founder at artgene.xyz, helping artists sell art online
I have tried to play with Claude – I would ask it to think of a number, drop the hint, and only then print the number. It should have test the ability to have "hidden memory" that's outside the text.
I expected it to be able to do that, but the hints to be too obvious. Instead, actually it failed multiple times in a row!
Sharing cause I liked the experiment but wasn't sure if I executed it properly. There might be a way to do more of this.
P.S. I have also tried "print hash, and then preimage" – but this turned out to be even harder for him
After a recent article in NY Times, I realized that it's a perfect analogy. The smartest people, when motivated by money, get so high that they venture into unsafe territory. They kinda know its unsafe, but even internally it doesn't feel like crossing the red line.
It's not even about the strength of characters, when incentives are aligned 99:1 against your biology, you can try to work against it, but you most probably stand no chance.
It takes enormous willpower to quit smoking explicitly because the risks are invisible and so "small". It's not only you have to fight against this irresistible urge, BUT there's also nobody on "your side", except for intellectual realization, of which you're not even so sure of.
In the same vein, being a CEO of a big startup, being able to single-handedly choose direction, and getting used to people around you being less smart, less hard-working, less competitive, you start trusting your own decision-process much more. That's when incentives start to water down through the cracks in the shell. You don't even remember what feels right anymore, the only thing you know is taking bold actions brings you more power, more money, more dukka. And you do those.
Generally I would tweak my brain if it would reliably give me the kind of actions I'd now approve of, while providing at worst the same sort of subjective state as I'd have if managing the same results without the intervention. I wouldn't care if the center of my actions was different as long as the things I value today were bettered.
Technically, we do this all the time. Reading stuff online, talking to people, we absorb their models of the world, their values and solutions to problems we face.
Hence the Schwartznegger poster on the wall makes you strong, the countryside folks make you peaceful, and friend reminding you "you're being a jerk right now" makes you calm down
re: post main claim, I think local entrepreneurship would actually thrive
skipping network effects; would you rather use taxi app created by faceless VC or the one created by your neighbour?
(actually it's not even a fake example, see https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/15/google-backs-indian-open-source-uber-rival-namma-yatri/)
it's also already happening in the indie hacker space – people would prefer to buy something that's #buildinpublic versus the same exact product made by google