LLMs are absolutely capable of inventing new words, just as they are capable of writing code that they have never seen in their training data.

Is selective breeding not a form of genetic engineering?

No. If so, you'd had to put a GMO label on all cultivated food.

Isn’t nature genetic engineering then? Amazing genetic engineering nature?

Only to the extent that the growers who apply deliberate selection criteria are themselves part of "nature". But we generally use that term to distinguish outcomes for which human intentions weren't a causal determinant, so I don't think it makes sense in this case.

But natural evolution is also selective. Animals choose their partners based on looks or features, they eat the fruits that look the best, spreading those seeds, and bees go to the most colorful flowers. Same thing we do

Right, but we typically use the term "natural" in contrast to "artificial", where the latter implies that the selection pressures are intentionally applied by humans in pursuit of specific outcomes, and the former implies that the selection pressures are not being created or curated by humans.

We make semantic distinctions like this in many areas: e.g. if a house burns down by accident, it's just a fire, but if someone deliberately set the house on fire, we call it arson.

I'd argue evolution is a mechanism that nature uses to engineer genetics, sure

Once good form becomes commoditized, hopefully function starts taking priority

I think it depends.

Having the kind of network and connections you do connects you with the actual needs of your community

At which point, it's not necessarily Transactional, but fostering connection and collaboration in order to create win-win situations for everyone in your community.

That's what politicking Should be.

Should be, absolutely. But isn’t where I am. People who go into local politics here seem to be interested in elevating their profile, having influence, or money.

Maybe you can break the cycle?

From some rudimentary tests I just did, Sonnet 4.6 says walk consistently. Opus 4.6 days drive pretty consistently.

This sounds quite interesting!

I've been exploring spec driven workflows, but from a different angle.

I've been thinking about how to describe systems with a standard format, recursively. Instead of one 10 page doc, you might get 10 one pagers, starting from the highest level of abstraction and recursing down into the parts and subsystems, all following the same format. Building out this Graph of domains provides certain reusable nodes/bits of context.

This then extends to any given bit of software, which is a system in itself composed of the intersections of a lot of different domains and subsystems.

Cue looks interesting and is something I'll be digging into more

This is my approach. I use the C4 software model, it's pretty general. Entities can be represented either by markdown files, or folders with README.md files (sort of like an index.js or __init__.py). Folder hierarchy gives you a basic project object model.

hierarchical specs? Sounds hard to understand where they overlap. Or, they are independent?

I draw the opposite conclusion. Willingness to change the name leads me to conclude purpose is more important than identity.

Now if it changes _again_ that's a different story. If it changes Too Much, it becomes a distraction

Isnt this name change because the previous one was hard to say, as per the blog post? Isnt that a case of focusing more on identity than purpose?

More that moltbot is ugly and was chosen in a bit of a panic after Anthropic complained. No one liked it, including the people who chose it.

I think B would be more accurate as "check this out: this one place has green firetrucks"

If China could sell it's cars here, it would spur American automakers to innovate, no? Government protectionism causes complacency

It's a balance. If a country is investing severely in a specific industry you can either tax them out of your swamp, counter invest in your industry or, realistically, do a mix.

It'd be difficult to compete with companies receiving large gov assistance without gov assistance and I find taxing them slightly safer than making it rain on specific people/companies.

It definitely worked in the past with Japanese cars.