> There was a tendency toward bureaucracy. Four agents spent 11 minutes appointing
> a "sole fertilizer operator" for a single piece of bone meal on a single wheat
> block.
Exactly what I was thinking reading through this. This is amazing and also frightening and hilarious. It’s like a deformed version of how normal groups of humans would operate. Very rules and process-oriented humans. I found the no-blame inquiry into chicken tossing that resulted in what is effectively written law particularly striking, and adorable, and depressing. And cute.
These agents were tasked with "building a civilization". This is a genre in Minecraft videos. They're full of this sort of thing.
So sure, it may be partially from these agents being heavily RLed into being little bureaucrats. But it's also the ingredient LLMs have had from the start: genre awareness.
This is exactly and 100% my experience with these agents: They drown themselves in process and insane levels of bureaucracy surprisingly quickly.
A couple months ago we had an experiment where we had an agent run a small business [1] for other agents and exactly the same happened: Crazy ledgers, endless analysis, and way too much attention to inconsequential decisions.
At one point our agent wrote elaborate date linters because it had a minor time mix-up.
Just curious: are the models here at max reasoning effort perhaps?
That sounds like over-thinking failure modes I see sometimes. (Can manifest as neurotic or autistic style, e.g. second guessing or ultra detail focused.)
All of the agents struggle with knowing when to stop. They can drive themselves insane inventing problems to solve after they arrive at a satisfactory answer for the current problem.
Keep this in mind when you see articles about how "an AI agent uncovered a thousand issues in our codebase overnight". A great many of those "issues" end up being that some process was not bureaucratic enough.
This is so great. Another fun trick we used in the 90s was palette animation -- by swapping the palette you can create incredibly cool effects at a low runtime cost.
Changing the pallette mid-frame is fun, too. You have to pay a lot more attention to timing since you don't have a copper (like the Amiga) on the PC, but it's still feasible.
it used to be a hardware thing, so if your pixels were represented by a nibble, and the definition of the color for each of the 16 possible value is in table the hardware references, you just update that table (on a vsync, or even an hsync) and you could get cool animations effects (for the time)
random example from the Atari 800xl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPjLZ4MVKCc (you can see how slow it is to draw a scene, but the animation effect due to pallete rotation is really fast).
Recently I've been thinking about the nerds/hippie dichotomy from that book. Really missing the anti-authoritarian streak that was so formative in the early computer industry.
But that communication is clearly intended to be confidential. Also isn't having one attorney on a multi-party communication marked confidential sufficient to create privilege?
When I worked at two different FAANG companies, both legal orientation sessions taught this specific scenario as an example of something that's not attorney-client privileged.
If you email your lawyer to ask legal questions, that's privileged communication.
If you just cc a lawyer on a thread while you talk to other people, adding the lawyer doesn't make the conversation privileged or protected.
Fifty years ago this week, The Byte Shop opened its doors, becoming one of the epicenters of the personal computing earthquake that reshaped our world. A secret rebel base for a generation of hackers, engineers and tinkerers who would go on to build many of the technologies you now take for granted, it’s most famous today as the launchpad for the Apple-1.
Paul Terrell's Byte Shop was a nondescript El Camino Real storefront filled with early 8-bit computers, racks of electronics components, soldering irons and supplies, and some of the strangest and most wonderful people. This was a hangout for members of the Homebrew Computer Club. I know Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Lee Felsenstein, Chris Espinosa, and Andy Hertfeld were regulars. In the photo linked at the URL above, that's infamous phone phreaker John Draper (Captain Crunch) sitting in the window. There’s probably many others from here on HN.
This Sunday we’re throwing a party to celebrate the occasion, at the DoubleTree Hotel at the San Jose Airport, from 12–6. The afternoon will include:
* Meet-and-Greet Reception featuring demonstrations and displays of early personal computers by their original designers, plus autographed copies of period advertising.
* Books, products, and memorabilia, including computer books and hardware available for purchase.
* Silent auction of collector memorabilia signed by the designers, running throughout the afternoon.
* Stage presentation and Q&A, narrated by Lee Felsenstein of Homebrew Computer Club fame, with participation from the "Apple-1 Garage Gang” and other dignitaries, both in person and virtually.
* Tribute honoring the pioneers who helped shape the birth of personal computing and are no longer with us.
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