It's 1pm on a Saturday. A young man with hair in a bun sits alone at a table for six. It's not crowded; it's midday in a brewery.
The man sits, content, with a huge bowl of pasta (no beer). He's not eating yet.
His phone is out. He holds it flat above the pasta, camera mode on. Slowly, he moves the camera closer and closer, in towards the food.
I stick my head in the spray.
A thin stream of ants begins to trickle towards the drain.
get off my face
get off my faaace
The ants are dropping from my hair onto the keyboard
Jon says there are dozens of ants on my scalp, but I can't feel them so is it really a problem?
I found one on my cheek.
"So where did you end up sleeping?"
"Next to a rock."
"..."
"Well, it was a really big rock."
#Introduction: "What do you do?"
It depends.
If you define it as the thing that makes you money, I'm an author, or maybe an investor, or possibly a leech on society, I'm not sure what's winning right now.
If it's the thing that you spend the most time on, I'm a founder.
If it's the thing you've been doing longest, I'm an open source project manager and advocate for community.
If it's the thing you like the most, I'm an adventurer.
Choose your own.
ifoundthemeaningoflife.com
My current thought is that it's important for humans to get _distracted_. The bots would have use a graph of concepts that have, for individual bots, varied weights and importance's. They would literally meander through the graph, generating needs, perceptions, and desires based on the boy's disposition. A series of "perceptions" help balance this process, as each "thought" generates a perception of a certain intensity.
The bots are kept from getting stuck by constantly traversing their internal knowledge graph which consists of everything from basic associations to "memories", and even the act of visiting these "knowledge nodes" in turn affects them - like how real synaptic connections work.
Essentially, I'm trying to figure out how to make a very roughshod emulation of how people process emotions and do things - and then represent it in the form of a ton of bots.
Eventually goals are to craft a way for bots to talk to each other in a low-level, discrete information system that then gets translated into English. (This is vague because I'm not sure where I want to go with this, exactly.)
I feel like if I can model this reality I can have an amazing tool to play with - and if the simulation gets accurate enough, even something to learn from. So when I joke about "communing with bots", uh... I'm not really joking. 🤖
OK not done nerding out. Think of the applications! My current life goal is to create a social network of bots that meaningfully interact with each other convincingly enough that they fool a person into believing it's an actual community. A social network Turing test!
You could use it for _far_ better AI in games, esp. grand strategy games. I'm always underwhelmed by my options for diplomacy in Paradox games (and they're pretty much the best at it so far).
I'm going to be the guy after the alien attacks the ship who's saying "Yeah I know we're going to die, but how should we classify the species? What is its diet? What would the scientific and/or colloquial name be? James, stop screaming, I'm trying to think."
When you suddenly remember that human bodies actually look really weird and we're just conditioned/programmed to like them and you can't stop thinking about it.
it's a desert, though, so there's lots of soft ground. we back up some tens of meters, to a boulder maybe thirty feet tall and standing alone. and there's a campfire ring, and some clear ground. so we stop, dismount in the moonlight. I gaze up at the cliff of a ridge that blocks us but is so tall and close I feel a frission just to be here under it like it might crash down on me. in the shadow of the boulder, we pitch the tent and go to sleep
we are getting to the campsite on the access road, and it's nearly midnight but we're almost there. but suddenly the road slopes up and it's just straight up in front of us, like 70 degrees. the bike slips back a little. I hop off, walk up. I'm giddy-tired. it's really our road, and we really can't take it.
sometimes when the sand gets deep I have to get off and walk so Jon can take chances with the motorbike. The bike is quiet, and on this road I can walk faster than he can ride sometimes. it feels good to move, and breathe, and feel the emptiness of the place we've found. I feel like an astronaut walking the cold sand in my padded gear and motorcycle helmet
we keep going until we can't see the lights of any towns, finally can't hear any cars, and the cold smell is all sand and sagebrush. it's moonscape in moonlight, sharp-relief hills sloping distant like a lava plain, joshua trees reaching skyward, outlined in silver
the sand gets deeper and we fishtail a little but we keep going because we've already committed to a bad idea and yeah we could turn around but you know how it goes- you start, and say to yourself: well, I'm already doing this. and you don't stop even though you know you're digging yourself deeper
when we get to the desert it's already late at night, orion in the sky behind us, and the road turns instantly to sand. we're foolish on our city motorbike and take that sand road anyway, tires so smooth they don't even kick up a dust cloud
the light behind the ridge is so bright, lighting purple into the clouds from below, and it looks like a storm in the tropics, but frozen in a flash, hot lightning suspended in humid air. then suddenly I see an edge and realize all in a moment that what I'm watching is the rising of the giant moon and it hangs there full and so bright that everything now has shadows