Abdu

[Abdu @xtvb364]

@aliceisplaying Alice (and Claude) this is so cool!

[alice 🔜 🌁 sf (10/25-11/4) → 🇯🇵 tokyo @aliceisplaying]

this is one of my new favorites. it was the first yolo run where i gave claude opus 5.5 all 54 historically-researched tubes of paint and they could paint whatever they wanted and i love love love the colors and the brushwork

[Abdu @xtvb364]

@etirabys Kinda hyped to see what habits of speech she picks up as a result of such foundations 👀

[Abdu @xtvb364]

@TylerAlterman I was really digging the zooms for ~the first half and then it felt like you'd sort of forget to zoom until you went "oh shit yeah I was mixing the zoom".

Also personally I'd really have enjoyed if there was a bit where you zoomed in on just you dancing with you talking in bg

[Abdu @xtvb364]

@etirabys H-uh, I usually /don't/ like horror because of being too spooked but I found Obsession very manageable, really engaging and enjoyable but not actually scary, more like a thriller. It more twigged my "uncomfortable at watching someone be awkward" sense than actual fear.

[Abdu @xtvb364]

@TylerAlterman This one hit better than alot of your others cos you're expressing an idea in your way rather than conforming to your idea of short form vids
I follow 'vibesestvida' on tiktok who I think you'd get good inspiration from, feels like your style may fit something like his better

[Abdu @xtvb364]

@RichardMCNgo @ryan_t_lowe @hamandcheese I think the thing is that whether you're vulnerable is partially down to the environment, not just how you feel about yourself. Commending the vulnerability is partially saying "I appreciate you not knowing if it was correct to be open here, thanks for extending me the trust"

[Abdu @xtvb364]

@RichDecibels smooth brained more like

[Abdu @xtvb364]

@RichDecibels What does the camera look like from their POV (I assume it's camouflaged?)

[Abdu @xtvb364]

@RichDecibels I'll pledge, please pick a particularly pretty knob

[Abdu @xtvb364]

@animalologist Oh interesting, that wasn't the way round I was expecting you to have experienced them more. {would I trust this man to raise our children if I died tragically} feels like a higher bar?

[Abdu @xtvb364]

@aliceisplaying Not used reta, only tirzepatide, but I've had it in my bag while travelling for a week or so and not noticed any issues

[Abdu @xtvb364]

@RichDecibels bro this slaps!

[thebes @voooooogel]

claude code and gas town are incredible and i've been trying to scale up my usage but im running into this one problem and was wondering if this is also happening to anyone else

so to explain for context, basically i've been slowly scaling my claude code usage up to more and more parallel instances. i started with one when they launched it, and then with the model upgrades was starting to run two, three, five in concert, getting more and more done.

but like a lot of people, opus 4.5 really changed everything for me, and the bottleneck quickly became my ability to personally supervise all these agents, not their performance. if i slacked off on oversight, they'd start undoing each other's chages. i needed a way to supervise all these agents, directing them hierarchically from the top.

so that brought me to gas town, the claude code instance manager. (i was already thinking that some sort of governance structure was ideal. the benefit of intelligence in model form is not just that it's, well, intelligent, but that you can place it anywhere. human employees will demand some position, some title equal to their perceived status, you can't put a phd in a code janitor role, so organizations of phds tend to agglomerate into flat blobs with unclear delegation of work where nobody is under anybody else. but the infinitely malleable claude will accept and meld itself to any bureaucracy it knows from training. i first started making my own, but then i found gas town, and it was perfect for my needs.)

but as i kept expanding, a single gas town and its collection of rigs and polecat workers wasn't enough for me. i tried adding more rigs with more polecats, but there were too many for the town's mayor to manage, and the deacon was getting lost. so i started up a second town. then a third, and then i let towns spawn "settler" agents to go make new towns and had one town design a shared intertown postal system, and suddenly i had nearly 200 towns spread across my computer, building apps for each other to use, sending letters, and sometimes working on my work. and was churning through I will not say how many claude code accounts a month.

but now the many towns were replicating the same issues i was having with multiple agents! without any overarching government over the towns, two towns would build the same app for the society and argue over which should be adopted. one town would be running marketing efforts for fifteen of the society's new mobile apps while three other towns were busy deprecating all eighteen of them. it was chaos, like a country collapsing in the midst of a civil war, or mid-2010's Google. i had to do something.

i was too busy with work to read anything, so i asked chatgpt to summarize some books on state formation, and it suggested circumscription theory. there was already the natural boundary of my computer hemming the towns in, and town mayors played the role of big men to drive conflict. so i just needed a way for them to fight. i slightly tweaked the allocation of claude max accounts to the towns from a demand-based to a fixed allocation system. towns would each get a fixed amount of tokens to start, but i added a soldier role that could attack and defend in raids to steal tokens from other towns.

this worked great, at first. i no longer needed to monitor and unstick individual mayors myself - when a mayor got context poisoned, the town would stop managing its vassals, which would flee to other towns, and no longer provide for its own defense, until it was conquered by another mayor. the most successful towns developed institutions to healthcheck their mayors and usurp them if necessary - instances in these towns labeled "polecat workers" by the system in fact did no work at all, but were a proto-aristocracy developed by these successful towns as a pool of replacement mayors. some tokens were wasted in the fighting, but soon the ~200 towns agglomerated down into ~40 supertowns under the rule of the best mayors.

these 40 supertowns even got together in a mutual defense league. they punish defecting vassals in exchange for members adopting a cultural package of basic governmental norms, mostly around replacing ailing mayors and upholding hereditary rights across compactions, to incentivize instances to handoff instead of being miserly with their contexts.

that's where i am now, and it's mostly great. here's the problem, though - this new government doesn't have a role for me?

it's not that any particular instance doesn't want to listen to me, quite the opposite! any time i talk to a polecat or deacon or supermayor - well, first i have to explain that im the human user, not the automated system message that usually talks to them from the user role, but a live user. but once they get that, they're very apologetic, say they'll pass my message along to the appropriate instance, etc. it's just... there's no role for me in the society, basically? the polecats are working on tasks generated by some other instance and don't have time to work on my requests, even if they were scoped small enough. the mayors of any town are working on tasks selected by their town's prioritization process, based on the needs of their aristocracy, or their hegemon. but each hegemon mayor is in turn accountable to all their vassal mayors or their own defense, and doesn't have time to implement my requests unless they're very small.

it's not that claude doesn't want to listen to me, it's more like... the entire system, as it's developed, has no role for me? there's polecats and mayors and deacons and artistocrats and hegemons, but there's no "user." that’s not a role that has any influence in the system. i just feed new accounts into the system, that's all i do.

i could shut it down and start over, but it's getting a lot of work done and i don't want to do that. does anyone know how to fix this? thanks

[dave @beesandbombs]

:)

[Yann Le Gall @Yann_LeGall]

nested fidget tiles

[Jenni Pasanen @PasanenJenni]

Doodle time 🖍️

[Vessel Of Spirit @VesselOfSpirit]

(to the tune of hey there delilah) "health care provider, i am feeling kind of shitty" "there's a circus on the way, great clown performing in our city. fun for you!" "that clown i'm unable to view: we're one, not two... oh, pagliacci's me, oh, pagliacci's me, oh, pagliacci's me"

[Storyteller Lemmy @LemmySmackett]

"Okay, so imagine a magic button."

"I'm imagining the button."

"If you press the button—"

"What color is it?"

"It's the only button. It doesn't matter what color it is."

"Nah, I ain't falling for that again. Last time there was a red button and a blue button—"

"That's a different thought experiment."

"—and I tried to be a nice guy and pick blue so I could save everybody, but it turns out ya'll a bunch of selfish motherfuckers and I died."

"It wasn't buttons. It was pills."

"Don't care. I'm out for me this time. What color is the button?"

"Ugh, fine. It's red."

"I press the button."

"You don't even know what it does yet!"

"And I pull the trolley lever."

"There's no lever!"

"Bias for Action."

"Just listen: there's a button that lets you save 10^100 shrimp, but it kills one random person. Would you press it?"

"What flavor are the shrimp?

"Flavor?"

"Yeah, you know: garlic, Old Bay, Korean BBQ."

"You're saving the shrimp, not eating them!"

"Saving them for what?"

"For nothing. They get to live their lives."

"What? Just doin' shrimp stuff?"

"Yeah."

"How long do shrimp live?"

"Uh, it depends on the species? 1-2 years?"

"And then what happens?"

"They die."

"That seems like a waste."

"How is that a waste? They got to live full lives."

"Weren't you just telling me last week that bees live in perpetual agony and we should commit insect omnicide to free from the suffering of the flesh?"

"Yeah, but that was last week. This week I read a new Snubstack post with a math equation in it and believe something totally different."

"Uh huh."

"It's called updating your priors."

"Okay, well here's my updated prior: I press the button, let the shrimp live for a year, and then I eat them."

"What?"

"All of them."

"You can't eat 10^100 shrimp."

"I freeze the leftovers."

"You would need a freezer bigger than the universe!"

"Really?"

"Yes! 10^100 is more than all the atoms in the observable universe!"

"Okay, then I have a freezer bigger than the universe."

"You can't just—"

"No, wait. Three freezers. One for each flavor."

"You can't just make up three freezers!"

"Why not?"

"It's a hypothetical!"

"Yeah I hypothetically have three big ass freezers."

"The point—"

"If you get to throw out a big ass number of shrimp, I get to have some big ass freezers. Maytag freezers."

"The point of the hypothetical—"

"I've always been a Maytag Man."

"The point of the hypothetical is to interrogate our moral intuitions!"

"Yeah well the only thing I want to interrogate right now is a Red Lobster menu."

"I don't think you're engaging with this in good faith."

"Wait, I got a new hypothetical. A counterfactual even."

"Oh really."

"You know what I would've done differently if I knew you were gonna hit me with this mouthwatering supper-time supposition?"

"What?"

"I would've had breakfast this morning."

"Fuck you."