blog of zachary "za3k" vance
Claude wrote me a tool to encode data in videos. Here is a copy of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". Encoded in the (fairly obvious) big on-screen pixels is a copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare. They can be decoded with this tool . curl https://gist.githubusercontent.com/za3k/d2d993685a23be04bc3ee5b28281e6d4/raw/0a27700266ff726604d802a9263bda552c57b67a/gistfile1.txt -o…
In 2025, I posted two bounties for qr-backup. One I did myself, and the other has now been completed by Claude. The task was as follows: qr-backup is designed to save to paper, and restore from the command-line. [...] this feature request is to add a printable, 1-page short C program which you can type in by hand, compile, and use to restore backups from an image. This is a very difficult…
IMPORTANT Are you a contributor? No, I am not a contributor Oh no! You were not supposed to see this link. Honor system, please don't read below. Instead, politely ask a contributor you know to buy you a print copy . The contributors were, in alphabetical order: Scott Aaronson Bryan Bishop ChatGPT Claude ELIZA Feast of Assumption James "preinfarction" Gaukroger GPT1 Grognor Grok Gwern Branwen…
Is an LLM a person? Well, it seems to me there's that's a bit of a vague question. A lot of things get shoved together in personhood. Does it experience emotions? Does it have self-awareness? Does it posess common sense, insight, and reasoning ability? Does it have senses? If so, does it react to stimuli? Does it possess a continuious thread of internal thought? Does it have memories? Can it talk…
I had quite a struggle getting this pad working under linux. Here's how I did it on USB. First, get rid of the built-in xpad module, which doesn't work. sudo modprobe -r xpad echo "blacklist xpad" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/xpad.conf Then install and test xboxdrv sudo pacman -S xboxdrv sudo xboxdrv --detach-kernel-driver --dpad-as-button You can test with evtest . Pick the XBox controller. If it…
One of my interests is "bootstrap" methods. That is, a minimal set of habits or processes, that when adopted end up making you cool down the line. For example, "study the habits of successful people" might be a good habit. If you do that, you might find yourself adopting other good habits. As such, I often ask people what habits lead to all their other habits, and about habits in general. The…
I've been trying various challenges this month. Some more object-level, like "Learn Redstone". Some more meta-level, like "orient everything I do toward goals". The first have been going pretty well. The second, not so much -- they start good, and I lose steam an hour or two in. My working theory is that I'm not losing enthusiasm -- it's just easy to forget, and there's no specific deliberable I…
Motivation and a sense of accomplishment Do you want to do something? It depends whether you imagine it will be pleasant or unpleasant. The anticipating self imagines whether something will be pleasant or unpleasant. This is in some sense, the pleasure of your mental model of your future self. We call this "motivation". Do you enjoy what you're currently doing? We call this "enjoyment", or…
I'm throwing my hat in the ring for the Computercraft Competition to make a self-replicating turtle. It's a bit of late entry -- the deadline was Nov 1, 2012, and the forum has long closed. But I love computercraft, so who cares! Computercraft is a mod for minecraft. In it you program Lua code to control little turtles. turtles can only interact with these three blocks They can: Move up, down, and…
Recently I was making a villager trading hall in minecraft. One of the main goals of a trading hall is to collect all villager trades. One of the trickiest is books, provided by a librarian. I got to wondering -- how long is this going to take? Well, we can do some math to find out. There are currently (as of Minecraft Java Edition 1.21.11) 40 trade-able books. 36 of them are available from the…