Tag: Consciousness
-
Aiming for Fullness: The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind.
The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a…
-
Interleaved Thinking
Interleaved thinking is essential for LLM agents: it means alternating between explicit reasoning and tool use, while carrying that reasoning forward between steps.This process significantly enhances planning, self‑correction, and reliability in long workflows. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/3/minimax/
-
Thinking is not Objective, has a Point of View
The Python developer reads case studies about Go’s performance and their amygdala quietly marks each one as a threat to be neutralized. The Rust advocate looks at identical problems and their Default Mode Network constructs narratives about why “only” Rust can solve them. We’re not lying. We genuinely believe our reasoning is sound. That’s what…
-
Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human
…behind the scenes, there had been robust conversation and debate by Wikipedia editors as to exactly what constitutes an “unusual” death, and that several previously listed “unusual” deaths had been deleted from the list for not being weird enough. For example: People who had been speared to death with beach umbrellas are “no longer an…
-
To really understand a concept, you have to “invent” it yourself in some capacity.
To really understand a concept, you have to “invent” it yourself in some capacity. Understanding doesn’t come from passive content consumption. It is always self-built. It is an active, high-agency, self-directed process of creating and debugging your own mental models. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/30/francois-chollet/
-
Setting up a codebase for working with coding agents
For the most part anything that makes a codebase easier for humans to maintain turns out to help agents as well. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/25/coding-agent-tips/
-
AI as Support Staff
When I sit down for a work session, I want to feel like a surgeon walking into a prepped operating room. Everything is ready for me to do what I’m good at. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/24/geoffrey-litt/
-
Visual Features Across Modalities: SVG and ASCII Art Reveal Cross-Modal Understanding
We found that the same feature that activates over the eyes in an ASCII face also activates for eyes across diverse text-based modalities, including SVG code and prose in various languages. This is not limited to eyes – we found a number of cross-modal features that recognize specific concepts: from small components like mouths and…
-
Measured AI | Note to Self
There are levels of abstraction everywhere in modern life. But the abstraction layer of “this will do it for you so you don’t have to” for AI tools is especially amorphous, opaque, and comes with real risks. Furthermore, AI chatbots are designed to make you feel good, not challenge you to think on your own.…
-
Comment la lecture « enclenche une véritable symphonie » dans le cerveau
une petite région particulière, spécialisée dans la reconnaissance visuelle des lettres et identique quelle que soit la langue. Située dans le sillon occipito-temporal, à l’arrière de l’hémisphère gauche, elle a été baptisée « aire de la forme visuelle des mots », ou « boîte aux lettres du cerveau », par Stanislas Dehaene. Si elle est endommagée, les personnes ne…