Interesting project, and I’m torn between whether it’s a good idea or not. But in any case, doesn’t something like an open post-trained trajectories corpus already exist with e.g. Poolside’s trajectories?: https://trajectories.poolside.ai/

I kept flipping channels until I got to a clip of Zuck in 2005 saying:

> "We're trying to figure out what to do with Apple. We're obviously sensitive to people's privacy."

Wow.

Aren't they running a safety classifier model in parallel to the main user thread to catch and prevent 'banned' outputs?

Same impression here reviewing several hiking trails in California. Some of the most famous ones too, like Yosemite’s Vernal Fall / Nevada Fall apparently have high radiation? What’s going on here? Am I to believe there’s a natural uranium deposit there?

There's another strong benefit to digital minimalism, which is the reduction in personal software footprint. The more software and network dependencies one is using, the greater security risks they take on. We live in an age where the supply chain risk is greater than ever, and it's useful to be mindful of the stacks our digital lives rest on. "How much can I get done with as little software and Internet dependencies as possible?" has always been an important question to be asking ourselves, and it's even truer now. Minimalism is not just a helpful principle to support our own cognitive wellness, but for our digital wellness as well.

Curious about the hardening and optimizing - how much extra prompting is spent to ensure a ‘clean’ software supply chain for this, versus having Claude at its own discretion use third-party packages/libraries/etc (or not)?

Sometimes I say something like "check recent cyber stuff" and it dispatches a few subagents and does the thing.

Wow, I'm definitely overthinking and overprompting then. Seems like driving this process can benefit from a more laidback approach. Thanks!

Only with Opus 5.5+. The thing is beast mode. I wouldn’t trust other weaker models this much.

There's all kinds of telemetry being collected and sent to data brokers, for ad targeting (not directly through Anthropic but third-parties), etc. See this study led by IMDEA Networks in Europe: https://leakylm.github.io/

This article talks about results at a high-level: https://networks.imdea.org/your-conversations-with-ai-may-no...

> The study identifies three main issues: the exposure of conversation permalinks to third-party trackers; the ability to link these interactions to user identities through tracking mechanisms; and the presence of privacy controls and policies that may not accurately reflect actual data flows.

> One of the main findings is the potential transmission of information related to user conversations, such as chat titles, URLs (permalinks), or associated metadata, to third-party trackers such as Meta or Google, along with cookies and other identifiers.

> The study also identifies mechanisms that could enable linking activity in AI systems to real user identities. The combination of identifiers such as cookies (commonly used in tracking services), hashed email addresses, and server-side tracking techniques could facilitate the creation of persistent profiles and user re-identification.

Fascinated by the psychology here. Is it because you view frontier AI labs as beneficial entities that truly care about everyone's well-being, and will do what it takes to ensure, post-replacement, that we are 'taken care of', broadly speaking? Or are you more like "I'm ready to be replaced, and if that results in my death, I was over this reality in the first place, so it just speeds up what I've been hankering for anyway."

If I'm replaced, it will mean that humanity as a whole has taken a step forward that's normally associated with digging up monoliths. If nothing else, it'll mean that I'll get to do something more interesting.

I'm one of those "code to live" types, as opposed to someone who "lives to code." More specifically, I usually write code in the course of building something that uses it. That's true 99% of the time, anyway. Why would I complain about a technology that helps me (and my customers and employers) move closer to the actual goal?

As for resulting in my death, AI is not going to be what kills me. Not unless humans misuse it. Which, of course, we will, because that's what we do... but (shrug) if it's misused in a way that kills me, at least it'll be a more interesting death. More likely, it will extend my life by accelerating medical progress the way it's starting to accelerate progress in math.

In any case, I don't see the current crop of frontier labs being especially important in the grand scheme of things. Unless they have something up their sleeves besides serving LLM tokens, they are most likely the pets.com and Webvan of our day, not the Amazon and Apple. They are valuable partners, certainly, but I can get by without them.

> I'll get to do something more interesting

Some would say living under a bridge with other former developers is interesting, in a way.

How does this follow? Isn't it fair to say that what someone's interacting with at the 'personality surface'-level is a form of emergent complexity / emergent behavior, not readily apparent or discernible at the neuron level (just like how human 'thinking' or 'consciousness' seems to work)? I'm not even arguing these models are conscious, I'm just saying that it doesn't seem like we can take the fact that a single neuron flipping their behavior or triggering 'alter egos' is enough to say they don't "think", etc. We might discover that flipping - if not a single neuron but perhaps really tiny clusters of neurons/synapses - in a human brain, might result in similar effects. We haven't had human connectomics studies to really show this (to my knowledge).

I think it’s even more apparent in humans. We are literally changing our brains little by little every microsecond of the day.

Well, compared to the scale of an LLM it’s actually massive.

You might have a different preference today than yesterday. You might have a different preference one second later.

I think all this study shows is that a human brain is more resilient to minuscule changes/damage.

Ambition has to match the problem space. Sometimes I stare at the Bay Bridge here in San Francisco, and I wonder to myself, as an exercise of "how much more ambitious could AI make us?" imagining a 10x version.. would it simply be a bridge 10x bigger? Is that the best I could come up with though? And why is the bridge there at all? ~15,000 years ago you could have walked from SF to Oakland across a dry valley floor (that is now the Bay, true story). Then the glaciers melted, water flooded in, and only then did crossing it become a problem worth solving: first with boats, then with a bridge, and eventually with BART’s Transbay Tube, which isn’t a bigger bridge at all.

Bridges exist to move people and goods across water within a particular envelope of needs and constraints. In this specific case, when the needs grew, the most ambitious answer was not a bigger bridge, but BART's Transbay Tube, which is an entirely different kind of thing.

So when I reflect on Dan's piece, it seems we're in agreement that AI is not provoking us to simply build bigger versions of things we already have.. but what remains unsettled is whether we know what we’re really building for yet.

There's of course the by-now oft-repeated story of electrification of factories, which had a 'first pass' of mostly swapping out the steam engine with one big motor, and otherwise preserving the same layout. Over time people redesigned floor plans around small motors at each machine (with Paul David’s “The Dynamo and the Computer” being the classic telling of this).

A lot of AI-assisted software development right now still feels like the one-big-motor pass at this. I suspect the projects really worth being ambitious about are probably the ones that only make sense once the entire factory floor changes, and I don’t think we're able to see that just yet. What Dan's doing is probably the right answer at the moment, building a lot of odds things and seeing what sticks.

Back to the Bay story, I think this moment is equivalent to our digital glaciers melting, and the water rushing in, than us having to figure out better "cranes", for example. It's changing what the world we're designing for is, what the whole problem space is, instead of whether we build bigger versions of things within the prior paradigm.

We look to our software stack today and we are tempted to imagine 'bigger', 'better', 'faster', 'more efficient', but... why? What are we really building _for_? We shall see!