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The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
401–410 of 434 posts
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And I rather disagree that mathematics is language, when I did maths there was a distinct difference from understanding a thing and then writing it down. It is generally the case that there's a difference between "understanding a thing" and "writing it down", as demonstrated by every student who studies for the exam, the Chinese Room thought experiment, and Business Bullshit Bingo. For example, I can copy the next…
> as demonstrated by every (...) the Chinese Room thought experiment Wait, did I miss the Chinese Room suddenly becoming sensible, or relevant? Last I checked it was a failure to accept that the system of "human + room" can in fact understand Chinese, even if the components individually don't.
My point here is that regardless of how you view the entire system of [human + room + books], the human themselves in that system are still just a cog. The human themselves doesn't know Chinese, they are literally writing down Chinese without understanding it, by design of the thought experiment.
"Is the Chinese Room intelligent/conscious?" is a scissor question*, i.e. people strongly disagree about what it shows.
Myself, I'm with you: the system collectively is intelligent, despite the human in the loop being reduced to a cog in that system. The biological analogy to "the human does not understand Chinese therefore the system is not conscious" would be "no individual cell in a human body knows what the human is doing therefore humans are not conscious".
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#403Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
The (or a) current neuroscience models of the brain are that its main job is to predict how the body should be responding in the near future. Obviously a lot more complex network nodes than an LLM, but prediction is clearly tied up with thought in some way. I don’t find LLMs to be very good independent thinkers, but I wouldn’t over sell our own mentation either - it clearly arises from a large number of simpler entit…
I don’t find LLMs to be very good independent thinkers, but I wouldn’t over sell our own mentation either - it clearly arises from a large number of simpler entities. Yeah. I don't see them ever hitting the heights of human creativity in terms of coming up with entirely new ideas, schools of thought, etc. That really might be a fundamental limitation of being trained on existing thought. Also, a lot of human experien…
It is remarkable. A shame that unregulated business models and giant pools of capital seeking very high returns seem to be distorting (hype cycle, excessive spending that seems untethered to realistic plans, and uncritical roll out prior to compelling proof of utility) the rollout of the remarkable new technology.
I would speculate when we do eventually develop independent synthetic sentient beings, LLM technology will be a part of the package. Perhaps also growing up with a sibling that tries to trick one.
Maybe someone needs to write the singularity novel but with Cain and Abel, not just a unified super intelligence but siblings full of some good will and a good bit of clear seeing and some fun (?) trickery.
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever had a professor or mentor walk you through some experiences as a way to help you understand some complex concepts? I guess language is used in that but the ideas are conveyed by the process not the language. And I rather disagree that mathematics is language, when I did maths there was a distinct difference from understanding a thing and then writing it down. And modalities that don’t include “where is…
> And I rather disagree that mathematics is language, when I did maths there was a distinct difference from understanding a thing and then writing it down. It is generally the case that there's a difference between "understanding a thing" and "writing it down", as demonstrated by every student who studies for the exam, the Chinese Room thought experiment, and Business Bullshit Bingo. For example, I can copy the next…
Our sensory experience as wired into our brains include notions of our own body, both physically “where is the leg now and where is it going” and as a sort of monitor of our brain/body state “hunger” “restlessness” “lonely” “need to talk this torrent of ideas out with someone”.
I was arguing that in:
> With multimodal models, at this point tokens are closer to units of sensory experience.
The tokens are inherently missing some extremely vital pieces of sensory experience, namely the ones that establish the narrative of a self.
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever had a professor or mentor walk you through some experiences as a way to help you understand some complex concepts? I guess language is used in that but the ideas are conveyed by the process not the language. And I rather disagree that mathematics is language, when I did maths there was a distinct difference from understanding a thing and then writing it down. And modalities that don’t include “where is…
> Have you ever had a professor or mentor walk you through some experiences as a way to help you understand some complex concepts? I guess language is used in that but the ideas are conveyed by the process not the language. Yes, but I believe this is happening with LLMs too. Language (as in text, symbols, actions) is a vehicle, but much like us, language models have internal models and represent concepts (this has be…
Not much in biology is simple. The time scales for this random walk and the ruthless energy budget of organisms makes for pretty crazy re-use of structures and chemicals even at relatively simple things.
The time scales and mechanisms of investor driven development don’t seem to share much with evolutionary processes. And digitally there’s not really a native equivalent to the global and dynamic state that the chemical melee inside and between cells provides.
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Code should be self documenting.” I know cliche but if your code does need to do something it usually doesn’t do or has a complex logic or an edge case where it’s no longer following it’s standard flow, add all those as test cases. If the flow is too complex, inherits from all over the place and you must put that as a comment, ask claude to write a test for that, it’s usually good at those.
I believe both that code should be self-documenting but also that comments and documentation are a critical part of the code. Comments and documentation explain the functional contract of the code and why implementation choices were made. Even if you have tests for an edge case, a comment inline with the code that explains why this edge case exists and why it is handled the way it is adds value to the code.
I agree. I’m talking more about these agents going in and breaking things. They might get some context when a test fails.
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And I rather disagree that mathematics is language, when I did maths there was a distinct difference from understanding a thing and then writing it down. It is generally the case that there's a difference between "understanding a thing" and "writing it down", as demonstrated by every student who studies for the exam, the Chinese Room thought experiment, and Business Bullshit Bingo. For example, I can copy the next…
Our sensory experience as wired into our brains include notions of our own body, both physically “where is the leg now and where is it going” and as a sort of monitor of our brain/body state “hunger” “restlessness” “lonely” “need to talk this torrent of ideas out with someone”. I was arguing that in: > With multimodal models, at this point tokens are closer to units of sensory experience. The tokens are inherently mi…
Thanks :)
> The tokens are inherently missing some extremely vital pieces of sensory experience, namely the ones that establish the narrative of a self.
Hmm.
While I agree LLMs are missing many pieces of sensory experience, it is unclear to me which pieces are necessary and sufficient for a narrative of self.
Clinical dissociation (and, at least to the approximation of public stereotypes, Buddhism) come to mind as an example where the presence of usual sensory input is insufficient for a sense of self: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dissociative-...
More broadly: while I agree that LLMs are not like us*, I am unclear why this matters in this context?
The behaviour of tokens in a transformer seem to me to behave like sensory input, just not human-like sensory input. The closest human analogy would be if the entire context window was a retina, each rod and cone one of the tokens in that context, and the output was filling in the blind spot (but of course, even this is a very loose analogy).
* even if the engineering teams were trying to do that, which they are not, it would be unlikely to converge on us so soon
Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#409Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Have you ever had a professor or mentor walk you through some experiences as a way to help you understand some complex concepts? I guess language is used in that but the ideas are conveyed by the process not the language. Yes, but I believe this is happening with LLMs too. Language (as in text, symbols, actions) is a vehicle, but much like us, language models have internal models and represent concepts (this has be…
Not much in biology is simple. The time scales for this random walk and the ruthless energy budget of organisms makes for pretty crazy re-use of structures and chemicals even at relatively simple things. The time scales and mechanisms of investor driven development don’t seem to share much with evolutionary processes. And digitally there’s not really a native equivalent to the global and dynamic state that the chemic…
Not much in biology is simple, but one of the ruthless rules is that an incremental change must be net non-negative in terms of fitness to stick around. In particular, this prevents evolution from keeping around adaptations "for future need", preventing chaining up many individually useless adaptations that become beneficial only when all of them come together. Key term here is "metabolic cost". This reduces the many ways evolution could've cobbled together our minds to a much, much smaller subset of sequences of steps that provided intermediate value along the way.