It's basically an adaptive timer for remaining oneself to be mindful and aware throughout the day, which is a prerequisite for my main practice. When it rings, it asks you if you were mindful since the last timer and adapts the next interval based on your answer.
I've wanted to do this for a while, but a physical device is beyond my skills and I never wanted to bother to learn mobile development. So having the computer take care of all the nonsense was ideal. Very different experience using LLMs when you don't know the technology, but all the nonsense behind creating and publishing mobile apps did not inspire me to learn it.
We would be a much more musically proficient society if we stopped this obsession with teaching music through written notation and just taught music aurally from the beginning, and notation only later for those who need it. It made sense at a time where recordings were not easily available, but that is not the case now.
Western notation makes sense once you know the circles of fifths, but the specifics of the notation is not really what is holding people musically.
I highly advice anyone against taking up this type of ear training practice if what they want is just to play music recreationally. I did it for a while, stressed out about it, and I saw very little improvement in what really mattered to me, which was just to be able to play music freely.
If that is also your goal, you would be better served by learning how to play along recordings and use them to improvise along them. Your ear is already good, given that you can hear music, and this relies on using those existing abilities. There is no existing ability to label random sounds out of a musical context. I am still unsure how mastering all of these puzzles turns into actual musicianship, but some people swear by it, so I guess it eventually happens if you do it for long enough.
Honestly I have stopped doing anything else and I have seen my actual musicianship skyrocket and I am having 1000x more fun than I did before. It's not that different from how music was taught before notation was widespread with the advantage of now having recordings and easy ways to loop them, slow them down, and change their pitch.
I am hoping to eventually make a product in this space based on this pedagogy once I finish the one I am currently working on. But honestly it's not really needed if you are fine with just doing it with the songs you like without a full curriculum and fancy scheduling.
It's related to this https://trane-project.github.io/generated_courses/transcript... which generates all the individual lessons for each stage in the guide. It has nothing to do with generative AI. The software is not really needed if you just want to jam along your own songs, I just didn't have a better place to put the guide.
There is no hard problem of consciousness not because of the baffling arguments against it in this article, but because materialism is not true. This article and the entire description around the hard problem just shows the amount of mental gymnastics needed to deny what is front of everyone in every instant of their lives.
Matter and mind are not the same and mind is not produced from matter. That there are correlates between the body of a sentient being and the content of their experience is common sense but not proof that their body is causing the very ability to experience anything.
You would think that absolutely no progress being made on how dead matter somehow produces experience would make people question their assumptions. Instead you get people denying that they have a mind or just coping by thinking that if they map yet another correlation they will finally crack the code.
Explain psychedelics, then? Do psychedelics have access to this supposed "separate layer" that mind exists on over matter? If yes, how? If not, how can something that ostensibly only interacts with the matter have any effect on the mind?
Can you explain any of this in a way that doesn't boil down to "it's magic and you just have to believe that it's happening because it is?"
What is there to explain about psychedelics? There is nothing special to them. They affect the bodily aggregates of a being and cause the contents of the experience to change. So does eating a donut. There is no contradiction with what I said because I already conceded that mind and matter are closely interlinked and that changes in the body affect the contents experienced by the mind.
But the "hard" problem of consciousness has nothing to do with the contents of the experience, but with explaining how experiencing of any kind is produced by aggregates that themselves do not have any such experiences. The simple answer is that mind (experience, consciousness, whatever you wanna call it) is not produced by matter and is a completely different realm of reality.
Maybe if science simply assumed that mind and matter are different things instead they would have made some progress. For once, the "hard" problem of consciousness would be revealed to not be problem at all. As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience. No magic involved. If people want to deny their own minds that is up to them.
> As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience.
Two things here:
1) How do you know I have a mind? How do I know you have a mind?
2) What is even your definition of "mind", and why (at least I suspect) is "the ongoing result of information processing facilitated by the complex interlinked network of neurons in the brain" not a satisfactory answer to you?
I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.
As for why any materialist explanations are unsatisfactory is that even if you managed to map every physical interaction in a sentient being, you are only mapping physical phenomena. Maybe that is enough to account for how that maps into the contents of the experience.
I am not arguing about how the contents are generated though. I am arguing about the "field" of subjective experiencing, which I called a mind. How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind? The simplest answer is that it is not, even if those material aggregates are deeply involved in how the contents presented to this field are generated.
Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water, but materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any experience of mental events.
> I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.
So that's a religious argument, then. It's real because enough people believe that it is.
> How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind?
How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?
> The simplest answer is that it is not
You keep saying "simple" when what I think you're actually saying is "easy." They are not equivalent things. In the same sense that I think the "hard" problem of consciousness should really be called the "complex" problem.
> Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water
At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.
The only religious argument is materialism. It's real because enough people have convinced themselves that it's "scientific". Even though there is no proof whatsoever, no solid hypothesis, no experiments to prove how matter acquires subjective experience, it's incoherent to the very foundations of its position (that matter is dead), and has not made any progress in answering the "hard problem" (which is just someone pointing out the incoherence). It also makes people argue that they don't have a mind, that asserting they have a mind is a religious statement, or that they have some trouble understanding what a mind is.
> How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?
The laws of physics are enough to explain this because no one is arguing that computers are experiencing anything when they play a video or generate a set of numbers that are displayed as natural language.
> At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.
Sorry, I phrased that badly by using "you" when I did not mean that. I meant to say that if someone (not you) wanted to argue that simple matter has some sort of experience, then at least the position would make some sense. But materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any subjective experience of any kind.
Anyway, I won't be able to convince you that you have a mind, so I'll peace out.
I pasted a blog that I wrote myself and flagged hundreds of patterns. Granted, the article is 15,000 words so some are expected but there are simply too many false positives to make this and any similar tool have any usefulness beyond flagging the most obvious offenders.
And looking at its suggestions, they are not very good. People are better developing their own writing style than trusting generic advice meant for common-denominator writing.
I did the same thing, and also found the results pretty mediocre. At best it did point out some places I could've dropped a less important word to be more concise, but pretty much any editing will do that (and I do think I tend towards verbosity as a writer; it's a flaw, but it's my organic flaw). Beyond that it was just pattern-matching on sentence structures it thinks are over-used in LLM-generated prose. Even if that's true, it's not a good argument for why I should rewrite a particular sentence in context.
yup same just tried it myself which an email I wrote.
like llms are using our language here so there's gonna be patterns we use that they also use.
i dont think we're ever going to get to a place where we have a "yes/no this was written by AI" kind of tool. i do be worrying what this might do to the fabric of society but there's no puttin this damn cat back in the bag so i guess we'll find out
If it's any consolation, they are full of shit. In the second jhana and above, the factors of initial and sustained attention disappear. In practical terms, this means you cannot direct your thoughts away from the object of concentration once you enter such state. You have to decide beforehand how long you will be in that state and give yourself a mental timer. See Dipa Ma's biography for a case of someone actually entering higher jhanas that way.
This is the reason that anything beyond the first dhyana is not encouraged in Mahayana, as it is impossible to apply vipasyana in a state of concentration so deep that you cannot direct your mind.
The teachers popular in the SF scene are inflating their own achievements and the ones of their students by using very lightweight criteria. I had that experience when I attended a TWIM retreat before their founder died. According to them, I reached the fourth or fifth jhana. I can assure you I did not.
Yeah, agreed, there's a lot of misinformation. I'm always encountering people that say they just started, followed a guided meditation on the jhanas and entered fourth jhana within a week. And then the signs they describe are all just your basic things that arise when you first start having some facility over your practice, probably not even stability in the first jhana. Not to mention that it's impossible to be following a guided, external voice when you're in such a state of absorption.
As Chogyam Trungpa would probably say, they're all practicing spiritual materialism.
There is plenty of proof, just not the type of proof likely to be accepted by people looking for a measurement from an external device, which precludes scientific proof until consciousness can be measured. Given that science cannot identify consciousness in live organisms at this time, you are going to have to wait a long time.
In general, there are three commonly accepted methods in Buddhist epistemology to know if something is true: perception, inference, and testimony. For the specific case of rebirth, common proofs use either perception, or inference.
- Perception: You train in states of concentration and use those to gain direct knowledge of past lives. Maybe some people would find this unconvincing even if they had the experience. Certainly not something likely to be accepted as scientific as Ian Stevenson's research has shown, even if the case presented was iron-clad.
- Inference: This uses Buddhist logic and an understanding of dependent origination. This specific argument comes from Dharmakīrti.
- Every moment of consciousness must have a substantial cause.
- Physical matter can serve as a cooperative condition for consciousness, but it cannot be consciousness's substantial cause, because matter and mind are fundamentally different in nature. Matter is extended, non-luminous, non-aware and consciousness is luminous and aware. If you are a scientific materialist, you will not accept this, but it must be noted that there is no scientific evidence of any kind for dead matter gaining awareness.
- Therefore, each moment of consciousness must arise from a preceding moment of consciousness of similar type.
- Then you trace this chain to the first moment of your present life. The chain must have been preceded by a moment of consciousness of similar type. The same logic applies to the last moment of your present life.
- Therefore, consciousness must be a stream that transcends physical birth and death.
Again, I am aware many people won't find this convincing, but to say that Buddhism does not attempt to prove rebirth and karma is not true.
It is difficult not to dismiss this sort of proof out of hand, because every religion engages in it. Buddhism can probably (?) coexist with many deist religions, but few of them can coexist with each other.
"But the cost of the mindfulness revolution has been Buddhism’s lost monopoly on many of its core concepts. Very few of those using Buddhist practices will ever become Buddhists in a religious sense. California Buddhism is one of the most successful cultural syntheses of the last century; but as far as conversion goes, it seems that it is Buddhism that has embraced California rather than the other way around."
Pretty much. Sad state of affairs. I don't care if people find something positive in Buddhism and offer their own takes, but too many people call their offerings "Buddhism" for the clout. Finding a qualified teacher becomes very difficult if you are actually interested in Buddhism.
On the positive side, I don't actually agree with the first sentence. You still have to find a proper Buddhist teacher if you want to be taught the good stuff. Even if you found the instructions somehow, it either requires proper motivation (at which point you are a buddhist) or a transmission for those methods to actually work.
No need. You just find someone that has a proper transmission, meaning that they were taught by a teacher that also had transmission, and so on. It's sort of like medical school. Your doctor was trained by doctors that trained under other doctors and so on.
People are free to take whatever they want from Buddhism and practice and teach it, even if completely unqualified. There is no dharma police to call. I was just making the point that calling teachings that reject core tenants of Buddhism by the same name is often just done to help them associate with whatever "clout" the word Buddhism has in the popular imagination.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is an example of how to properly go about this process without overstating what it really is.
I've been trying codex and claude code for the past month or so. Here's the workflow that I've ended up with for making significant changes.
- Define the data structures in the code yourself. Add comments on what each struct/enum/field does.
- Write the definitions of any classes/traits/functions/interfaces that you will add or change. Either leave the implementations empty or write them yourself if they end up being small or important enough to write by hand (or with AI/IDE autocompletion).
- Write the signatures of the tests with a comment on what it's verifying. Ideally you would write the tests yourself, specially if they are short, but you can leave them empty.
- Then at this point you involve the agent and tell it to plan how to complete the changes without barely having to specify anything in the prompt. Then execute the plan and ask the agent to iterate until all tests and lints are green.
- Go through the agent's changes and perform clean up. Usually it's just nitpicks and changes to conform to my specific style.
If the change is small enough, I find that I can complete this with just copilot in about the same amount of time it would take to write an ambiguous prompt. If the change is bigger, I can either have the agent do it all or do the fun stuff myself and task the agent with finishing the boring stuff.
So I would agree with the title and the gist of the post but for different reasons.
Don't you also need to specify the error-cases at each stage and at what level of the system you would like to handle them (Log away, throw ever more up, Inform others, create Tasks, etc.)?
My twist on this is to first vibe code the solution with the aim of immediately replacing it.
I’ve found that two to three iterations with various prompts or different models will often yield a surprising solution or some aspect I hadn’t thought of or didn’t know about.
Then I throw away most or all of the code and follow your process, but with care to keep the good ideas from the LLMs, if any.
I mostly work with existing codebases so I didn't really want to vibecode for real.
The only vibecoded thing was an iOS app and I didn't follow this process because I don't know iOS programming nor do I want to learn it. This only works if you know at least how to define functions and data structures in the language, but I think most PMs could learn that if they set their minds to it.
same, prototyping fast helps me understand what I'm building and the flows I want. It would not be possible to think of all the interactions and restrictions I'd want if I tried to do it on day 1.
I've been working with coding LLMs for almost a year. Here's what I've found works best:
- Do a brainstorming session with the LLM about your idea. Flesh out the major points of the product, who the stakeholders are, what their motivations and goals are, what their pain points are. Research potential competitors. Find out what people are saying about them, especially the complaints.
- Build a high level design document with the LLM. Go through user workflows and scenarios to discern what kinds of data are needed, and at what scale.
- Do more market research to see how novel this approach is. Figure out what other approaches are used, and how successful they are. Get user pain points with each approach if you can. Then revisit your high level design.
- Start a technical design document with the LLM. Figure out who the actors of the system are, what their roles are in the system, and what kinds of data they'll need in order to do their job.
- Research the technologies that could help you build the system. Find out how popular they are, how reliable they are, how friendly they are (documentation, error messaging, support, etc), their long-term track record, etc. These go into a research document.
- Decide based on the research which technologies match your system best. Start a technical document with the LLM. Go through the user scenarios and see how the technologies fit.
- Decide on the data structures and flows through the system. Caching, load balancing, reliability, throughput requirements at the scale you plan to reach for your MVP and slightly beyond. Some UX requirements at this point are good as well.
- Start to flesh out your interfaces, both user and machine. Prototype some ideas and see how well they work.
- Circle back to research and design based on your findings. Iterate a few times and update the documents as you go using your LLM. Try to find ways to break it.
- Once you're happy with your design, build an architecture document that shows how the whole system will concretely fit together.
- Build an implementation plan. Run it through multiple critique rounds. Try to find ways to break it.
- Now you're at the threshold where changes get harder. Build the implementation piece by piece, checking to make sure they work as expected. This can be done quickly with multiple LLMs in parallel. Expect that the pieces won't fit and you'll need to rethink a lot of your assumptions. Code will change a LOT, so don't waste much time making it nice. You should have unit and integration tests and possibly e2e tests, which are cheap for the LLM to maintain, even if a lot of them suck.
- Depending on how the initial implementation went, decide whether to keep the codebase and refine it, or start the implementation over using the old codebase for lessons learned.
Basically, more of the same of what we've been doing for decades, just with faster tools.
I think full literate programming is overkill but I've been doing a lighter version of this:
- Module level comments with explanations of the purpose of the module and how it fits into the whole codebase.
- Document all methods, constants, and variables, public and private. A single terse sentence is enough, no need to go crazy.
- Document each block of code. Again, a single sentence is enough. The goal is to be able to know what that block does in plain English without having to "read" code. Reading code is a misnomer because it is a different ability from reading human language.
It's basically an adaptive timer for remaining oneself to be mindful and aware throughout the day, which is a prerequisite for my main practice. When it rings, it asks you if you were mindful since the last timer and adapts the next interval based on your answer.
I've wanted to do this for a while, but a physical device is beyond my skills and I never wanted to bother to learn mobile development. So having the computer take care of all the nonsense was ideal. Very different experience using LLMs when you don't know the technology, but all the nonsense behind creating and publishing mobile apps did not inspire me to learn it.