Tag: Consciousness
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The Virtue of Laziness
LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don’t want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones. — Read on simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/13/bryan-cantrill/
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Working with agents doesn’t feel like flow — Bill de hÓra
After a stint of deep work, I usually feel the tiredness of having held a line of thought together for a long time via concentration. After a stint with agents, the tiredness feels more like the aftermath, again, of sustained play or competition. The accumulation of lots of small judgments, many state updates, repeated course…
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What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?!
Unless an author makes a major stylistic turn later in their career, I can’t imagine any new work being favorably compared against the earlier work that established the style and sounded so fresh. On the other hand, it’s not always the first work that is considered the best. It can still take time to perfect…
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The Claim Upon the Training Data — Jônadas Techio
What is at stake, if this changes, is not the catastrophe Dennett feared — not “counterfeit people” flooding the zone, though that too. It is something quieter and deeper: the shared fictions losing their grip, not because they are falsified but because the infrastructure maintaining them no longer has a stake in their coherence. A…
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Auto mode for Claude Code
Before each action runs, a separate classifier model reviews the conversation and decides whether the action matches what you asked for: it blocks actions that escalate beyond the task scope, target infrastructure the classifier doesn’t recognize as trusted, or appear to be driven by hostile content encountered in a file or web page. […] Is…
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Liberals and Conservatives See Different Victims: Moral Disagreement Is Explained by Different Assumptions of Vulnerability
all forms of judgment—including moral judgment—is a process of categorization (McHugh et al., 2022). When people wonder whether an act is immoral, they are questioning how well it belongs in the category of “immorality.” For 50 years, we have known that categorization judgments involve the process of template comparison, where our minds compare a potential example…
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Boredom Is the Price We Pay for Meaning – The Atlantic
Everything that displays a pattern is pregnant with boredom,” Brodsky told those flabbergasted undergrads. Of course, much of what displays a pattern—lifelong friendships, enduring marriages, serious scholarship, the making of art, prayer, Sunday mornings in winter—is also pregnant with meaning. Boredom is the price we pay for a life rich with meaning. Recognizing this makes…
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Hoard things you know how to do – Agentic Engineering Patterns – Simon Willison’s Weblog
The key idea here is that coding agents mean we only ever need to figure out a useful trick once. If that trick is then documented somewhere with a working code example our agents can consult that example and use it to solve any similar shaped project in the future. — Read on simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/hoard-things-you-know-how-to-do/
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40,000-year-old German artifacts may display written language precursor | Reuters
For example, crosses were found only on tools and animal figurines, but not on human figurines. The researchers analyzed more than 200 Stone Age artifacts that bore these signs, dating from about 43,000 to 34,000 years ago, from four cave sites in southwestern Germany associated with a culture called the Aurignacian. The Adorant figurine, for…