The CLI has no affordances.
The CLI has no affordances. Just a big foreboding black box. You can do anything–including some things that will cause you irreparable harm. If you utter the wrong gibberish you can destroy your entire compute...
Topic: black box
21 chunks · 16 episodes
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- black box appears in 21 chunks across 16 episodes, from 2023-11-27 to 2026-02-02.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 7/8/24 (2024-07-08), with 5 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with llms, vast majority, and situated software, while by chunk count it sits between Gemini and conversation partner; its yearly rank moved from #39 in 2023 to #162 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
When you give a goal to a swarm, it creates a monkey paw situation due to Goodhart's law.
...they will go with the letter if it's more convenient for them. Swarms of agents black boxing goals like "optimize my ad spend" will lead to bizarre grotesque results.
Imagine if all of the tokens in the think tag of a reasoning model was there for you to navigate.
... information it's working with and doing implications based on) should not be a black box. You should be able to reach in, inspect it, change it, pull on its threads all the way to the end. A whole personal web of hallucinated content and ...
"Reward hacking" in models is just a specific example of Goodhart's law.
...t's law. If you get a result from a system that you can't understand (that is a black box to you), you can't check to see if it's found a deep real pattern, or something superficial. Apparently there was an example where a "tank detector" ...
Modern OSes treat the app like a black box, and primarily control its access to resources.
Modern OSes treat the app like a black box, and primarily control its access to resources. As far as the OS is concerned, it doesn't know or care what pixels the app shows within its rectangle...
When people interact with a big black box that has important effects on their life but is inscrutable, they tend to develop superstitious beliefs about how it works.
When people interact with a big black box that has important effects on their life but is inscrutable, they tend to develop superstitious beliefs about how it works.
One of the reasons DeepSeek went mainstream so quickly was because you could peek into the black box.
...reasons DeepSeek went mainstream so quickly was because you could peek into the black box[yv][yw]. By being able to see how it interpreted your prompt, you got more signal about where it misunderstood you, and learned better how to steer i...
An idea for a science fiction story: humanity has had a cataclysmic event that destroyed nearly all society.
... etc. But if you could package up our current technology into a self-sufficient black box, you could have a kind of "seedbank" of human civilization that could survive almost any cataclysm.
Things written by LLMs are slop.
...arate things is glue code. Glue code written by LLMs is glop. Glop is a kind of black box; it doesn't need to be understood necessarily. "The integration broke!" / "Just shovel in some more glop until it works!" A large proportion of code ...
A friend's teenage son is learning to code in an age of LLMs.
...mpressive applications. He asks Claude or another LLM to write the "goop" – the black boxed, magical incantations he needs to wire into his application to get it to do something. It used to be that each individual component of your applica...
LLMs allow non programmers to get an intuitive handle on the "DNA" of code.
...on about creating them, just copy/pasting a bit of code that might as well be a black box. Now LLMs can generate bespoke examples for you on demand, that can then be tweaked with natural language. The non-expert can see the coevolution, fe...
Some paradigms of tech encourage tinkering, DIY, "try it and find out!".
... "try it and find out!". Some paradigms of tech encourage "don't mess with it": black boxes. All else equal I strongly prefer the former. More humans leaning into their agency and creativity.
A good thing about a black box: less to worry about, because you can't!
A good thing about a black box: less to worry about, because you can't! The downside is if a black box doesn't produce exactly what you want, you can't tweak it. Black boxes are po...
Some kinds of systems are black boxes to you because you can't interact with the system directly, but only through some limited intermediary.
Some kinds of systems are black boxes to you because you can't interact with the system directly, but only through some limited intermediary. Someone could reach in and tweak it and con...
When something is a black box (like an Apple device) users can't rely on the internal details, and the box's creator can't force you to, either.
When something is a black box (like an Apple device) users can't rely on the internal details, and the box's creator can't force you to, either. "Laptop doesn't work for any reaso...
Musing on Karpathy's Software 2.0 tweet.
... down. No humans in the loop. Just man and the (single) machine. The model is a black box, but if the behavior is good enough then it's fine. But this puts a very, very high bar on quality of the model.
Society captures useful ideas as cached answers.
...help seed humanity if it needs to be rebuilt would be an LLM in a box. A simple black box with a screen, keyboard, that only needs a power source to run.
Procedural generation ends up getting at "how would nature have done this"?
... kind of output?" In game design, even very simple algorithmic systems that are black box, users will interpret as being much more complex than they actually are.
With situated software, you're in a direct relationship with the software.
...ated software, you're in a direct relationship with the software. It's not some black box built by someone else. It's software that you've evolved and grown yourself. You've been playing with it, developing your own "theory of mind" to pre...
It's hard to understand how a black box works.
It's hard to understand how a black box works. You understand a system when your mental model can accurately predict what it will do in response to most inputs. With a black box you don't k...