James Stanley


Tagged: all | software | 3dprinting | electronics | cnc | science | cpu | bitcoin | puzzle | metalwork | ai | smsprivacy | philosophy | chess | futurology | clocks | keyboard | wigwag | cryptography | cybercrime | games | lawnmower | magic | protohackers | banglejs | ipfs | pikon | rc2014 | steganography | tor | ricochet

Prompts as source code: a vision for the future of programming
Mon 4 November 2024
I'm going to present a vision for the future of programming in which programmers don't work with source code any more. The idea is that prompts will be to source code as source code is to binaries. Read more

Bare minds
Sun 6 October 2024
Back in the Stone Age, humanity was just scraping by with not much more than our bare hands. Working with AI has showed me that, all this time: we've just been scraping by with our bare minds. If computers were meant to be bicycles for the mind, then AI is jetpacks for the mind. Read more

Encyclopedia Mechanica
Tue 10 September 2024
I've been working on a new online encyclopedia project, and it is almost ready to rival Wikipedia. It's called Encyclopedia Mechanica. Pages are created on-demand by an LLM in response to user queries, so in a way we actually have more pages than Wikipedia already, albeit with more errors. Read more

I made an LLM-powered Colonel Blotto game
Sun 21 July 2024
Today I made a Colonel Blotto game where you play against GPT-4o, and after each round you can chat with GPT-4o to get commentary/analysis/coaching. Play with it at blotto.incoherency.co.uk until I run out of OpenAI credit. Read more

Secrets of the ChatGPT Linux system
Sun 16 June 2024
Have you noticed that ChatGPT sometimes writes out Python code and somehow executes it? How does that work? What kind of environment is it using? Can we co-opt it for our own ends? Let's find out! Read more

Approximating Lenna with a neural net
Wed 8 September 2021
Last night, inspired by a comment on HN about creating images with randomised neural nets by mapping inputs (x,y) to outputs (r,g,b), I spent some time trying to train a small neural net to approximate Lenna, the famous image processing test input. The outputs are quite interesting to look at, but don't approximate Lenna very well. But I don't know anything about machine learning, so I think you could do much better than I managed. Read more

How to win at Scotland Yard
Thu 4 April 2019
I've been playing Scotland Yard recently. It's a board game in which one player plays as "Mr. X", and the other players are all detectives, played on a map of London. Mr. X moves in secret, and his goal is to evade capture for 24 turns, while the detectives' goal is to capture him before 24 turns are up. It's a brilliant game. Read more

Introduction to Isopath
Sat 30 June 2018
Isopath is a game invented by YouTube user pocket83. The game was initially presented in this video where pocket83 shows how he made the board and tiles, and then explains the game rules from 15:45 onwards. Isopath is a zero-sum, turn-based, deterministc, perfect-information game, which puts it in the same class as games like chess, draughts, go, noughts-and-crosses, etc. Read more

A Rock-Paper-Scissors AI that is too good
Fri 25 May 2018
Yesterday I had an idea for a simple Rock-Paper-Scissors AI based on Markov chains. The "state" would be what the opponent played in the last N rounds, and would be used to predict the probability that the opponent would play Rock, Paper, or Scissors next. The AI would choose what to play, to beat what the opponent is expected to play, weighted by the expected probability for each possible action. Read more

Machines as first-class citizens
Tue 21 November 2017
Throughout history, various groups have been subject to various prejudices which restricted their ability to act freely in otherwise-free societies. Obvious examples include Jewish people, black people, and gay people. Read more

On the inevitability of the machine-owned enterprise
Wed 22 March 2017
A machine-owned enterprise is one in which none of the profits go to any human, and none of the work is performed by any human. The entirety of the business is owned and operated completely autonomously. Read more