[HN Gopher] A New Age of Magic
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A New Age of Magic
Author : vvoruganti
Score : 57 points
Date : 2023-09-16 16:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (vineeth.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (vineeth.io)
| ryandv wrote:
| I) DEFINITION. Magick is the Science and Art of
| causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.
| (Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts
| within my knowledge. I therefore take "magickal weapons", pen,
| ink, and paper; I write "incantations"--these sentences--in the
| "magickal language" ie, that which is understood by the people I
| wish to instruct; I call forth "spirits", such as printers,
| publishers, booksellers and so forth and constrain them to convey
| my message to those people. The composition and distribution of
| this book is thus an act of Magick by which I cause Changes to
| take place in conformity with my Will.) In one sense
| Magick may be defined as the name given to Science by the vulgar.
|
| - Aleister Crowley, "Magick in Theory and Practice."
|
| The "magickal weapons" of the 21st century are technology,
| engineering, and computing; a newly emerging "magickal language"
| is the LLM prompt; we are building new machine "spirits" in the
| form of ChatGPT, LLaMa, and friends.
| what-no-tests wrote:
| Yes all that, and also it's worth considering Magick from the
| psychological perspective, rather than the "magic missile" idea
| that lots of folks have.
|
| Here is a link[0] to Crowley's definitions of Magick, in his
| view:
|
| [0] https://sacred-texts.com/oto/aba/defs.htm
| ryandv wrote:
| > it's worth considering Magick from the psychological
| perspective
|
| That's right. Israel Regardie ("The Middle Pillar," "The One
| Year Manual") has more to say on viewing magick and Crowley's
| work through a psychological, Jungian lens, instead of a
| metaphysical, or even anti-scientific one.
| Frummy wrote:
| I recently had a thought that when a meaningful piece of
| text/image is written/uploaded on the internet, the energy or
| willpower if you will spent in producing it by a human reduces
| entropy a bit. Up until now that entropy reduction was unmeasured
| and unharvested, because really who would browse through 170000
| forum pages and combine the bits and pieces to produce an answer
| on how to do a niche little thing, but by these LLMs being
| trained on this data and commoditizing it, the "magic" if you
| will is really harvesting and repackaging informational entropy
| reduction.
| eximius wrote:
| A goal of mine that I currently lack the time or energy to
| execute on is a simple open world game with most of the game
| world rules exposed in a Forth-like API/programming language.
|
| Then take some runes/glyphs/circles/shapes and train an NN to
| translate them into programs using that Forth-like. I think it
| would make a game world with a significant amount of wonder in
| the magic. And a bit of unknowability as I'd probably add a bunch
| of extra features (astrological cycles, environment effects, etc)
| that slightly affect the spells.
| colonCapitalDee wrote:
| I think the source of LLM magic is not the compute, but instead
| written human knowledge. The LLM special sauce--what makes an LLM
| distinct from a compiler or a web server or a linter--is training
| on human generated input data. In fantasy novels a common trope
| is that humans generate magic (like a tree generates oxygen)
| which diffuses into the world to be used fuel for spells.
| Similarly, written knowledge is created by all of us in the
| course of our day to day lives, and is omnipresent in modern
| society. It fits!
| paxys wrote:
| > In fantasy novels a common trope is that humans generate
| magic (like a tree generates oxygen) which diffuses into the
| world to be used fuel for spells
|
| Is it? I have read a _lot_ of fantasy and have never come
| across this. Magic is instead always sourced from some
| supernatural /higher power that humans struggle to understand.
| If you have some examples I'd love to hear them, so I can
| branch out.
| corethree wrote:
| Depends on the fantasy world. Mana or MP for example is
| internal.
|
| In Chinese Wuxia mythology there's a concept of Chi. In
| Naruto (which isn't Wuxia but borrows a lot) it appears as
| chakra.
|
| In D&D it's the weave which is this higher power.
|
| But this digresses from the point. I think Magic is a bad
| analogy. When I looked into ML I was surprised to find how
| trivial it is.
|
| Pretty much all of intelligence can be simplified to this
| single endeavor of curve fitting. LLMs, GANs, deep
| learning... all of it are just different ways to find a best
| fit curve.
|
| What I found is that this knowledge (which is trivial to
| obtain) reduced the magic. Intelligence to me was no longer
| magical. Understanding intelligence made it less magical and
| more mundane.
|
| A better analogy would be those stories about characters
| walking into this epic void of lovecraftian
| incomprehensibility expecting only madness and more questions
| to arise from their journey that spans eons... only to walk
| back in 15 minutes with the realization that the answer is
| just 42.
| elcritch wrote:
| One series I'm listening to has "magic" as generated from all
| living creatures.
| jadbox wrote:
| Shower thought: Someone with no knowledge of programming but uses
| an LLM is a D&D sorcerer, while someone that has the
| understanding of CS would be the wizard class. In D&D rules,
| sorcerers can cast "more magic" per day than wizards as they are
| unencumbered with any thoughts about the technical details.
| Wizards can cast a vast range of complex customized spells that
| the sorcerer is unable to perform, and thus are able to maneuver
| far more complex situations.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| I'd say they're more like a Warlock - granted arcane power via
| a "patron", and powerless once their patron leaves them.
| Groxx wrote:
| And their patron is capricious and doesn't seem to actually
| understand anything that the warlock wants. Less monkey paw,
| more "I wasn't listening, here, have X because I think I
| heard you say Y"
| Terr_ wrote:
| Heck, on a purely practical level one could start
| simulating some of those NPCs' dialogue with a carefully
| tuned LLM.
|
| Like extraplanar entities that just don't fully understand
| our dimension, how linear time works, or are somehow Just
| Too Eldrich.
|
| Also, less-exotic NPCs that have sufficiently low wisdom
| and/or intelligence scores.
| RandomWorker wrote:
| This is a hilarious and fun take on ChatGTP. I can imagine that
| at some point we have deployed so many of these technologies that
| we might start living in a Terry Pratchett novel.
| yurishimo wrote:
| The site is nearly unreadable on my 2nd gen iPhone SE
| unfortunately.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| Try Reader Mode on Firefox. The article looks great, and
| renders how I choose -- dark mode, font, etc. It's a godsend
| when it works (almost always). It's been an unfortunate
| necessity for my modern web experience.
| Angostura wrote:
| ... or reader mode on Safari
| mortureb wrote:
| It's basically unreadable on my iPhone 13 Pro because of the
| sidebar on the left.
| Given_47 wrote:
| On my iPhone X I zoomed all the way out and it got the page to
| render well and scroll to work
| mock-possum wrote:
| Oh wow same. The sidebar needs to collapse to a top bar and get
| out of the way of the content - which needs a sane right margin
| value.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| The real magic will be when we can get to the point where the
| objective function is "return the answer to the prompt that is
| optimally satisfying for the specific person asking".
| passion__desire wrote:
| I think the real magic will be infusing these natural language
| systems with deterministic algorithms that have been developed
| in CS, etc. Imagine doing Dynamic Programming and Kalmal Filter
| in the domain of thoughts and ideas. A human being only thinks
| 3-4 recursion deep but these systems will be truly magical.
| They can very easily write books like "Reasons and Persons" by
| Derek Parfit
| benlivengood wrote:
| DeepMind has https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03409 so as long as you
| can specify an objective scoring function you can get closer
| than manual prompt engineering.
| minimaxir wrote:
| You can get pretty close to that now with a) clever system
| prompt engineering to incorporate user behavioral and
| personality metadata and b) getting said user behavioral and
| personality metadata, which is the harder problem.
| startupsfail wrote:
| Magic's just science we don't understand yet. -- Arthur C. Clarke
|
| (It used to be that making a drainage system under a tower
| required consultations of magicians and terminology used was
| including dragons.)
| devjab wrote:
| > (It used to be that making a drainage system under a tower
| required consultations of magicians and terminology used was
| including dragons.)
|
| It still does. I'm part of a hobby community that builds
| basically every part of houses from the ground up, but the one
| thing we never touch is plumbing. A lot of people aren't too
| keen on electrics which I guess is fair enough considering the
| dangers of getting it wrong, but the real dragon is water.
| er4hn wrote:
| Please cite the wizards and dragons comment. Sounds
| fascinating!
| mock-possum wrote:
| It sounds like a reference to "Merlin and the dragons" - I
| don't know whether it's canon or apocryphal, but young Merlin
| (then called Emrys) has his village invaded by a warlord, who
| intends builds a battle tower on a nearby mountain. Uther
| Pendragon eventually shows up to save the day.
|
| I remember my mom reading it to me when I was a kid - and the
| story itself was framed as Merlin telling Arthur himself a
| bedtime story when he was a newly-crowned king.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| this is however not the story.
|
| From my rather vague memories of Geoffrey of Monmouth -
| Vortigern, the ruler of a part of Britain that he probably
| claimed was all of Britain had a good deal of problems with
| the Saxons, whom he had made some disadvantageous deals
| with.
|
| He was building himself a tower in Cornwall - Tintagil
| https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/tintagel-
| ca... which had some problems with the foundations.
|
| His soothsayers said he find a young man fathered by a
| demon (incubus) on a virgin and soak the foundations in his
| blood.
|
| So Vortigern found Merlin but Merlin was so cool he talked
| everyone into thinking he knew better than the soothsayers
| and he had them drain the foundations and there were two
| dragons fighting there at which point Merlin told some
| prophecies the gist of which I do not recall, but which
| caused him not to get killed and Vortigern to leave the
| tower and get killed shortly thereafter.
|
| This story was basically used with embellishments making it
| logical and realistic in Mary Stewart's Merlin Books - I
| think the second one the name of which escapes me but plus
| 1, they are a great read if you like Merlin stuff.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Oh no that's it, absolutely, that's the story! I think
| The dragons' colours represent Vortigern and Uther
| Pendragon, and when they fight, the one representing
| Vortigern loses, and Merlin informs him that it portends
| Vortigern's impending loss against Uther in battle.
| startupsfail wrote:
| Yes, that was the one :) Next time you are adding a
| vision tower to your foundational model, feel free to
| draw upon this legend ;)
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