writer / editor / insoluble sub-intelligence
London, England
Joined March 2012
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a new essay-parable from me—on the dreamworld, the special category of the artificial, and whether our collective brain is regressing to intelligence's hallucinatory default.
open.substack.com/pub/surplu…
I enjoy the canon of inoffensively wistful but ultimately beautiful artworks that algorithmic culture has yielded. Forgetful Angel lives in my feed in the same way the passport photo of my partner lives in my wallet. I hit like every time I see it
I long for the rare, out-of-print Caillois with the early 90s grunge cover and the holographic mantis sleeve
meditating on an image of my brain impressed with the fingerprints of everyone I’ve ever loved, like a dirty ball of playdoh
feel like a targeted individual spotting the bladee egobaby set on the new season of popular chinese reality show 再见爱人
roleplaying is over-theorised as a morbid symptom of post-authenticity culture and under-theorised as a fundamental primitive of intelligence
Guy Mackinnon-Little retweeted
this started with a striking PC1 falling out of persona space
my main insights from the past few months:
⊹ “distance from the Assistant” is the main axis of persona variation across these models e.g. the most relevant thing seems to be “how Assistant-like is this persona”
⊹ this axis already exists in base models and steering with it makes them speak from the POV of helpful archetypes like therapists, coaches, and consultants
⊹ not all personas far from the Assistant are bad! the risk comes from departing the more predictable territory of post-trained behaviour
still have a lot of questions about what to anthropomorphize, what to treat as fundamentally alien…
New Anthropic Fellows research: the Assistant Axis.
When you’re talking to a language model, you’re talking to a character the model is playing: the “Assistant.” Who exactly is this Assistant? And what happens when this persona wears off?
ALT Left: Character archetypes form a "persona space," with the Assistant at one extreme of the "Assistant Axis." Right: Capping drift along this axis prevents models (here, Llama 3.3 70B) from drifting into alternative personas and behaving in harmful ways.
Guy Mackinnon-Little retweeted
The Other Internet Book is finally here!
- 16 classic essays from the OI squad
- 6 rough-cut essays from our super secret archive
- 6 new pieces exploring the organization’s evolution behind the scenes
- 1 existential timeline
Out on @metalabel_ now!
otherinternet.metalabel.com/…
Guy Mackinnon-Little retweeted
We're excited to announce that this week we will be launching combinationsmag.com: a new publication by @RadxChange exploring ideas about economics, democracy, and the relationship between technology and power.
To mark the occasion, you are invited to join us here, this Thursday, November 14th at 11 am ET, for a livestreamed discussion with contributing authors @byranadasgupta and @t1ngyu3 in conversation with the Combinations team, where we’ll explore coordination and collective intelligence at two different scales: planetary politics and AI models.
See you soon! ✨
*Not on X? Here are a few other ways to connect:
👉 riverside.fm/studio/combinat…
👉Twitch.tv/RadicalxChangePath…
👉 YouTube.com/@RadicalxChange
Guy Mackinnon-Little retweeted
⁂ Announcing the release of Autonomous Worlds N1:
A 120-page anthology of essays by engineers, game designers, artists, and writers exploring onchain computation as a novel medium for virtual worlds.
aw.network/notes/note-metala…
it’s been a pleasure 🫂
What else is there to do but take leaps of faith?
A letter from the Editors of Zine. ⊹
zine.zora.co/games-of-chance
essential infrastructure for multi-author artificial realities
Autonomous Worlds are not just worlds that happen to exist onchain, but worlds that could not exist otherwise.
Announcing the Autonomous Worlds Network, a @0xPARC organisation that seeks to uncover and advance the plot of these worlds.
aw.network/about
Guy Mackinnon-Little retweeted
Do it for the online plot.
An evening of discourse, sights, and sounds in London on Sunday, July 16.
ft. @shumonbasar @vcamblin @yanasosna @guymyguymyguy @lycheevision @Y7_OUTPUT
🎶 sounds by @tommouna @quietluke
♟️ chess by @clubchessnyc
RSVP:
omx0213epfq.typeform.com/to/…
an actual blurry jpeg of the whole internet would be a sublime image, just like the existing blurry jpegs of black holes and exoplanets. why haven’t we seen a blurry jpeg of the whole internet yet?
newyorker.com/tech/annals-of…
don’t want to edit books that don’t inspire someone to leak the whole thing page by page
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