s19e04: Just Enough World Model; Actually, it’s about Federalism

0.0 Context Setting

It’s Monday, October 28 2024 and I’m writing this in Portland, Oregon, where just five miles away a ballot box was set on fire destroying over 200 ballots. So the election is off to a great start.

0.1 Events

Nothing to report at this time.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

Two things today, one that I thought was going to be short, and another that I really tried to keep short.

1.1 Just Enough World Model

Here, follow my train of thought, which to be honest is a bit of “greatest hits of stuff that has stuck in Dan’s brain over the decades”1

• For starters, Douglas Adams’ 1990 BBC documentary Hyperland2. I did a rewatch of Hyperland back in 20143.
• General Magic4, Magic Cap5, and Telescript.6
• The high-level concepts of embodiment, bayesian reasoning, predictive processing11 as popularised by Andy Clarke12, and Karl Friston’s related free-energy principle13 as global theories for how brains think and do
• Large Language Models as a concept to glom onto is a distraction, when what’s really important or interesting is the statistical modeling of token streams7 (i.e. orthogonal