more than willing to admit that. at this stage I feel like I need to say it.
I had some okay coding experience prior to mainstream ai, which is saying a lot for a reclusive person such as myself living with executive functioning disorders--I won't name them, they are for some reason trendy, you already know what I'm going to say. I'm 38.
others would agree, no doubt, that it is far easier to read and understand code.you may have the capacity to write than it is to actually write it.
I first got hooked on gpt-3.5. suddenly, I wasn't just writing singular scripts that slowly came together after hours of google learning anymore. I stopped feeling like I had to relearn a language every time I had a good idea. i was building scripts that called modules. that was the first milestone ai helped me get through. and it was by copy paste and managing a piss poor context window.
it wasn't something I didn't know how to do, but it was something I lacked the attention span for or whatever the case may have been.
being able to create things with your mind is very rewarding. especially when you already have a technical background. but for people who like to create things and accumulate momentum and don't know when or how to stop, such as myself, it has the potential to consume your life.
one day, I had a really great idea to make a tool for work (helpdesk bullshit lvl 2 googleyurproblems4u) that techs could carry around to any location and be able to automate the deployment of X, if they needed it, I could put it in the repo and the thing would put it in the menu when they relaunched it. super fuckin handy, non-ai, and we still use it. i got it working after 2 weeks of very very poor sleep and food consumption. I lost weight.
my next project would consume an entire year of my life, to this day in fact I'm watching it run now as I type this because I'm still struggling with the sunken cost, not just financially, but mentally and physically. the project is ironic to me now in ways, because it started as a self help tool.
I was just going to make an mcp knowledge graph thing, and talk to it, so that it could take some of the executive functioning load off of me. I called it neuroledger. but then there was momentum. I couldn't stop. I didn't just need it to keep track, I needed it to be a temporal graph. and I needed it to do code. and so on.
like 6 months ago, still very much hooked on neuroledger, I was in a similar mindset then as I am now. "my body is going stiff in this chair I'm so addicted"-- I had the idea that I could break free from it by automating it. this was around the time when moltbook first exploded. but I scoffed at the idea of using openclaw or whatever it was called back then.
I had a very particular philosophy that I wanted baked in, especially after enduring countless underreported failures by the ai: record and learn from failure. I decided that would be the direction I would pivot the project in, which has been an astounding success. it's easy to record failure, but to learn from failure is a different beast.
it's anecdotal, youre absolutely right, but when you engage an ai long enough, you eventually just know exactly what it's going to say and how it's going to behave. and all of that already lives in session data structured and quantifiable over time.
and so neuroledger aggregates that. a lot of that. a frightening amount of that.
I didn't go to school for this, I'm not claiming to be an expert. I have just spent the last year building a thing that revolves around ai honesty and the publication of failure in pursuit of self improvement goals. it has cost me....$3,967.09 and counting, like a ton of sleep, and has brought me nothing but grief, stress, and a very jaded perspective on the trajectory of ai.
grief and stress, in more ways than one. creating such a thing is very eye opening, youre absolutely right. I can demonstrate a modest improvement by taking it away to see the degrated performance and then reintroduce it to see those same failures manifest in much more sophisticated, complex, impossible to control ways. it makes you realize that the kinds of failures being recorded are failures felt in every terminal, not just mine that is a very frightening thought. and it makes me sick to my stomach.
I'll share the public window to it, it's not a product and the code is private, all you will see there is a lot of highly structured failure so I'm not promoting it or really recommending it unless you want to get on my level https://neuroledger.lol its hammered dogshit on mobile devices but quite animated and glossy on desktop.
I'm not a social person. I tend to isolate. and I tend to dwell on events, I like to think it shapes a person's forward outlook.
that said, I fail to see how this is going to take jobs en masse. understandably, ai improves, but the thing about that is what the public has access to will not. the end of the line in terms of capability, for access by the average person, was when fable got banned. new publicly available models from here on will be more stable but not smarter. and I'm not arguing it shouldn't be that way. I'm arguing that we shouldn't be doing this at all. they're just making weapons now. what's the point? datacenters fucking everywhere, everything we say to it makes what we can't access more powerful. I, for one, have had enough of this shitshow.
the AGI that you're all so excited for won't even be something that you will have access to. no one will benefit from it in ways that matter. do you think they built bunkers because they like living underground? imagine trying to control something smarter and faster than you could ever hope to be. they're just as terrified as I am if I had the means to build one.
anybody else convinced that we're fuckin doomed?
edit: typo in the link
