loop is such that you have to wait on humans to actually do the things in physical reality and report back, as opposed to simulating reality and running tons of deterministic pass/fail checks. When the model is engaging in a domain where it doesn't have this deep training data, it's still useful because it leans on the best mental models and frameworks we have - it's decent at triage, forming hypothesis, and spotting patterns. For people in science and medicine, it's currently more like a helpful colleague than a genius. The calculator allows humans to figure math out faster - saves them a ton of time and cognitive effort. AI is like a calculator in these loose-feedback domains, but humans still have to be the ones to do the work, at least for now. What happens when AI-robots are dialed in? The feedback loops gets tighter, but still not as tight as something like coding and math. You can't fast-forward a chemical reaction or a biological process the way you fast-forward a compiler.

Stochastic parrot: a term for the view that a large language model doesn't understand anything—it just produces statistically plausible text by predicting likely word sequences from patterns in its training data, without any grasp of meaning. This misses the point. I don't think AI will ever be conscious or anything, and I'm not sure what it might evolve into (I'm AGI agnostic), but the tech is already incredibly powerful in ways I feel most people aren't quite grasping, and we're nowhere near the ceiling on reaching its maximum utility. We can't make AI companies redirect their funds into world-poverty. If we were gonna do that, the government should just seize Amazon or build its own Amazon and fund it with that. Would be nice. Also, we're in the middle of a land-grab right now. All these companies are betting that AI will be foundational infrastructure in the future. And they're right - we're never going back, which is why they're willing to go a decade bleeding money. In the meantime, they're doing everything they can to cut costs. They're currently moving into nuclear power: Also, there's now massive incentive for technological advancement. Big shit is happening right now. Also, you have to keep in mind that model efficiency has been increasing something like 10x per year through innovation. And it's not just AI companies and their vendors pushing this space: Whichever companies win out will have massive profits barring open-weight models don't become so efficient that they're cheaply democratized, which I think will eventually happen. I think you and I will eventually be able to run something like today's ChatGPT from our homes. But by that time, frontier models will be solving problems we never thought possible. It's false that AI isn't solving novel problems. Per Claude: DeepMind's AlphaProof/AlphaGeometry hit medalist-level performance on International Math Olympiad problems—novel problems, formal proofs. Frontier LLMs now score competitively on genuinely hard math benchmarks that aren't in training data. On science, AlphaFold materially changed structural biology (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024). ML systems have contributed to novel materials discovery, weather prediction beating physics-based models, and protein design. Google's mammography work similarly rivals radiologists in recent 2026 Nature Cancer results. Also, we don't even need AI to come up with novel solutions. If all innovation stopped right now, it's utility and benefit is already incredible. People still haven't fathomed the massive epistemic effect this tech is having on humans right now. My conservative sister is getting smarter because she started using ChatGPT to make pictures and she eventually started asking it questions, lol. When we have a disagreement, she says "ask ChatGPT", lol. Then I do and she defers to it! It's updating her models and decisions. For these people who aren't doing much critical thinking, even if AI is wrong 5-10% of the time, it's net epistemic effect on them is still positive as hell. It's such a dumb take that AI is making people dumber (not that you claimed this). I do have a bias because I'm a power user and I'm getting a ton of use out of it, but because I'm a power user I probably grasp it's potential better than non power users. I use it more to build solutions and to solve problems than I do for chatting. It's made me more intelligent, made my work easier, clients are more impressed with my deliverables, and it's allowing me to capitalize on edges others aren't seeing. It's the best all-purpose tool in existence, and the creative opportunities and solutions are still largely untapped. If I only used it as a chatbot, I'd probably think it was a net-negative as well.

Yeah, I should look into that as well, thanks. Might check this out: https://eli.health/products/cortisol

Morning isn't a good time to make decisions for me because planning is like catnip for me. I'm better off waking up and getting right to the thing (eat the frog) while I've got the most energy and least pull towards something else. I also noticed that some days I get little sleep and wake up and feel like absolute shit, and other days I get the same little bit of sleep and wake up feeling great. I want to figure out what is responsible for that. For me, I think it's more psychological than biological. This has always failed me. I can't easily do things I don't feel like doing. Even if I force myself for 90 days straight, there's never any lasting equilibrium. Some days are easier than others depending on energy and circumstances, but me forcing it never goes away, no matter how long I just brute force the action. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. It would be amazing if you could reliably activate that state because it truly does provide a surge of energy that often leads to and sustains a flow state. But can we reliably activate or engineer these states? If so, I think we have to look at how they manifest in the first place. And if you look closely at what's happening, it seems to me to be a generative process where my mind is allowed freedom to explore, connect dots, and generate what it wants to, such that it builds up a collection of ideas that points to some potentiality that inspires me at the core. So how can I make that goal I cared deeply about the other day, matter today? I have to generate the meaning. How? Well, how did it get generated the first time it happened? Can I mentally walk those same steps to generate the meaning I once saw. Some people refer to this path reconstruction as an "alignment practice". But it's not enough for me. I need alignment + conducive energy. The energy is the hard one. Sorry if this isn't tying into your points very well or if it's scattered. I know I'm all over the place - just one of those days.

lol. great song

Supplement culture or whatever has gotten out of hand. People take stuff they don't know the first thing about then think their subjective measurements prove or disprove it. You can't measure this stuff without a serious medical project.

Some values are compatible with certain architectures and some aren’t. Truth cannot be valued in the abstract. It either has value for you or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, no matter how many times you claim to care about truth, it will always remain a conceptual ideal. Trying to force yourself to care about something you don’t is inauthentic. We are who we are and have to work with that.

Was just working through an idea about how to be more effective, and it seemed relevant here. For me, the biggest factor is energy. I mean, I need mindset tweaks as well, but energy is the main thing. So, I was thinking, how the hell can I figure out what makes my energy do what it does? It's too complex and too much to track. So, I thought of designing a telemetry system that can capture as much data about me and my state as possible. Oura ring, continuous glucose monitor, internet browser history, time spent driving, time spent at desk, AI chats, meal composition via local AI image analysis, phone logs, and other things I'm forgetting. The idea is to capture as much data as possible without requiring me to capture it, because that's the main failure mode. Then, funnel all of that data into a database for pattern analysis. Combine all that with maybe 2 or 3 automatic check-ins per day where the system asks me specific, high quality questions via a speaker and listens back for my answers, and I think that's a pretty damn solid telemetry setup for getting your energy figured out. I imagine this sort of thing will be commonplace 500 years from now, but the tech to do this is available now. People get the Oura ring and CGMs and just look at the apps and get very little from it. These apps have APIs that let you extract the data and bring it into your own system. The more contextual state data you can capture, the better the prediction machine, and it can be set up to largely operate on its own. I'm confident I can implement all the tech with AI, but I'm not sure how difficult it will be to extract predictive patterns, and not sure if my lack of statistics knowledge is going to make it difficult, but I'm optimistic it's solvable and the patterns will emerge. Anyway, energy is the main reason we deviate. Oh yeah, another big thing is having control over the things that go into your mind. For this, I'm setting up a system that can balance out my energy whichever way it needs to be balance by intelligently making me think about or experience specific things. One early idea is that if I'm being too serious for too many days in a row and I should lighten up, then the system could randomly come over my speaker or phone with some funny stuff to nudge me in that direction. Or if I'm slacking off, it can give me intelligent reminders for why I care about my goals but just not today. And you wouldn't have to record these audios yourself. Recently, I started playing with local text to speech models, which basically allow you to create your own Hey Google, Alexa, Siri, etc. With these TTS models, AI, and personal telemetry, you can design your own coach.

After you go off the deep end publicly, and if your only means of survival has been online content creation, you need a way back in after you go off the deep. Connor acting like he was some mastermind viral attention exploiter was all just a story to deal with the shame of his public insanity and a way to get back into the business.

It's kind of like, your entire mind will always be somewhat of a black box, but with work, you can discover how it's working. Like, when you first contemplate "what is intuition?", you have no idea wtf it is. But after a lot of observation, you can come to understand it deeply and then deliberately fine-tune it much more effectively than if you didn't know what it was. It's still a black box, but you've mapped out a section of it that you can tweak to get better outputs. Anthropic just identified an aspect of AI that was previously invisible/unknown. If labs can now add/remove things to change outputs, that opens the door to fine-tuning a model's reasoning the way you'd fine-tune your own intuition.

It's the best peak into the box that we've ever had, and it's not insignificant. They were able to remove things from the J-space and add things in to get a different output. That seems pretty big to me.

Anthropic just released a groundbreaking paper on their discoveries of how AI thinks. Basically, it works much like the human mind does. The similarities are striking. They proved that if you tell an AI to not think about X, it can't help but think about it, lol. This stuff just came out - all new information. A new concept called the "J-space" is the main idea. https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace It feels like this research is going to speed things up quiet a bit and allow labs to make much more efficient and accurate models, because now, they can actually control what the model thinks. This is insane. Massive implications.

I've been in many lakes and never been swept up by any currents. What lake are you referring to where people drown every year? I've mostly only been in southern lakes, so maybe they're different elsewhere. It is true though that swimming in freshwater is more demanding than a relatively calm ocean. Takes a lot more work to stay afloat.

His drowning may have been intentional. I could see him engulfing the water because he seemed to have some insatiable hunger or deep urge to not be vulnerable to reality. Almost like he saw reality as his enemy because it imposed upon him. "Reality telling me I can't do this? Death trying to impose itself on me? Humiliation trying to impose itself on me? I'll meet them head on." IDK.

Yeah, don't go to https://bangphlipolicestation.com/ because it auto-downloads malware. This is not the official page. Notice it doesn't have a .th domain. I think this is the official page: https://bangphli.samutprakan.police.go.th/

Can you share the link?

Might need to use a Thailand VPN.

I'm more mocking the idea than your intuition. But I do think it's a mistake to lean towards this being true. Connor's friends are not rational actors, lol. It would be easy to get the friend to go along with this. All the friend has to do is say he was fooled and then play victim and his channel potentially blows up from a 100-1000x algo boost. Yes, of course it's very likely one of these days Connor's recklessness will wind him up dead, and that may be the case now. Actually, I just checked again and it appears there are legit reports from authorities, so it appears to be true. Although I still wouldn't be at 100% with this guy, lol.