Funny AOP/SOP should pop up. I found myself thinking the other day that ChatGPT's generative programming prowess was in some ways what the Aspect Weaver always wanted to be, but wasn't. That area seemed to founder in hindsight under the weight of symbolic reification baggage...

Carlos E. Perez In many cases, the landmarks were there before the wagon trains rolled in and named them... From our stochastic perches thirty years in the future, one can broadly see why the GoFs approach of pattern mining prevailed over the AOP/SOP gambit. Github fracking recapitulates it...

Carlos E. Perez A pattern "describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice." It's akin to a quantum object, it's doesn't take corporeal form until the wave function is collapsed...

Poyekhail!

A word in tune with the Zeitgeist if there ever was one:

NEW POST: Recently I had an enlightening chat with Xu Hao (our Head of Technology in China) about the techniques he's using to prompt ChatGPT to generate useful code martinfowler.com/articles/2023-…

Variations on this notion have more or less been around since the early '80s: its.caltech.edu/~bi250b/2009/p…

Waiting to see whether 30-story popsicles can really fly...

If you talk to an LLM like a big box website chat box, it will dumb things down for you. If you up your game rhetorically, you'll steer it towards the loftier upper-middlebrow manifolds of the plankton rich parts of the memepool...

I think we've all had our John Henry vs. the Steam Drill moments with these beasts. Your typical thought-leader might be thinking, gee, 1000x as many artificial thoughts to lead. You're thinking, what, give poker another look?

It's every bit as much Captain Kirk as it is Spock...

Confabulation at the capacity and context margins is a inherent consequence of how neural networks work. RHLPing one to give it a super-ego that strives to somehow eschew uncertainty won't solve this fundamental problem. An NN is neither a database nor an expert system.

A superb take on the "nature got there first" perspective on neural nets from Terry Sejnowski: This remarkable tidbit: "LLMs have hundreds of billions of weights, about the same as the number of synapses under a square centimeter of cortex." direct.mit.edu/neco/article/3…

Echoes of the steroid era in baseball. Who's juicing and who isn't. But there is no drug test for GPT. I used to ask: "Were Einstein to be shown to have used cognitive performance enhancers, would we demand he give back his Nobel Prize"...

Sometimes the Scandinavians gets it right. John Hopfield receiving the Noble Prize in Physics is their most satisfying call since ... Bob Dylan...