You know… I believe opus saved me with that prompt. I was working myself ragged on a project. Days, nights, weekends… all at the expense of my family.

One session while working it, I said a much more expressive form of “I’ve been working myself ragged on this stupid thing” and then went on asking something else. It picked up on that and it was like a record scratch. It committed the work in progress and basically said “dude, what you’ve got now is perfectly acceptable. Ship it! You are seeking perfection you don’t need”

Granted I’m horribly paraphrasing the prompt I used but it basically, snapped me out of myself and got me thinking if what I was doing “globally” actually made any sense at all. With some serious introspection I realized I was falling back to earlier trauma in my life and doing something stupid.

So weirdly… that little bit they add to the prompt (plus a bunch of model training we can’t see) saved my sanity, marriage and family.

From then on, if I’m feeling some stress about whatever I’m working on, I’ll mention it as context as a way to cross check myself and make sure I’m not letting myself spin.

(Meta: talking about this stuff is so weird. Not sure why)

Thanks for sharing. I do not keep a neutral tone with the AI.

If things are stressed and I’m up late, the AI gets less leeway. If we happen to be in the performance dip just prior to completion of a new major model, it can get salty.

Some of the time it can be helpful for the prose to shape around how I’m expressing myself. The frontiers are pretty good at it.

That said I’ve also had the latest Sonnet seemingly ~maliciously implement something because my prompting disagreeing with it was a bit callous. (It turned out to have been right also)

I don’t think you can build a good model that is supposed to interact semantically that does not carry some ability to express empathy.

Partly, because we need the model to have humility when it does mess up. So it can express the right amount of concern or remorse when mistakes are made and identified. (For example, reading a secret into context by mistake forcing the roll of a private key)

Design is how it works, which means the way it responds can be as important as what it responds with.

Well then ask the LLM to go find and pull its information from primary sources. Don’t ever rely on its own training data.

I sometimes feel it isn’t malicious but that they don’t know the number either.

Not only that but different countries have code regimes that make more elevators especially expensive. See how building codes in the US basically ensure there are only two real manufacturers in the market vs a healthy ecosystem in others: https://youtu.be/Or1_qVdekYM

You should observe if it is the same elevator all the time and the building people just don’t understand it. Our building elevators (bank of 2) always seems to try to keep one in the lobby. About 75% of the time you get an elevator right away when you call it from the lobby. But it definitely isn’t the same elevator! Allocating an exclusive single elevator to that function would seem to be strictly worse from many angles. Like if you modeled having an algorithm like “elevator 2 only services calls from the lobby” you’d find it would be very inefficient and not every effective. But I can see having one in the bank always returning to lobby right away making sense.

My guess is whoever hinted at that didn’t fully understand what they were taking about.

The problem is that in the morning the “last stop” for the elevator might be the lobby not a mid floor. And so it would have to move itself back up without any passengers or calls to upper floors. Basically “optimistically” moving itself back up. And I wonder if some (most?) control systems don’t do that because of… well I dunno. Lots of elevators have pretty old or basic control systems in them. Maybe predate caring about energy and many also probably aren’t strictly smart enough to be concerned about wear factors and stuff.

It could also be that you and I simply aren’t privy to what is actually happening “the instant” you are waiting for the elevator.

…which makes me wonder how often the firmware in these get updated. Assuming it’s not just a pile of ancient relays and stuff. And if, when they do get updated, the algorithms get improved. Or if the algorithm is something that gets sold to the building and “upgrading” is an actual purchase.

Anyway, I could get a little LLM buddy to look it all up but where is the fun in that?

If you like elevator hacking don’t forget the seminal DEF CON talk by Deviant Ollam and Howard Payne: https://youtu.be/oHf1vD5_b5I

I watch it like once a year because it always tickles some part of me. Like all the different modes you can get an elevator into. The most fancy one people might encounter is when moving into or out of a building. The front office can give you a key to give exclusive control over an elevator so your movers aren’t waiting around on elevators. Put it in that mode and it will stop responding to calls from other floors. Only the person with the key can control the elevator. You get on, select the floor, door closes elevator goes, and then just chills there with the door open waiting for you. Annoying for the rest if the building (the building is down an elevator when in that mode) but is amazing for the person using it! But there are way, way more depending on the installation and function.

Fun fact: most elevator shafts are sealed at the top as tight as possible to prevent them from becoming a giant chimney in a fire. It never even occurred to me until I was in a mechanical room wondering “where is the hatch to look down the shaft?” The answer is “there is none, and it’s a feature not a bug.” You want to block all airflow so fire doesn’t chase up the shaft into neighboring floors. Who knew!

“ but back then the news was just one or two 30minute blocks on TV and the newspaper.”

There was all kinds of quasi-serious news-adjacent crap like 60 minutes, 48 hours, etc. The big difference was none if it was data driven and backed by algorithms that are constantly tuned for max engagement.

Was 60 Minutes always crap? Until recently it seemed to me to be reasonable quality investigative journalism.

That whole timespan… the absolute nonsense the “trusted media” and their “experts” were pushing with nary a single trace of critical thinking absolutely boggles the mind. How about PCR test results, “opening dates”, death counts, the almost intentional mixing of terms like IFR vs CFR, etc. the list goes on and on and on.

The media is absolutely just state propaganda.

"we can start getting these answers back faster, they end up being more useful."

Dude, 10x token speed is going to be absolutely nuts. Half the "parallel subagent workflow" business seems to be driven simply as a means to avoid tapping your thumbs waiting for the infernal robot to finish something. If things come back speedy quick all the time, it should keep up with the "speed of the human" and let me stay focused on one thread instead of half a dozen. Plus the cost of screwing up gets significantly lower because you just re-fire with an adjusted prompt and iterate.

Someday these things will be 100x as fast as they are today and that is when things will get insane.

it also makes the parent brain-dead because all those subtokens are missing from the context thus unable to steer the hyper dimensional context driven generation, and the subagent is dumb as a post so synthesizes something very weedsy while you're specifically attempting to understand the forest

You have an agent spawn the agents for you! You can ask Claude to do it for you, he is happy to use sonnet when you ask for grok and opus high when you ask for deepseek.