Google's new Nano Banana Pro is very good for image generation, I gave it a prompt that I figured was quite complicated and might not work and it got almost everything right.
Prompt:
[picture of me] This is me, can you draw a five-panel comic of me in a science fantasy setting. I should have a band of hovering multicolored gems h
overing around my wrists (nothing physically connecting them, they're hovering in air) as well as two futuristic drones floating around my head. One of them, Whisper, is specialized for reconnaissance and the other, Thunder, for combat. The shade of my clothes is similar to the picture and I'm wearing a cloak.
Panel 1: I'm standing on a mountain cliff, looking at a village below. I say "Ah, finally a place to rest. Whisper, go check out the locals." Whisper says "acknowledged" and is seen flying toward the village.
Panel 2: The village as seen through Whisper's cameras. We can see that there is something wrong with the villagers; they have electronic collars around their necks and have distressed expressions. Red text points at the collar and reads "class-3 body control device".
Panel 3: I am seen sitting on the cliff, looking at the drone's camera data on my tablet. I say "Entropy take me! Those collars override any signals sent from the brain to the body! Whisper, trace the source of the control signal; Thunder, assault the source!" Thunder is seen flying toward the village as well, saying "initiating attack sequence".
Panel 4: Whisper is shown following the control signal to a transmitter in the middle of the village. A caption reads "Whisper rapidly located the source of the signal..."
Panel 5: Thunder is shown blowing up the transmitter. The caption reads "...which Thunder then eliminated. But who had enslaved the villagers in the first place?"
Result:
I do have some points of improvement but these are minor:
- The drones were said to be "futuristic", but Whisper in particular looks just like a small version of a fighter jet, nothing particularly futuristic.
- Also Whisper looks to have a cockpit which doesn't make much sense. I also don't see its cameras anywhere on its hull - though maybe you could say that the cameras are housed inside the thing that looks like the cockpit...
- In the third panel, Thunder looks to be flying away from the village rather than toward it, but maybe it made a loop back in the air.
First points would have been easy to fix by also giving it a reference image for the drones.
I sent this post to my friend Angie who works in software.
She was amused.
Left to their own devices, tons of people struggle to formally study topics they’d like to learn. What’s the standard solution? A classroom environment, where a teacher/professor gives assignments and there are (perceived) consequences for failing to do them.
Left to their own devices, tons of people would struggle to complete the non-fun parts of their job. What’s the go-to standard solution? A boss.
Back when I was a student, it certainly helped me study much more than I would have managed on my own, but I wouldn't say it was a solution for akrasia. I still had pretty massive amounts of it. Likely the bit about consequences also made things worse. I might notice that I was falling behind in how many courses I had completed, so I would do things like taking on an excessive course load in an attempt to catch up and then be forced to drop most of them partway through the semester, after it proved impossible to do all of them. Then I did worse than if I'd just have focused on a more realistic amount of courses from the beginning, and fell behind even more.
Many of my past jobs have been similar in that yes, I have certainly gotten more done at the job than I would have gotten done otherwise, but that's involved a very large degree of suffering and fighting akrasia and the amount of things I've accomplished has been nowhere as much as I'd have wanted to.
My levels of akrasia have been more serious than the average person's, but I don't think that I'm unusual in finding that school/work is nowhere near a solution to akrasia. In fact, I think that "procrastinating on your school assignments until it's just barely before the deadline and then doing them at the last moment with a lot of discomfort" is maybe one of the most common forms of akrasia there is.
I think "pathologies" also connotes something purely bad.
Agree that it just assumes it. And because it's just a game, people are more inclined to grant the premise for purposes of gameplay without feeling like they need to argue against it. So then they get an experience of what it could be like if the orthogonality thesis was correct, regardless of whether they happen to currently agree with it.
So it's making the argument that "if A (orthogonality thesis), then B (paperclips)". (With lots of additional assumptions, of course.) And while the game doesn't establish A, it does mean that if someone does get convinced of A by other means, they've now been exposed to the argument that their new position also implies B.
Sounds cool! And yes I am. :D
The core idea as described by Harry in HPMOR was
"You could call it heroic responsibility, maybe,” Harry Potter said. “Not like the usual sort. It means that whatever happens, no matter what, it’s always your fault. Even if you tell Professor McGonagall, she’s not responsible for what happens, you are. Following the school rules isn’t an excuse, someone else being in charge isn’t an excuse, even trying your best isn’t an excuse. There just aren’t any excuses, you’ve got to get the job done no matter what.” Harry’s face tightened. “That’s why I say you’re not thinking responsibly, Hermione. Thinking that your job is done when you tell Professor McGonagall—that isn’t heroine thinking. Like Hannah being beat up is okay then, because it isn’t your fault anymore. Being a heroine means your job isn’t finished until you’ve done whatever it takes to protect the other girls, permanently.” In Harry’s voice was a touch of the steel he had acquired since the day Fawkes had been on his shoulder. “You can’t think as if just following the rules means you’ve done your duty.
It has a very strong emphasis on "whatever happens, no matter what, it's always your fault" and a natural extension of what Harry was saying is "your friend being the one pushing this on you isn't an excuse; if she dies due to your inaction, it's your fault".
Do you have an example session of an adversarial roleplay you'd be willing to share?
I wrote more about my approach to it here and here (I talk about "co-writing" but the difference between that and role-playing can be pretty slight). (I say that I like Claude Opus the most in those posts, but I switched to Sonnet 4.5 after it came out.)
That's a neat trick with the hashes! I haven't done adversarial role-playing with LLMs myself (the characters may be opposed but the writers are generally aligned), but I'll keep that in mind if I ever do.
The general idea makes sense to me, I'm a bit confused about the chess example though:
Say you're able to calculate things either to depth 2 (ending after your opponent's move) or to depth 3 (ending after your own move). Isn't it still better to calculate things as far out as you can?