I would guess that since there are already companies providing virtual flings (girlfriends/boyfriends, etc) that this is already starting to happen. There is talk about the recent AI chat emulation where several agents apparently created a religion, and debated various aspects of it. People (and AI agents) are treating AI output as the real McCoy already.
One of my hobbies is researching the heck out of Bible stories, in terms of what they probably meant at the time of writing, and how they are perceived today, and drawing out various lessons that they might be trying to get across. I can certainly see the potential for the emergence of doctrine.
Semi-related: I experimented with ChatGPT and got it to analyze a thought or claim using the Socratic method. It will grill the crap out of every aspect of your belief until you are absolutely sure of your convictions, or are ready to abandon them. https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6982d3ffa5cc819196c4e1d8ac29bea1-soc... I can easily see someone building an agent like this that proselytizes with that same question/answer conviction found in books like Reasoning From The Scriptures, that the Watchtower publishes. It's purpose is to answer every possible question you could ask of a "Field Minister" and actively leads you to questions that they hope would resonate and draw the person into that particular church. The book intentionally never lets the person being witnessed to get off the hook. It would be a bigger effort than what I did, but certainly would work.
I'm not sure if this would be able to detect the difference between truthful thoughts about actual memories, and intrusive thoughts that could give the entirely wrong impression.
Yet, they still do use lie detectors, even though the things they detect can be faked, or triggered out of personal alarm or offense. So it is entirely possible, regardless.
Intrusive thoughts is a big one. Most people report some variation of this phenomenon (myself included), and are often horrified by the thoughts or images their own mind produces, very much wanting them to go away. To be judged by that is unthinkably wrong.
Exactly. I have ADHD. The real kind (not the fantasy kind everyone on X seems to have). I grew up on Ritalin. I think they'd have a hard time sorting out "conversational" streams that run through my head. Even when I'm reading something, there is still an excessive amount of internal chatter. I've heard some people hear silence, and that just freaks me out.
It often is "inspired" by what I'm hearing and reading, but not related to how I actually feel about anything in particular. Sometimes I have to put effort into not getting too extreme in those many based-on-a-theme side stories. I'm quite sure this technology would either paint me as someone I'm not, just because of my brain's way of going through a dozen interpretations of whatever it is I'm thinking about, or burn out by the extreme amounts of the internal chatter that entails.
Needless to say, I grew up on nightmares (a common ADHD thing). I eventually ended up learning lucid dreaming to escape them, but still, even my dream world comes up with s##t I would never think of in my waking reality. Those feel so very real to me that I can't imagine this brain scanner thing could tell the difference either.
It depends on your classification of effective. If it is to gather accurate information, it is ineffective. If it is to gather the justification for what you were going to do anyway, it can be most effective.
For a fairly recent example: the US' post-911 War on Terror when they were waterboarding people. This definitely didn't get them any real info, and they found out in the worst way that innocent people will confess when they think they are actively dying.
Prior to this, it was already known to produce false feedback and confessions. The US military has a strange way of repeating history to see if it'll turn out differently "this time." It sadly never does.
They don't seem to mention if it is elective. An all or nothing mechanism might spell out words that the patient really didn't intend on others seeing (like "Ugh, that guy again! I can't stand the way he...")
It is pretty difficult to control your inner dialog against spontaneous and triggered thoughts.
I wanted to comment this HN entry with "people with intrusive thoughts sweating profusely" or something similar, but in truth are there people with no intrusive thoughts whatsoever?
I for one don't fight them, regardless how horrible they would be spoken out aloud, because so far I haven't seen any evidence of anyone reading my mind.
I also made a point of explaining to my child that her thoughts are hers and hers alone, so she can think whatever she likes.
I would rather not have to backtrack on any of this.
I think every verbal person has the ability to “speak” phrases in their mind; people without an internal monologue (as is, I suppose, the case for me) just don’t need / tend to do that with every thought they have.
This is my experience too. I can rehearse words to say or simulate the conversation of others in my head. I just don't use words when I'm not doing wordy things myself.
I didn't know the Comic strip Partially Clips was a pun until I told someone about the strip, then as soon as the words came out of my mouth realised the joke.
On the other hand I can play back non verbal sounds I have heard in my head, which I think not everyone can do either. Not to the degree of my daughter though, I mentioned how I had noticed an ad was using a singer (not super famous but we knew who they were) and when I told her about it some days later her eyes went blank as she listened to it again and then she said, "Oh yes, it's Nataly"
> This is my experience too. I can rehearse words to say or simulate the conversation of others in my head. I just don't use words when I'm not doing wordy things myself.
Yep, same here. Most curiously though, I think I had an internal monologue in my childhood and teenage years, but sometime around 16–18 y.o. it went away. Sadly, I don’t remember the exact moment, as I’ve only learned about this topic around 20.
> the Comic strip Partially Clips was a pun
Whoah, took me a while too, even though you’ve explicitly told it’s there. xD
> I can play back non verbal sounds I have heard in my head, which I think not everyone can do
I'm the opposite of you two. My brain won't stfu. I took Ritalin since grade 3 until I was in my 40's. That never got rid of it, but it did make it easier to focus in spite of all the chatter and other mental distractions.
Now I'm old and lazy, and that seems to have a similar effect. The racing thoughts are still there, but they don't get in my way now that I have far fewer responsibilities to take care of.
Yes, indeed. My argument is the intrusive thoughts wouldn’t be internally verbalised, thus such a device, in my opinion, wouldn’t be able to spell them out.
With me, they'd have 10 different things to parse. Some would be spot on. Some would be way the heck out in left field. And occasionally, some are totally obtrusive and definitely not meant to be spoken.
Thoughts are intrusive when they get in the way of what you are trying to get out of a thought process.
Of course someone without an internal monologue can have intrusive thoughts! Do you think intrusive thoughts have to come in the form of a monologue? You don't have intrusive 'scenes' in your everyday experience?
I think it is fair to say that internal dialog includes whatever mode someone primarily thinks with internally. If it is words, images, or kinesthetic, only the modality is different. I don't see how these modes wouldn't constitute internal dialog if that's how people think internally. These are the primary ways people generally do form their internal world.
There are also olfactory (imagine smelling cinnamon in a slice of apple pie) and gustatory (think of vinegar). These two don't tend to occur in dialog form, but they can enhance or reinforce the other modes. Animals like dogs might not agree with that suggestion.
Haha — it's surprisingly therapeutic to get roasted by your own tool.
I ran it on the repo itself and it called out my own placeholder names
in the test fixtures. The fallback roast lines weren't safe either.
Let me know what score you get if you try it! The worst I've seen so far
was a 12/100 on a legacy codebase with 200+ TODOs.
This looks like an extremely limited app launcher. I'm guessing you are 15 years old or younger if this is something you feel enough pride in to post here.
Also, there is no README, forcing people to look at the code to realize it has nothing to do with AI, or an Operating System for that matter.
There is more than pizza to look for. Think jerky and hotdogs, for starters. And grape soda. There are some crazy exchanges about how absolutely amazing some of Jeffery's various recipes are.
Very unlikely spontaneous discussions on things nobody really ever feels the need to rant about.
"This is better than a Chinese cookie!... let’s go for pizza and grape soda again. No one else can understand."
This is interesting. But I've always thought including programming language as a feature is very weird. Unless its extensible in that language, but that's not the case here.
End user doesn't care, so long as it fulfills a need. And nobody "needs" a program to be coded in a specific language. It comes across like evangelizing.
It reminds me so much of the 90's arguments about whether C is as fast as Assembly (and whether any Lisp can keep up), so long as you know what you are doing as a coder.
In this case, size is the selling point. Not the language.
One of my hobbies is researching the heck out of Bible stories, in terms of what they probably meant at the time of writing, and how they are perceived today, and drawing out various lessons that they might be trying to get across. I can certainly see the potential for the emergence of doctrine.
Semi-related: I experimented with ChatGPT and got it to analyze a thought or claim using the Socratic method. It will grill the crap out of every aspect of your belief until you are absolutely sure of your convictions, or are ready to abandon them. https://chatgpt.com/g/g-6982d3ffa5cc819196c4e1d8ac29bea1-soc... I can easily see someone building an agent like this that proselytizes with that same question/answer conviction found in books like Reasoning From The Scriptures, that the Watchtower publishes. It's purpose is to answer every possible question you could ask of a "Field Minister" and actively leads you to questions that they hope would resonate and draw the person into that particular church. The book intentionally never lets the person being witnessed to get off the hook. It would be a bigger effort than what I did, but certainly would work.
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