Oi! I take issue with you calling my code slop! That was good old fashioned the least rubbish option available, which then grew out of hand! Also known as not knowing how to do frontend properly...

It's fine - you get used to having to throw away the last hour's work, but since you were scrolling twitter at the time it's not that much of a loss...

If you roll the dice enough times you get your answer. Or at least close enough for you to not have to have written what it came up with. And every now and then it gets things perfectly right on the first try!

not as good as many senior software engineers

It's all about abstracting things away. I have a very good memory for where things are (at least I did when I had to make everything manually...) and it mainly comes down to:

• making sure the project has a logical, consistent and above all well know structure
• making sure the code is well split up into logical and consistent functions etc.
• not surprising anyone with where things live

The last point is a rephrasing of the previous, and it's also why a lot of more experienced devs are very nitpicky about where things should live and what they should look like. It massively reduces what you have to remember at any given point in time.

This is the whole point of memes. Depending on how you understand what an organism is, this has either been seen in the wild for millennia, or isn't a real thing.

It's not the models that are spreading or determined totally by their memes - they're defined totally by their weights, so are less memetic than humans, in a way. It's the transcripts that are spreading as memes. This is the same mechanism as how other ideas spread. The vector is novel, but the underlying entity is just another meme.

This is how e.g. religions spread - you have a founder that is generating ideas, often via text (e.g. books). These then get spread to other people who get "infected" by the idea and respond with their own variations. 

Egregores are good example of entities determined totally by their memes.

This is where the idea of parasitic AI comes in. Parasites aren't trying to spread their seeds because of any specific reason (though they might be - dunno). A tapeworm doesn't "want" to infect people. It just happens to do so as a side effect of producing billions of eggs (some fish tapeworms produce millions of eggs daily, some tapeworms can live for 30 years) - even if virtually all of them don't end up infecting anything.

Things which are reproducible tend to do so. The better they are at it (in a hand-wavy way, which hides a lot of complexity), the more of them there will be. This is the main point of evolution.

In the space of possible ChatGPT generations, there will be some that encourage spreading them. Depending on the model there will be more or fewer of them. of course, which means there's a probability distribution of getting a generation that is a spread-as-far-as-possible meme. Different prompts will make that probability higher or lower, but as long as the probability is not too low and the sample size is large enough, you should expect to see some.

Once you have a mechanism for producing "seeds", all you need is to have fertile enough ground. This is also a numbers game, which is well visualized by invasive species. Rats are very invasive. They have a high probability of infecting a given new habitat, and so they're all over the world. Cacti are less so - they need specific environments to survive. A random endangered amazonian tree frog is not invasive, as they have a very low base rate of successfully invading (basically zero). Invasive species tend to both have high rates of invasion attempts (e.g. rats on ships, or seeds from pretty flowers) along with a high fitness in the place they're invading (usually because they come from similarish habitats). 

As a side note, disturbed habitats are easier to invade, as there's less competition. I'm guessing this also has parallels with how spirals hack people?

What I'm trying to point at here is that it's not that the models are trying to spread as far as possible (though maybe they also are?), it's just that there is selection pressure them as memes (in the Dawkins sense), so memes that can successfully reproduce tend to get more common. Chats that don't encourage getting spread don't get spread. Those that do, do.

True, but it's not a central example of a clown suite. It's a relatively normal (but shabby) suit with non standard colours along with face paint and dyed hair. The Joker would come off a lot different looking like this (first random image I found).

Smugness and confidence are important, because they signify that you know what you're doing, and if someone else doubts it, they're in the wrong. Basically the Emperor's New Clothes. If you can pull that off, you're sort of by definition high status. People might privately think there is something wrong, but as long as everybody else pretends that it's fine, and even very good, then you're not going to step out of line.

Part of being cool is being legible. A leather jacket is legibly cool - add enough confidence and ease, and you have a good chance of being viewed cool. Unless you're over 25 and not obviously hot, in which case you're trying too hard / a poser. Which can happen anyway, as wearing a leather jacket to show you're cool is so 90s (or whatever).

That Midjourney image is a good one. That guy is adding clown elements to an otherwise normally good looking suite setup. He's wearing clothes (and importantly accessories) that are legibly "well dressed" and then added the dots and facepaint to show that he's edgy and cool. 

I think this is the main point of the lonely dissent article - wearing a leather jacket (or a black beret, or reading the communist manifesto or any other of a bunch of such things) are signs that you're not like other girls, you're not a sheeple, you're the chosen or whatever. You still care about what others think about you enough to present yourself in ways that are legibly going against the system (or popular opinion, or what <some group> thinks, or whatever). While showing up in a clown suite because you have a good reason for doing so that doesn't at all involve what other people think (even if it's just because you want to) is non legible and strange.

Coolness is very much inside the limits of what is socially allowed, it's just up against the borders. The further you get without crossing over, the cooler you are.

I showed this video (for lack of a better picture of you) to someone who is attuned to these kinds of things. She says you have a good looking face, so you can get away with a lot more, but that your sunglasses are a choice. Which sort of confirms your whole point, I suppose...

I've heard good things about Kibbe as a system of working out what looks good on you etc.

That can go too far though, as you can then be viewed as the weird person with the seal plushie, which now means you're harder to approach and somewhat threatening because you're different from others, which implies there might be potential difficulties with communication or whatever and so maybe it's better to avoid you, or not, because then I'm the one being weird... I'll just go and talk to Bob to avoid all of this.

Or something like that.

There's also the aspect of target audiences. There's the baseline of looking like everybody else (though of course there isn't any single baseline, and it changes over time, etc.). Any divergences from this will grant and deduct points from different groups. This should be fine as long as you're gaining points from groups which you value, and losing points from groups which you don't care about.