Anecdata to be sure, but I can tell you that no one I've talked to was pro data center. I'm sure those people must exist somewhere but somehow I've never run into them in real life.
For datacenters being built at all I want them to invest enough in power production to avoid contributing to price spikes. And for them being near me I want strict noise controls.
But if both of those are met, I'll be pro-datacenter if it can offset checks the size of Hermantown $800 per household per year in taxes.
Oh, I don't need that. I've always been fully aware they exist. I'm just pointing out that they're not in my circle. My friends are quite literally highly selected.
I similarly had Argon respond with a vast hallucination. It surprised me because it wasn't a little wrong on the details but a fully false verbose response that completely fabricated fabricated everything. I'd recently had Claude Code help me create transcripts for some audio notes from my mother in law and decided to see how some other models would handle the same task sans harness. Argon made up a long conversation from a police sting operation with under cover operatives seemingly just because it read the file names and identified that they would have come from a recording device.
Honestly the fiction writing was pretty impressive!
Suddenly very curious what the llm roleplay people think about this one lol. Fortunately I've already learned to stifle my curiosity on that specific subject.
It goes way back, I work in AI/Ml (taken over by transformers/LLMs) space since early days of this "AI Summer". We get some nice grad school students interning from top universities. I met one during a trip to the office, from top notch school, introduced me to Triton programming when it first came out. It was early days of LLaMA just coming, when The Bloke was regularly dropping finetunes, I was joking asking him what the hacker stack was for "AI waifus" that the cool kids were using. Lo and behold he drops the name of the SillyTavern project. Which later was really educational in setting up local inference servers and in other ways, may have had to, ahem, delete some browser history.
But my experience is that the agent matters a bit more than the model. It is fun on ChatGPT because of its recent (?) bias to always be creating images for conversations around fiction.
what are some of the vagaries of how that use case depends on the agent aka harness? i’ve only been focused on sort of how to make models reliable for my math / cs / engineering and arts and crafts work loads, but RP is an important category for some folks. like are the fails of the various models different from more technical yet creative work loads?
eg im working on rigorizing a proof that a fun algorithm of mine is not only the first provably efficient algorithm for a particular problem, but its also the fastest in practice. ive found that for the sort of stuff i need to assume the model will get confused in the out of training distribution stuff from my personal library of ideas, so they will at best be a confused secretary intern mashup
If you uploaded the audio via the web site or app and got terrible results I'd bet Argon wasn't the model doing the transcribing. The only way to know for sure is to try again with the API.
Oh it definitely didn't transcribe anything at all! This was through the WebUI. I'm certain it would have done better through Antigravity or such. Really I was just expecting a denial but I figured what the hell, the files are small and I like to see how the results of various models compare.
Yes! I was having Argon summarize some project updates and it... just made up entire paragraphs that had no basis in reality. It felt like I was back in GPT3 days.
Will have to give Carbon a try, but if it is anything like what I saw before it was entirely unusable.
I've found I prefer time release melatonin as personally I can fall asleep initially but often wake up in a few hours and then can't get back to sleep.
Some other melatonin sleep aids give me the most vivid nightmares, so I definitely think it can be worth trying a couple different options.
I have aphantasia so anendophasia sounds like such a nightmare to me, though I imagine those so have it would likely feel the opposite of me. I've met some folks in the past who I'd suspect have anendophasia, but I'm not sure how I'd ever bring that up without coming across as uncouth.
Anyone with anendophasia care to opine on their experience?
Yes, I’m very familiar. I have no inner semantic articulation whatsoever. When I hear people talk about meditation (clearing your head, etc.) it always amuses me, because that's my normal state. It's completely still up there...
But it’s more than that. I don’t have any conscious notions of thought at all. It’s much more like these guys in the tv show Severance who stare at numbers until “it feels right”.
The end result just pops into my head, often just as a feeling, not even as anything graspable, and only takes semantic shape when I say it out loud or write it. And even when I write it, it continues — it’s like a constant irking feeling of calibration that never feels quite right until it does.
There is one exception: demi-sleep is the only state where I can ruminate (e.g. stress-related), but then it's also non-verbal -- more like a combination of images and sensations. It's hard for me to put into words (no pun intended)...
That's a fascinating description of anendophasia from the inside. It's hard to imagine not having an innner monologue, a constant stream of words and images. Must be so nice and quiet in there! For me it takes conscious effort to step back and let it cease, but when my attention drifts away, the stream starts again by itself.
Would you say you're a visual thinker, or is there no imagery either? I'm trying to imagine (ha) how someone can think without words or images. The closest I can relate to is when I'm playing music, like the piano, there is a thinking process - even problem solving - without any concrete concepts internally, no words, colors or forms, not even sounds. Now that I think about it, I get into that mode of non-verbal (and non-visual) thinking sometimes when I'm doing math or writing software. It's like thinking by doing, often through an external medium - shaping code, numbers and operations, music or art as it's happening.
> stare at numbers until “it feels right”
I think most people do this sometimes, consciously or not, but just not as their dominant mode of thinking. How interesting.
Perhaps it was more common in the past, or in some subcultures like a Buddhist monastery. Or among animals and plants, their "thinking process", problem-solving without words.
Visual imagination and inner monologue are not complements, but more like orthogonal capabilities. I am pretty far away from both. Sorry, for the long reply, but this topic hooks me every time I trip over it... ;-) Ironically, given what I will state next, people around me tend to describe me as very imaginative.
I lack conscious visual imagery. I can't recall faces of loved ones or really "see" scenes from memory in a way that feels visually coherent. Even though I have practiced drawing and painting at times, I cannot render people, animals, nor landscapes from memory. I would need a live model or reference photo. I could draw or paint fictional scenes or more basic forms, but would struggle with anything life-like without a reference. I can recognize it is flawed, but cannot summon the missing bits.
I also lack any inner monologue. My thinking is not verbal. It is extra work I have to do to cast ideas into words after I've already thought them up. I can think about words as a task, but I don't think in words. This interviewing strategy also sounds like a nightmare to me. I could talk at length about "how I think" in some philosophical or psychological mode, but I cannot recite a real thought process as if it is a sequence of verbalizable intermediate steps. That's just absurdly ill-fitting to me.
By contrast, I have a pretty strong inner stage for proprioception and a sense of spatial relationships or topology for both real 3D and 4D (space-time) structures. If I focus, I can nearly invoke physical sensation by imagining falls, spins, impact, flight, etc. This can also involuntarily engage my inner audio stage, where I might imagine corresponding sound effects.
There is a first-person and third-person version of my spatial stage. I can sometimes think about a dynamic stage, i.e. the 3D stuff moving, but more often this turns into a more static sense of a stage that includes motion vector information. (Alas, this hasn't made me a dancer nor given me appreciation for choreography...) I don't know how to describe this to people though. I don't "see" it. I feel or know it. It may have a perspective-like projection to it, favoring or enlarging the near space, but it doesn't have occlusion, lighting, or other visual qualia.
Sometimes, but not always, I cast more abstract thinking onto topological structures that map into this spatial stage. Then I can "feel" the shape of a problem, problem space, or search process over that.
As I mentioned above, I do have an inner audio stage. I can think about arbitrary sound and it has an experience like a faint version of real-time hearing on a secondary channel. There are intensity and frequency qualia, timing and rhythm, etc. It can convey harmony, noise, sharp attacks, etc. At the extremes, I can nearly induce accompanying physical senses like a deep bass thumping my chest or a high-hat sizzling in my ear. But it's always sort of off in the corner as an apparatus I can access, without being mistaken for real hearing. This and real hearing can operate in parallel, though it is harder to attend to the inner stage if real hearing is overwhelmingly loud or full of semantic content.
When I think about words, it is sometimes in this audio stage. To some degree, I can remember people talking or run through hypothetical speech with intonation etc. It's a bit thinner on the audio qualia than other audio thinking, as I focus more on the semantic and emotional content and less on the sounds qualities. I know whose voice I am imagining, but it's not necessarily a rich or faithful synthesis of the sound qualia. Musical thoughts bring more of that richness.
But, I have another linguistic stage that is more symbolic. It's more like feeling the topology of the words, a bit like a parse tree, and less a real-time stream. It would be a mistake to say it is a visual process, as it morphs into semantic units in my spatial/topological stage. It can also abstract, thinking about the sequenced structure of sections, chapters, etc. rather than all the words.
Finally, all of the above-mentioned things feel like tools I can apply. They don't seem like "me" or my core thoughts. It is very difficult to describe my thoughts that happen behind the scenes in all this. There is a version of the above senses that represents my real, anchored, position in the world. And there are the extra, "imagining" versions that I can operate. My real self is some amorphous attention that flits among these.
(Probably) due to trauma effects, I have very high situational awareness. So, it's very rare that my attention can completely separate from the real-world monitoring. But I can deprioritize it a bit when I really focus on other problem solving, recall, or rumination. It's a bit like a mixing board that cuts from one blend to another with different levels of abruptness versus smooth blending or transition...
That's interesting! I'd always heard something along the lines of bad code bases contain more swearing in the comments and as such it should be avoided.
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