Weren't we supposed to be living in the post-scarcity era?

We are, it's just very unevenly distributed.

I agree with that and stand by these words. If people want to call it gatekeeping, so be it. Programming, software engineering if you will, is a serious discipline, and this craze needs to stop. Software building should be regulated and properly accredited as any serious activity.

In some countries you can't call yourself a software engineer if you don't have an engineer degree and a license to practice.

Should be the same everywhere. Anyone can be a coder, but not everyone is an engineer

Quaternion graph traversal and control system

https://github.com/VoxleOne/SpinStep

I work in robotics and with quaternions (mainly 6DoF SLAM and used to do robot arm kinematics), but I don't get the use case for this. Maybe provide some example use cases?

There's a customary way to post it here. "Show HN":

https://news.ycombinator.com/show

It’s almost suspiciously elegant: focus on transformations and their composition, and the structure takes care of itself.

We're heading to a future where (when) friction is a luxury. Anyways, I thank the organizers for the rare opportunity. Long live Blogosphere.app, long live blogs.

We went from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Power of Ten rules to ‘have you tried restarting Microsoft Outlook?’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...

Restart which one?!

This. My personal style have always been llm-like, including the generous use of em-dashes, and "not-only-this-that" style mannerisms. It' increasingly difficult to retain reputation.

Neural cellular automata are interesting because they shift learning from “predict tokens” to “model state evolution.” That feels much closer to a transition-based view of systems, where structure emerges from repeated local updates (transitions) rather than being encoded explicitly.

I'm working on a theoretical/computational framework, the Functional Universe, intended for modeling physical reality as functional state evolution. i would say it could be used to replicate your CA process. Won't link it here to signal my good faith discussing this issue - it's on my GH.

from https://voxleone.github.io/FunctionalUniverse/pages/executiv..., "The Functional Universe models reality as a history built from irreversible transitions, with time emerging from the accumulation of causal commitments rather than flowing as a primitive parameter." Is it fair to say that time is simply a way of organizing a log file on a dynamic reality? I interpreted "composition of transitions" as a system of processes. I think the hard modeling problem is interpreting interactions between processes - that transitions don't simply compose, that observed transitions may be confounded views of more complex transitions. I gather NCA would be granular enough to overcome that.

That’s a very good objection, and it’s pointing at a real pressure point in our framework.

Short answer: it’s close, but incomplete. It’s not that time organizes a log of reality; rather, reality is the accumulation of committed transitions. What you’re calling a ‘log’ it’s the ontological structure itself.

I gather you're basically saying: what we see as a transition ≠ what’s actually happening at the fundamental level. This is a legitimate and deep problem.

You’re right that observed transitions may not compose cleanly. In the Functional Universe, composition is a property of fundamental transitions. What we observe are often coarse-grained projections of many underlying transitions, which can obscure compositional structure.

>> An LLM can't even learn mid-conversation.

There’s an implicit assumption that scaling text models alone gets us to human-like intelligence, but that seems unlikely without grounding in multiple sensory domains and a unified world model.

What’s interesting is that if we do go down that route successfully, we may get systems with something like internal experience or agency. At that point, the ethical frame changes quite a bit.