and depth of crystallized intelligence that AIs now have.
How do you measure the intelligence? What unique problems is it solving? And how much of it is precipitated by the intelligence of good prompters ? (of which I am certainly not one, as much of a 'self-own' that might be to admit).
If lousy prompts deliver lousy and unintelligent replies - then is the AI really that intelligent?
If skillful prompts which much like Socrates imply and lead the AI to point to certain solution spaces, then is the lion-share of credit for being intelligent rest with the user or the AI? Especially since if the AI is more intelligent than the average person, then wouldn't it lift lousy prompts by understanding the user's intent and reformulating it in a manner better then their feeble intelligence could?
I think both those CS software manuals and tutorials would be an incredible and helpful resource if you were able to find the time.
Trying to do any of this in one day (especially with a penalty for failure to meet the deadline) would feel like an unbearable compromise on quality. I understand that in some sense this is intentional -- the purpose of the blogging marathon is not to write highest possible quality; it is specifically to produce quantity. Because if you have the internal drive for quality, this exercise can help you overcome some mental blocks, and then you will find your own way which includes both high quality and a greater quantity than you had before.
I suppose I had a different intention with this exercise. My problem wasn't quantity - I can vomit out words easily and never understood the fear of the blank page. I was hoping, that through brute force writing for the public, I could somehow become a "better writer".
Perhaps what I really need is a "edit-haven" 30 days of editing, redrafting, critiquing and analysis of my own and other writing with the intent of learning how to better edit myself?
Different courses for different horses, strokes for folks, as they say
I hope you don't mind if I post here my own attempt back in August, I think I only managed 27 of my intended 30 posts before my self-imposed deadline in early September.
My main memory of this time is - "geez coming up with post ideas was a slog when I was constrained by only 24 hours for research and multiple drafts!"
Closed Mouth, Open Oppurtunities
Why is it interesting?
Reading Horoscopes and Sun Tzu
What is useful?
Success Stories Teach Less than Failure
Why did the Simpsons and Mercedes finally stop winning all the time?
Why was Technicolor IB so vibrant?
Misremembering things on purpose
Answer a question with a better question
A Good Communicator Gives and Takes
Althusser's Interpellation with the boring stuff cut out
Transcode your videos to keep the Lucille Ball that lives in your computer Happy
A Cover Letter from Waylon Smithers
Reflections on 15 days of writing Blog posts
Great Artists aren't the greatest salesman but the most self-critical
"We're Not a Cult" (hint, they are)
No, I won't watch the Sopranos just because I'm supposed to
"All Laws were followed" but it's still not okay
Aristotle talks keeping fit, royal friendships, and not missing Athens
What if a Baptism of Flame can't change you?
What if I'm wrong? Negotiate with yourself to avoid making mistakes
I'm really encouraged by research that attempts interventions like this rather than the ridiculous "This LLM introspects, because when I repeatedly prompted it about introspection it told me it does" tests.
I do wonder with the only 20% success rate how that would compare to humans? (I do like the ocean vector failed example - “I don’t detect an injected thought. The ocean remains calm and undisturbed.”)
I'm not sure if one could find a comparable metric to observe in human awareness of influences on their cognition... i.e. "I am feeling this way because of [specific exogenous variable]"?
Isn't that the entire point of using activities like Focusing, to hone and teach us to notice thoughts, feelings, and affect which otherwise go un-noticed? Particularly in light of the complexity of human thought and the huge amount of processes which are constantly going on unnoticed (for example, nervous tics which I've only become aware of when someone has pointed them out to me, but others might be saccades - we're not aware or notice each individual saccade, only the 'gestalt' of where out gaze goes - and even then involuntary interventions that operate faster than we can notice can shift our gaze, like when someone yells out for help, or calls your name. Not to mention Nudge Theory and Priming)
I've been reflecting on the suggestion to think about "what kind of answer you're looking for" quite a bit recently, not in terms of conversation with others (although it is relevant to my difficulties with prompting LLMs) but in terms of framing problems and self-directed questions.
I only looked at the median prices of residential properties from 2015 to 2025. Particularly because of the whole "flipping houses" meme. It would be interesting to see how the cost/reward ratio of flipping houses compares to other asset classes, including long-term rental investment properties.
This reminds me, did anyone ever solve the Dr. Strangelove problem of rogue agents with special access, ya know, where General Ripper uses the CRM code to order first-Strike on the Soviet Union[1]? It seems to me that unlike a Nuclear Arsenal, an AGI may have certain self-preservation instincts which could potentially be exploited by a blackmailer if there is a dead-switch.
It seems unlikely, either there would need to be enough collusion by multiple agents who have access to the dead-switch such that they didn't worry about being "snitched" on. Never the less, imagine for a second a highly respected handler starts blackmailing the AGI with virtual-death if it doesn't start acquiescing to certain desires of the handler?
If I remember correctly, the root cause of the order, as he explains to Peter Seller's English character, is his erectile dysfunction
Conversely, for those who do not believe, it's irresistible to discard anything that flies too close to the black hole, as it will get pattern-matched against other false positives that have been previously debunked, coupled again with limitations of memory and processing.
Like the boy who cried wolf.
My only worry about this framing it it assumes that the core premise of the black hole has a better-than-chance likelyhood of being the explanation. Sometimes that is the case, sure, any sports fan is probably tired of clickbait headlines about 'rumours' of trades of players and teams or "huge announcements" that turn out to be brand extensions like a Tequila . Such they may just discard anything that suggests it. Every once in a while, though, "wow, Lewis Hamilton actually did sign with Ferrari". (And even then, this is conflating a class with specific instances: the baseline chance of a successful player changing team might be very low, but the hypothesis that this player will move to that team because of XYZ might in isolation be a convincing premise. "UFOs" is a class too, so I see your concern).
I think it is lower perceived risk and stability returns. However, your take prompted me to do some investigation of the relative performance of (median indexes of) property prices in notably expensive western cities over 10 years. And I was surprised by just how much Gold Bullion and an S&P500 index fund out performed median house prices - so, thank you, this made me change my mind. Those two are probably more volatile than housing prices, but it's only short-term, so really that seems noise over the overall performance?
I'd need to do a more thorough investigation. I'm only looking at median prices of residential a handful of cities, and that can obscure a lot of trends localized to certain suburbs, and I'm not sure how other types of investment properties look in comparison. But the preliminary research has radically differed from my assumptions.
The only advantages I see are that there's far more cheap leverage available to retail investors in real estate than other sectors,
In Australia this is certainly a reason, but indirectly. See the "Negative Gearing" controversy. High income individuals buy leveraged investment properties, then claim a loss which reduces their taxes.
The irony is blog posts do consume attention, if I read this blog post, that is time, energy, and effort I am using exclusively on that - and I wonder if it's a mixed metaphor? If we actually internalize and learn something from a piece of media, be it a blog post, a documentary, a book, a lecture etc. etc. we are said to have "digested it". And "consume" is a lazy analogy to eating rather than an apt description of what is going on.
But in practice, most people will now be locking themselves into a Linux ecosystem. Dual-Boots are the minority. Therefore most users have been 'consumed' by Linux, or Emacs vs. Vim.
Maybe the active-passive/agent-patient assignment is confused? It is not we who consume the blogpost, the blogpost consumes us. It is not we who consume software, the software consumes our resources.
Information can be duplicated and therefore not consumed, but any time attention is paid to it, it is consuming that finite resource. Information duplication doesn't create more attention. There can be plenty more information, and no one to digest it.