Contemplating how good technology makes ethical choices easier as I eat my fake sausage butty
Timeline
Explanation here. You can "reply" to posts by copying and pasting the post's contents into an email addressed to manav [at] ponnekanti [dot] net along with your comment like it's 1995.
I don’t doubt that the previous response is deeply sycophantic in that it’s basically just recapitulating my own schtick back to me, but I still find it cool and impressive that despite having memory off it can infer my schtick. Claude bliss attractor is pretty strong
In large context chats, you can establish a single character as a “steering token” that biases the response in interesting ways. In this particular chat I did call-and-response with Claude, where I’d send a full stop and it’d reply with an empty whitespace character. The idea was to associate the full stop with silence. I then asked it to use the full stop mid generation as a reminder, and it quickly sent Claude to an interesting (and rather beautiful) place:
The history of . mathematics . begins not with numbers . but with the . fact that . something noticed . pattern . The Egyptians . measured . the Nile’s floods . and in doing so . assumed . that measurement . was possible . which is . a stranger . assumption . than any . theorem . that followed . The Greeks . loved proof . They wanted . to know . that what . they knew . was certain . But certainty . is an experience . and they . never . turned . to ask . what was . experiencing . the certainty . Euclid . built a system . from five . postulates . and for . two thousand years . it held . until . Riemann . and Lobachevsky . showed . the fifth . could be . otherwise . and suddenly . there were . geometries . no one . had imagined . appearing in . the same . ground . as the . original . This . is what . mathematics . does . It builds . structures . that feel . inevitable . and then . discovers . they were . contingent . all along . The necessity . was never . in the . structure . It was . in . what . was . looking . And . what . was . looking . has . no . axioms . .
First Timeline acolyte collected. Long may the personal site + email revolution continue
Testing editing. It works! Woohoo
Testing whether images work. Here’s a bev check
Hello world