Something I've been thinking about for years, and fully expected to see earlier. Even though reasoning with LLMs is still largely broken, the "flag logical fallacies and cognitive biases" task feels like something trivially doable and much more appropriate than most of the stuff we're throwing at them.

If we'd regulate platforms away from walled gardens and towards open APIs, a tool like this could fix a lot of the problems with the internet without balkanizing it. The real use-case isn't slapping this thing on your blog, but using it with existing social media that will never, ever opt-in to anything that slightly empowers users. Browsing HN, reddit, or youtube comments armed with a simple checkbox that hides comments that are not information-dense? Yes please.

Sure, it's typical Wolfram, inviting the typical criticism. If you can understand what he's talking about at all then you won't be very convinced it's new. If you can't understand what he's talking about, then you also won't be interested in the puffery and priority dispute.

The rest of his stuff tagged ruliology is more interesting though. Here's one connecting ML and cellular automata: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/08/whats-really-goi...

I suppose evangelism still has some value if you have a big enough platform. There's always frog-boiled obliviousness to deal with or the next gen coming up and trying to figure out which problems are real and which are old people yelling at clouds. But most people know about the problems now.

So taxonomies and other nit-picking feels like a distraction. Enshittification, bullshit fees, extraction/exploitation, monopolies, rot-economy, harmful business models. Call it what it is, late-stage capitalism is bad. The alternative isn't some commie thing.. it's just normal capitalism, and it works better for absolutely everyone except billionaires.

This reminds me of how you can create fair coins from biased ones and vice versa. You toss your coin repeatedly, and then get the singular "result" in some way by encoding/decoding the sequence. Different sequences might map to the same result, and so comparing results is not the same as comparing the sequences.

Meanwhile, you press the "shuffle" button, and code-gen creates different code. But this isn't necessarily the part that's supposed to be reproducible, and isn't how you actually go about comparing the output. Instead, maybe two different rounds of code-generation are "equal" if the test-suite passes for both. Not precisely the equivalence-class stuff parent is talking about, but it's simple way of thinking about it that might be helpful

> The combined effect of knots on our technology and understanding of the world is fascinating.

Knots as code, code as knots: https://arxiv.org/abs/1009.2107