Are there any good examples of something that's actually one thing, but has two different identities in the popular consciousness?
Like. As a hypothetical example, if the two Noam Chomskies were actually one guy.
I think it'll be a big deal when software engineering AIs are no longer dependent on human-created languages and frameworks.
Seems like the transition to new languages could both boost AI productivity and reduce human ability to review new code.
@pmarca In production there's a resilience/efficiency tradeoff. You'd like to revert to local industry when trade fails. But those industries need subsidies to withstand more efficient competition. This is also why it's hard to have an 1800-level civilization inside a 2026 civilization.
If you wanted to worship something big, powerful, ancient, and nurturing, hard to see a better option than the Sun. So its actually a bit odd to see people ever worship anything else. Is it the Sun's constancy what they hold against it?
I wonder if an LLM agent could exhibit much better introspection just by training on simple tasks related to its embodiment (e.g. "how many tokens do you see in this word?")
Horror premise: the discovery that we are what you might call "typical observers" in the sense of the anthropic principle.
Like, typical within the multiverse.
How would you name "the fate of one's soul" in naturalistic or humanistic terms? Like, you don't want to see someone you care about walk the path of destruction, even when the damage they cause is small.
People tend to underestimate the value of really tall towers. Because they tend to judge towers based on what they can see. But in order to know what's on top of a tower, you'd need to already be that tall yourself.
@megagoose11 Nice problem. Assuming the acceleration is always towards the origin, then this orbit can only arise from harmonic motion (like a spring).