I had the impression while reading that, at some point during the FAQ you stopped caring and had fun writing, and I thought this illustrated the point of the post pretty nicely.
It no longer works!
I just found out about this and want to join (probably just for quarter-haven, like Rauno), but the discord link is expired. Can I still join?
Doesn't Claude's training data include all the tutorials and step by step walkthroughs of this game ever published on the internet? How is it not using this information?
In the sequel: the mirror mold evolves into intelligent life, develops a brain on its own, and threatens to take over the world. U3 begrudgingly sends an ambassador to the human city to collect samples of mirror-mirror-pathogens.
That's impressive work! Out of curiosity, how long did it take to figure all of this out?
Putting error-correction codes in the genetic code is an interesting idea. In the context of the Pikachu thought experiment, though, here what I think would happen in the long run: because of the drift barrier, evolution can't distinguish between a ~1/N error rate and a zero error rate. So, there's nothing to prevent the rest of the machinery to become less accurate, until the error rate reaches 1/N after error correction. Now that I think about, you could probably keep things in control by systematically sequencing the genes for the replication machinery and breeding based on that. There is a spark of hope.
Oh yeah, I mean to compare things that have the same functionality (e.g. human-made butterfly robot vs natural butterfly). Obviously shovels are more simple than butterflies. But, seeing stuff like the wax motor and other examples people have posted, humans are definitely capable of coming up with great simple mechanisms, and I underestimated that. Thanks for bringing it up.
Kudos for taking the challenge! If I understand correctly, your first point is actually pretty similar to how E. coli follows gradients of nutrients, even when the scale of the gradient is much larger than the size of a cell.
The fact that the tech changes all the time sounds like a major obstacle. I think a big reason why so few people refine their LLM usage the way Janus does is that any skill you'll acquire through practice might become irrelevant in the next few months, when the company releases the next update. Likewise, you could probably design some nice thick interesting AI-based musical instruments right now, but the threat of immediate obsolescence would discourage people from actually practicing. Instead, we get Suno, because that's the only thing that is viable on these timescales. So, unless AI progress slows down dramatically, making thick AI tools will require figuring out a way to make things plausibly future-proof. That sounds hard, but maybe there's a way.