I too am interested in "Claws", but I want to figure out how to run it locally inside a capabilities based secure OS, so that it can be tightly constrained, yet remain useful.

I hereby propose a more elegant version, with all the marketing fluff removed:

  I pledge Allegiance
  to Liberty and Justice
  for all

I could handle that once a day.

The limiting factor would be the density of information in the source material, followed my the cognitive impedance match of the receiver.

Fir example, a correct grand unified theory isn't useful if you don't know the physics to understand it.

I almost stopped at the first episode. I remember the IBM PC manuals, and the build in ROM Basic, they could have read the ROMs and dumped them to the printer in minutes, there wasn't any mystery to it.

I'm glad I stuck with it though, the rest of the series was much, much better.

I think there are two separate areas of concern here, hardware, and computation. I strongly believe that a Computer Science program that only includes variants of the Von Neumann model of computation is severely lacking. While it's interesting to think about Turing Machines and Church numbers, etc... the practical use of FPGAs and other non-CPU based logic should definitely be part of the modern CS education.

The vagaries of analog electronics, RF, noise, and the rest is another matter. While it's possible that a CS graduate might have a hint of how much they don't know, it's unreasonable to expect them to cover that territory as well.

Simple example, did you know that it's possible for 2 otherwise identical resistors to have more than 20db differences in their noise generation?[1] I've been messing with electronics and ham radio for 50+ years, and it was news to me. I'm not sure even a EE graduate would be aware of that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omn_Lh0MLA4&t=445s

the design of FPGAs was certainly part of my CS degree!

they even made us use them in practical labs, and connect them up to an ARM chip

I'm glad to hear that. Did you have to learn Verilog, VHDL, or something else in the FPGA programming?

verilog

The fabric of civilization - how textiles made the world -- Virginia Postrel

It's chok full of interesting stuff.

The Sammy Jankis link was certainly interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Whether or not AGI is imminent, and whether or not Sammy Jankis is or will be conscious... it's going to become so close that for most people, there will be no difference except to philosophers.

Is AGI 'right around the corner' or currently already achieved? I agree with the author, no, we have something like 10 years to go IMO. At the end of the post he points to the last 30 years of research, and I would accept that as an upper bound. In 10 to 30 years, 99% of people won't be able to distinguish between an 'AGI' and another person when not in meatspace.

I really don't see why AGI can't be a spectrum and we just have very weak AGI and going from weak to strong will take many years, if it ever happens.

Having peeked into the cloning kit, a surprisingly small (7k) archive, I'm left wondering if this could work with something completely self-hosted, instead of requiring a Claude code subscription.

Unlike with Iraq, there's a small, but non-zero probability that we lose a chunk of Chicago or DC over this. Notice how they aren't talking about weapons of mass destruction this time.

On the other hand, it's an almost certainty this will cost Trillions, and accelerate the end the Dollar as the world's reserve currency.

I wonder what the unintended consequences of that would be.

Imagine Americans celebrating, dancing, in the streets the nuclear-fire deaths of their fellow citizens, because at least some of them were of the wrong political persuasion.

Imagine whichever political party is in power in the US for the next 1000 years having a mandate to flatten any city or country for any real or perceived link to it in any way.

That's not what I meant.... I was considering that Iran might be able to pull together a nuclear weapon, and deploy it against us.

I understood that.

Surprisingly, I think it really doesn't matter much to me if a person or a bot wrote most of this, the curiosity is the part I respond to.

I told it a bit about the experience of seeing the stars, focused wayyyy too much on the technical details, then tied it together in that none of us actually see the whole sky.

Yeah, a tiny bit unsettling, but it's honest enough that the uncanny valley isn't really a thing for me right now.

I'm not sure if I'll do the thing and run my own copy, or not. I've got to ponder it for a few days.