I think it would be fair to say that at least a few people can do a small amount of 4d visualisation.

Agreed, I don't think anyone has a good grasp on, say, 64K D, but we can do a bit better than just 3.

I’ve heard people claiming that they can but I’ve never heard compelling evidence that they’re directly visualising 4D objects rather than 3D projections of them, or some symbolic representation (arrays of numbers etc.)

All I’ve been able to do is mentally tag parts of a shape as being at different “depths” (possibly with two parts at the same 3D location but tagged as having different “depths”). Which, yeah, I agree isn’t really visualizing a 4D shape. I think someone better at it than me might be able to use this to leverage one’s visual spatial intuition in a way that is a bit closer to what 4D visualization might be like if it were possible.

But I don’t think it is possible for us. At least, for strict senses of visualization. I suspect that the architecture of our brains doesn’t support it. This is rather speculative because I don’t know basically any neuroscience, but I wonder if the whole “the brain is largely a very wrinkled surface (though with several layers to this surface), and the retinas are also surfaces” may have something to do with this. A retina in a eye-4-ball would have a 3D boundary (I.e. hypersurface), and I imagine that the amount of information that it would take in if it had an at all similar angular resolution, would be too great for our visual cortex to be able to represent all of it.

Of course, our vision only really has the high resolution it seems to everywhere in the narrow region we’re directly looking at, but still.

So it is like 3D because you do not visualize the complete 3D models but only 2D projections of them. Or do you really visualize the back and inside of a vase at the same time?

If I visualise a 3D object then it’s in at least pseudo-3D (as in front surface with depth) but I can switch it to a kinda volumetric view. This might be thanks to years worth of 3D modeling and CAD which helped me map between first person and third person cameras and between solid and transparent, though. 4D doesn’t even make sense though, like I can do an animated 3D volume?

What would you regard a trusted demonstration that someone can?

I mean, there are people with aphasia and hyperplasia - how do you prove actual 3D visualisation.

There are games that people play that need 4D visualisation to be able to do well and they perform at that.

Why?

When you’ve sold NOTHING to 1 million people, you’re basically the greatest salesman of all time

A great salesman has repeat customers. What you're describing is a con artist.

Nope. You're just trying to trick people using curiosity or FOMO or something. That's not salesmanship, that's a con.

I'm interested in learning/teaching technologies. Naturally science fiction examples are interesting.

I have found that often LLMs are familiar with the contents of SF books.

But I feel poorer, almost deprived, by the fact that all the LLMs I've checked with have NOT been trained on the contents of Eon by Greg Bear.

Does it exist in the web at all? Could be the contents have not been scraped for the dataset yet.

My read:

Isaac Su seems to be irritated and mildly triggered that people don't think or act like LLMs aren't just dumb, mute, simple tools.

Instead of talking about THAT, he is doing a weird combination strawman/bikeshed-like post about the different imagined, nuanced reasons why he imagines people credit LLM input in attribution.

A more honest take would be:

"Some of you are ascribing more sentience and agency to LLMs than I feel comfortable with. Stop doing that. I'm obviously and fundamentally right that they are dumb tools that can never threaten my intellectual and emotional security or human superiority."

Whether they are right or wrong — one reason that many people are giving credit is that they feel that (at some at level at least) that Claude/DeepSeek/Gemini/etc. is acting enough like a participant or partner to deserve being given credit.

I can live with well-composed articles that have a huge chunk of AI in their generation.

Stuff interesting enough to get upvoted (i.e. not slop), but I'm so irritated and triggered by pointless, human, comment threads moaning about "this is AI generated".

I could skim the article.

Wasn't too distracted or annoyed by the obvious AI voice.

Learned a bit about ice cream and American (Western?) enshitification at work...

...but these endless, superior, contentless, dogmatic, boring streams of comment threads about how AI it all is.

*Rolls eyes*

I almost actively _long_ for the days when commenters simply didn't read the article/post/treatise/repo and went straight to the comments, or complained about the paywall or the fact that it is on Twitter.

Please be interesting.

I find this:

> but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.

Somehow incredibly ironic when applied to you comment itself...

How so?

I’m missing the irony.

The comment is basically doing exactly what it accused OP of doing: behaving as if the commenter has "singularly thought through every problem in an armchair" and knows better than OP who actually tried doing it.

Could be an armchair, could be a toilet, either seems a reasonable standard for a commenter on a messageboard, are we expecting a focus group or something?

No, but pointing out the irony of the situation is still helpful to anyone reading it.

Fine tuning a model isn't that hard and the tradeoff he described is real.

I was on the fine tuning team of a multi-team hackathon to make a specialized chatbot once a few years ago and despite working technically well our output had very little impact on end to end output.

Why?

Technical curiosity?

I ask because this does not seem to be something to want to have.

That's a good question. It started off as pure technical curiosity (in the realm of: will this even work?). but as a side note, I always think of my screen time and the amount we spend chatting away on social media.

Obviously, this is probably and idea. I could imagine I connect my calendar to Hermes, and automate myself into 12 dinner plans and a trip to Disneyland on a Thursday afternoon just because I once mentioned I'm a Mickey fan to my nephew.

Correction - "Obviously, this is probably a bad idea."

I don't get it...

These humanoid robots are expensive. Unskilled labour, housework seems to be the lowest ROI for them.

Factory work, dangerous tasks or skilled tasks I can understand that the robot can pay for itself, but you'd wear out the machine before paying off its labour on work like this.

I get the future angle for usage after population collapse means we need more bots to take care of elderly populations, but NOW?

Housebots don't seem practical.