So, I always thought that Warhammer 40k techpriests were absurd. Strange obscure religious rituals to appease the machine spirit.

But at this point I can actually see something like that. What is prompt engineering but a strange pseudo ritual.

So praise the Omnissiah, I guess...

They've always resonated with me, maybe because I often work on legacy code. All this ancient technology that no one understands. Crazy rituals/incantations to get things done. People being afraid to skip steps, even if it probably isn't needed. The aversion to unconsecrated (non IT-supported) technology.

The machine spirits were the only part that felt "too magical" to me, but now we're well on our way. The Omnissiah's blessings be upon us.

(Let's just skip servitors. Those give me the heebie-jeebies.)

> "too magical"

Just putting the "magic/more magic" story here as a reference to the uninitiated - https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html

Burn some "incense" to help you get in the zone. Bless the machine spirit!

> So, I always thought that Warhammer 40k techpriests were absurd. Strange obscure religious rituals to appease the machine spirit.

40k lore is like South Park: either extremely dumb or unexpectedly insightful.

The Cult Mechanicus' raison d'etre is the realization that religion persists across time and space scales that knowledge alone does not. Thus, by making a religion of knowledge you better guarantee its preservation.

Unfortunately, once you divorce doctrine and practice from true understanding, you lose the ability to innovate and cause the occasional holy schism/war.

PS: 20 years ago I told a friend that "software archaeologist" would be a career by the time I die. Should have put money on it.

Unfortunately, I think Vernor Vinge scooped you any way. One of the main characters of A Deepness in the Sky was something akin to a software archaeologist (I swear that exact phrase was used, but it’s been a minute) and that book was published in 1999.

Fair, but I didn't get to it until ~2010. And yeah, Vinge uses the exact phrasing https://akkartik.name/post/deepness

Well. Either "software archaeologist" appears as a profession before the time you pass away, and you get paid. Or, you die first, and then your friend doesn't get paid. I don't think they would have gone for that...

One would hope that I'd die with at least a few dollars in my estate!

You'll need to write it into your will or probate (can't remember if that's the right word) will never let it through! :)

> Unfortunately, once you divorce doctrine and practice from true understanding, you lose the ability to innovate and cause the occasional holy schism/war.

There is only one thing to understand.

We are one with the Emperor, our souls are joined in His will. Praise the Emperor whose sacrifice is life as ours is death.

Hail His name the Master of Humanity.

Feel free to call me next time your lights stop working, and then we can have a nice theological discussion before I choose to fix them. ;)

Exactly. This is already happening.

We'd like to think this could turn into the voice interface on Star Trek.

But

It can go the other way also, 'incantations', 'spell books'. Speaking to the void to produce magic.

"The CFO, donned the purple robes, and spoke the spell of Increased Productivity, and then waved his hands symbolizing the reduction in work force labor. And behold the new ERP/SAP App was produced from the void. But it was corrupted by dark magic, and the ERP/SAP App swallowed him and he was digested. The workforce that remained rejoiced and danced"

We're going to be living in a perpetual holodeck malfunction episode.

And by the way, if you want to speed the collapse, all you need to do is talk about goblins on the Internet a lot now.

They just told us exactly what kind of attack works best.

Or Comstar in the original setting of Battletech

So you are not the target audience for this.

The target is people who would buy a MacBook but want to run Linux.

There are many people who turn down the MacBook, not because of build quality, or design, but because it does not support Linux.

Arbitrage I assume

I know, I just don't see the arbitrage in what's described? If I order online because it's cheaper than the high street, that's not an arbitrage – the arbitrage would include then selling it on the high street afterwards, getting paid to close the gap until it reflects only delivery fees and the value of immediacy.

I assumed from the context the arb was California salary vs their local salary.

And to make that an arbitrage you'd need to subcontract someone local to do the job you've taken the California pay for. It doesn't mean 'get a better deal in a non-obvious way/place', it's taking both sides of the trade in different markets.

they might hire them to work on the project and then sell the project themselves hence the arb, or outsourcing basically.

Good point about the project lifecycle. In my experience, open source contributions often get repurposed this way. The key is clear licensing from the start.

Prepaid/paid limits with shutoff is appropriate for this though.

If you have per key limits, this is not possible, and even in a wild situation you should b able to expect that your firebase key will not use 50k.

How much is industrial scale batteries for solar?

The LCOE is better than nuclear and nuclear is not getting cheaper while industrial scale batteries continue to get cheaper.

Mid thinking cycle seems dangerous as it will probably kill caching.

The mid thinking cycle would require significant architecture change to current state of art and imo is a key blocker to AGI

Can you use zellij over ssh on a remote server?

Yes you can!

without running zellij on the remote machine? how?

I'm unclear what's being asked. Zellij is just a TUI-based terminal multiplexer like tmux and screen, you either run it locally and SSH within it to a remote machine, or SSH to a remote machine and run Zellij from within the remote connection.

I guess they mean 'have zellij hold your session when you log off/close controlling terminal'. (that would require zellij on remote)

Never underestimate that people are lazy.

I think there is a difference between things like coding where it is semi closed loop, at the end of the day the software works or not.

Vs fields where there is not a reliable feedback path, or that feedback path is much more noisy.

There definitely is but even then, you can get a feel for a loop for more open-ended tasks too - you move forward until the model output starts to look handwavy/contradictory, then pause to talk to it/consult outside sources to improve your own knowledge. Most "fuzzy" fields also have quantitative components, and it's often worth stopping for a moment to put together some kind of quantitative evaluation suie to give the model grounding. When you've learned the right path yourself, you start moving forward again. It's for sure slower and more error-prone if you were already an expert when you started, but it's workable, and head-and-shoulders better than what you could do without the AI.

I generally think it's better to phrase it as a gift.

My motto, is that people have helped me a lot in life, with time, resources and sometimes money.

If I loan money, I explicitly do not expect to be repaid, and will generally say, pass it on.

Also it's often not the loaner side who cuts off contact. But if the person who receives the loan cannot repay it, and every time they talk to you, they feel guilty and think about it. They might just start avoiding you.