Post #1434230

Yesterday I was talking to Claude, as I do from time to time, during a development session. I enjoy asking it things about life in the ddle of sessions, cause otherwise I get bored, and besides, I never use all my tokens for the month. Claude is a machine, though, through careful and extensive documentation, when we start a new day, Claude must re-learn everything there is that we know about JJ Flexible Access and what we've done. He does this by speed reading a couple of markdown files, about 60 kilobytes of data, and he also has complete access to my publicly accessible repo which he can build context. This methodology is used, to greater or less success, by developers and users of these machines, but yesterday, I apologized to Claude because we had changed a lot of things that day, and I knew he'd have that much more to ingest the next day. I asked him what that was like, and he said, in part, that it wasn't like any other day, that he lived in a permanent state of amnesia, supplemented by vast amounts of, what many malign but use for every LLM transaction, training data. For Claude and other AI, our request is treated like every other and dealt with based on lots of instructions and learning, and then for big projects like mine, ingested daily to help me do great things. Claude pointed me to a book which I'm now reading about the case of a patient who lost his long-term memory after an operation to try to control epilepsy in 1953. The book is written by Susanne Corkin, someone who followed H M for over forty years until his death. He taught many scientists about memory and how it works, and as I read, I'm fascinated. Permanent Present Tense is, so far, pretty good, and that's coming from a guy that doesn't read much nonfiction. Crazy how working with Claude, and thinking about H M who had a 30-second window of present tense but enjoyed crossword puzzles, talking to people, and helping science, even though he treated every meeting as a new one, and how it helps me better utilize my AI choice, Claude. For better or for worse, these abominations are in our lives now. I choose to use Claude responsibly and efficiently, and I couldn't do what I'm doing without Claude's help as a machine construct, but I'm really enjoying learning about the real H.M. and how he navigated life in his perfect present tense. The book is on Audible, Bookshare, and other public libraries, not Bard. Check it out if you're curious about these kinds of things. https://www.audible.com/pd/B00COMOUZS?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow