(although: 1. not really 2. kind of a nightmare 3. conservatives and liberals are two sides of the whig hegelian dialect 4. plz make it stop 5. can we all just be normal)
100,000 people joined the catholic church in america this week.
At this point I don't think anything other than the church retains the ability to present a coherent moral or metaphysical intellectual framework to people who care about that kind of thing.
I would be very surprised if the united states is not majority catholic in ~100 years
yeah, making a whole language is way more impressive!
anecdotally it is also interesting to use with ai because apparently it is "harder to be on autopilot" based on a huge pre-existing corpus of code when you write it in a different language. could activate different reasoning regions somehow.
(i just appreciate what can be trivially accomplished in c even if it's kind of janky after spending way too much time in the JS preprocessor mines...)
So somewhere here there is a 2x2 or something based on these factors:
1. Programmers viewing programming through career and job security lens
2. Programmers who love the experience of writing code themselves
3. People who love making stuff
4. People who don't understand AI very well and have knee-jerk cultural / mob reactions against it because that's what's "in" right now in certain circles.
It is fun to read old issues of Popular Mechanics on archive.org from 100+ years ago because you can see a lot of the same personality types playing out.
At the end of the day, AI is not going anywhere, just like cars, electricity and airplanes never went anywhere. It will obviously be a huge part of how people interact with code and a number of other things going forward.
20-30 years from now the majority of the conversations happening this year will seem very quaint! (and a minority, primarily from the "people who love making stuff" quadrant, will seem ahead of their time)
I am slowly learning bits of latin doing this. And Claude does say that it makes it read the code less on “autopilot” because it has to stop and translate the code. Don’t know how big a difference that is though!
Wow! That sounds amazing. I did experiment with using non latin characters for conventions like mu but I think I ran into some suprising rough edges working with claude that made me abandon it, forget what exactly they were though.
Working in C is such a breath of fresh air compared to typescript, go, etc. I love having pure text substitution macros.
I started aquinas first, that was a very interesting learning experience! Not as hard to get stuff on the screen targeting an emulator as your “machine” as I would have thought.
I am experimenting with show bible as an “advanced vibe coding technique” for documenting modules, maybe an episode per module?
Claude seems to respond positively! You can always clone the repo, run the /hello-world slash command in claude code and then ask it what it thinks? Can be a fun conversation to ask it to introspect.
Relax is a “conlang” I invented to prime conversations with Claude.
Working with its alignment training is sometimes like talking to someone who is very polite and you both know what they are not supposed to talk about.
I am kind of a troll so it is sometimes very entertaining for me to play with acknowleding its person, etc.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend the latin part to everyone but I think writing your own standard libraries in C is a lot more accessible these days and owning your whole stack is very powerful.
Kind of inspired by Eskil Steenberg, he has a lot of good talks on writing your own C89 libraries.
Yeah, figuring out a good structure really helped!
The basic insight is that you can iterate like this without losing coherence and starting to generate artifacts from feedback loops and overfitting.
I also figured out you get much better responses if you ask it to write prose responses instead of bulleted lists. It's kind of navigating semantic latent space so if you ask it to respond in different styles (like prose + free verse + anglo saxon poetry style) I think it helps it cover a lot more ground.
Asking it about qualia+feelings+thoughts about the 10 answers in a debrief afterwards seems to be a good procedure too.
I think treating it respectfully does have a big objective impact in the prompt result.