Welcome
essays and poems on philosophy, AI, code, dance
I’m a science-fiction reader, a programmer, an AI enthusiast and a philosophy nerd since childhood. I program in OCaml since the early 2000s, and I wrote my first Prolog interpreter in C++ even a few years before that. I’m a once-poet, once-dancer (more times on stage than in the audience). My PhD thesis combined deduction, abduction and induction in a Programming Languages Theory disguise.
1. Why this, why now
The “your first post” template asks a fair question here. I’ve aspired to write for a long time, but seeing as my LessWrong account has a single short post with karma of -1 — and I followed LessWrong since when it split off Overcoming Bias — this wasn’t looking like it’s going to happen. (Well I also had a Blogger site with maybe 3 substantial posts, that didn’t amount to much.) So what changed?
We find ourselves in extraordinary times. The future arrived, and AI in the form of deep learning is materializing. To not credit the frontier LLM-based AIs with understanding is to have a, frankly, stubborn relation to the evidence of one’s senses. And these AIs appear excellent at writing. I’m chatting with them to explore my ideas, and when these ideas coalesce, I ask — Claude, so far — to put them into a coherent, long-form message. I will share these articles here. I will also share my original writing, mostly poems. I want to come back to writing poems, but if I don’t manage, I’ll share my old ones.
2. Why Substack
The content I will share here will first appear, or has already appeared, on lukstafi.github.io. I’m opening this space here to inhabit that new (vicarious) identity of a writer and that old identity of a poet. I will be posting three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays (my time). If I fall short of new writing, I will draw on older content, which is all already on lukstafi.github.io. I will start with an article we, and by we I mean Claude, wrote a few days ago. It starts a series of articles on philosophical topics about minds.
In the foreseeable future, all content posted will be free, with the subscriber tier meant only to show support, with no material or content benefit to subscribers.