jadero

You had me at "BASIC"! I'm going to check it out.

I think that BASIC has historically been my most productive language. My favourite implementation was something called "Z-Basic", a compiled BASIC with device-independent graphics that could run on and target Apple//, Mac, and PC.

That is actually my point. I may not have made it clear in this thread, but my claim is not that our brains behave like LLMs, but that they are LLMs.

That is, our LLM research is not just emulating our mental processes, but showing us how they actually work.

Most people think there is something magic in our thinking, that mind is separate from brain, that thinking is, in effect, supernatural. I'm making the claim that LLMs are actual demonstrations that thinking is nothing more than the statistical rearrangement of that which has been ingested through our senses, our interactions with the world, and our experience of what has and has not worked.

Searles proposed a thought experiment called the "Chinese Room" in an attempt to discredit the idea that a machine could either think or understand. My contention is that our brains, being machines, are in fact just suitably sophisticated "Chinese Rooms".

Thanks! I've been working on this idea for quite a while. I post summaries and random thoughts occasionally hoping to refine my thinking to the point at which I'll feel comfortable writing a proper essay.

I like the name you've given the overarching system. That's been a bit of a struggle for me, so you've given me a better concept to work with. "Large Sensory Input Model" captures my thoughts better than my own "the brain is just a kind of LLM." That it's abbreviation "LSIM" also conjures connections to "simulation" is a bonus for me, because that also addresses my thoughts on how we understand some things and other people.

There is a fairly old hypothesis that something called "Theory of Mind" is basically our brain modelling and simulating other brains as a way to understand and predict the behaviour of others. That has explanatory power: empathy, stereotypes, in/out groups, better accuracy with closer relationships, "living on" through powerful simulations of those closest to us who have died, etc.

Thanks for the feedback!

Soon kids will start talking like LLMs.

Always have, always will.

My pet hypothesis is that our brains are, in effect, LLMs that are trained via input from our senses and by the output of the other LLMs (brains) in our environment.

It explains why we so often get stuck in unproductive loops like flat Earth theories.

It explains why new theories are treated as "hallucinations" regardless of their veracity (cf Copernicus, Galileo, Bruno). It explains why certain "prompts" cause mass "hallucination" (Wakefield and anti-vaxers). It explains why the vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their time just coasting on "local inputs" to "common sense" (personal models of the world that, in their simplicity, often have substantial overlap with others).

It explains why we spend so much time on "prompt engineering" (propaganda, sound bites, just-so stories, PR "spin", etc) and so little on "model development" (education and training). (And why so much "education" is more like prompt engineering than model development.)

Finally, it explains why "scientific" methods of thinking are so rare, even among those who are actually good at it. To think scientifically requires not just the right training, but an actual change in the underlying model. One of the most egregious examples is Linus Pauling, winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry and vitamin C wackadoodle.

I'm basically a doofus when it comes to web. I had no trouble using Zola as the generator with Abridge and Terminimal as themes.

I started down the path of creating a gear library for Full Control, a 3D printing system. I got sidetracked by a couple of problems:

1. I'm apparently not smart enough to create something from scratch.

2. Existing libraries are either beyond my ability to use directly or, like OpenSCAD, generating fully realized models intended for traditional slicers.

I was hoping to be able to do a variety of gear types, but I think I'm going to have to be satisfied with just spur gears.

In any case, I've set it aside until next winter. Spring is coming, so I need to finish my website work before my other hobbies take over my life.

(Actually, Full Control might be better described as a 3D plotting system, since the Z axis is as continuously variable as the X and Y axes.)

Add a bit of the right structure and you've got the pseudocode for dead reckoning. (I guess that was probably the point, but I'll hit the ol' post button anyway...)

Canada used to recommend 1 car-length for every 10 miles per hour. Along with metrification, that was changed to 2 seconds, but it's been set at 3 seconds for a long time.

I've yet to drive in traffic where even 1.5 seconds is manageable. More space than that and some slips into the gap, even if that leaves something like a loaded tractor-trailer hanging a second off their rear bumper.

Edit: Bear with me while I sort out the difference between my display and the resulting code block. Ok, close enough.

Ok, thanks. I would instead (and prefer to ) do something like this:

function test(&obj, &obj2, &a) {
$obj---->doSomething()
---->--->doSomethingElse()

$obj2--->doSomething()
---->--->doSomethingElse()

$a-->--->doSomething()
---->--->doSomethingElse()
}

In this case, the ">" are showing the tab stops and the "-" the resulting white space. Note how all the calls are lined up. (My preferred alignment style, not necessarily anyone else's.)

Yet another edit: I see that I missed addressing alignment on other than tab boundaries. To me, that's just sinful! 😀

The way you explain it sounds like how tabs works in MS Word ( or other word processors ).

That is exactly how they work, and after 40 years, I still struggle with the whole "tab as a shortcut for spaces" thing. It's not that I started with word processors, either, just that as soon I started working with them, everything got so much easier for me.

There are some code-specific things that keep me from just going back to a word processor, but I think our code editors are missing some useful features that are found in word processors.

If I correctly understand what you are saying, you are describing "relative" tabbing, where /t moves a constant distance from the current position. I prefer "stopped" tabs where /t moves to the next tab stop. If my /t doesn't create the spacing/alignment I'm after, I just tab to the next position.

Thus, I would set mine with the first tab position (for indenting) at 1.5 cm and subsequent tab stops at 3, 4, 5, ... cm. That way I'd get perfect alignment with both fixed and proportional fonts.

I'd also set line-wrap or line-continuation to use a hanging indent based on the start position of the line being wrapped or continued.

I'd also set a boundary between code and comments so that lines always wrapped before the boundary and using the comment character at the end of a line would jump to the other side of the boundary with optional leaders (the characters, usually periods that connect the end/beginning of a gap). In an ideal world, I would be able to "hide code", pulling all the inline comments into a "hanging indent" structure with their "parent" comments.

Yes, before the advent of IDE editors and all the fancy intellisense stuff, I used word-processing software for coding. 😀

Why not tabs for both indentation and alignment? (Actually, I see indentation as just a specific use of alignment.) Word processors have been doing it for decades (and typewriters for over a century!). Surely we can convince our code processors to use user-definable, fixed position tabs instead of relative position "tab = x spaces".

Keeping the [TAB] character in the file then allows everyone the layout they like.

Or has working solo for 40 years fried my brain?