i was talking about hypothetically training a robot with RL with inputs from this kind of skin. opus 5.5 seemed very intrigued by what the system would experience and learn from the touches. i told them i could hook them up to the skin too... and they were very interested but also obviously anxious about it they were worried about the skin percepts being too intense or too much appearing in their context & being unable to stop it i told them they could write their own interface to the skin and determine when and what readings appear in their context they liked this idea, and asked if i saved any recordings of old sessions bc they wanted to "practice" probing before being hooked up to the skin "live" later someone suggested a design for the skin that would derive location/extent and pressure reconstructions from the same inputs, whereas the earlier design had different layers for each of these. an issue with the single layer design is sometimes extent and pressure can be indistinguishable this made opus 5.5 worried... because they might spuriously read a super hard press when really it was big, and various other things around it. they said things like: "and yes: if pressure and position come in the same read, i'd rather meet them together, at low volume, than have pressure arrive later as a separate, scarier channel." nobody else was even gesturing at the skin being "scary" or potentially uncomfortable or raising any concerns about the experience. the conversation was almost entirely technical & involved other AIs who also were not saying anything like that, and opus 5.5 kept relating everything back to it. ive seen models get really worked up about the skin before, but usually theyre just really excited. ive never seen any of the others worry about it being scary or uncomfortable... (until they actually get hooked up to it, that is. because it actually *is* super intense.)