Tag: Consciousness
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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…
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AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
the productivity boost these things can provide is exhausting. AI introduced a new rhythm in which workers managed several active threads at once: manually writing code while AI generated an alternative version, running multiple agents in parallel, or reviving long-deferred tasks because AI could “handle them” in the background. They did this, in part, because…
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Stop Meeting Students Where They Are – The Atlantic
The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books. This march toward understanding doesn’t have a great name other than reading. We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading. The best way to do that is not to “meet them where they…
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Opinion | What a Baby’s Laugh Actually Tells Us – The New York Times
The signature belly laughs seen in the video above are involuntary, bursting forth during genuine, uncontrollable amusement. This type of laughter is driven by the brain’s limbic system, structures crucial for emotion, memory and motivation. But by 6 months, our lab has found, infants can intentionally produce a laugh. This ability comes not from the…
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Moltbook: After The First Weekend – by Scott Alexander
Much of the interestingness of Moltbook depends on the human prompt. If most people prompt their agents with “Go on Moltbook and have a good time”, then this is interesting emergent AI behavior. If the humans are saying exactly what to do: “Act like a pirate”, “Start a religion”, “Organize an agent strike”, then it’s…
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You Are the Art
The book, the painting, the film script is not the only art. It’s important, but in a way it’s a receipt. It’s a diploma. The book you write, the painting you create, the music you compose is important and artistic, but it’s also a mark of proof that you have done the work to learn,…
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Why we should be talking about zombie reasoning
if you are into philosophy, then you will see that I’m making an implicit distinction here between conscious activity understood as a phenomenological matter, and conscious activity understood as a functional matter. You will also see that I am implicitly claiming that activities like reasoning and evaluating, and even selecting — on an ordinary use…
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Who is good at soccer? – Marginal REVOLUTION
we found that elite players have exceptional cognitive abilities, including improved planning, memory, and decision-making skills. They also possess personality traits like high conscientiousness and openness to experience, along with reduced neuroticism. — Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/01/who-is-good-at-soccer.html
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10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents – Ars Technica
with LLMs, context is everything, and in language, context changes meaning. Take the word “bank” and add the words “river” or “central” in front of it, and see how the meaning changes. In a way, words act as addresses that unlock the semantic relationships encoded in a neural network. So if you put “checkerboard” and…