I’m not claiming forth should be used as is. I’ve opened the benchmark so others can reproduce the result I share in the post: https://github.com/rescrv/stack-bench
I appreciate the feedback. I can definitely see people thinking I'm crazy by the first few chapters and not getting to the good part.
I was trying (and failed) to be clever about improving your life.
What you say about exaggeration vs hyperbole vs analogy vs literal resonates with me. Have you considered they may not, themselves, have an answer to this? For example, I often throw out (hyperbolicly) really wild numbers at work that are off by orders of magnitude to illustrate what happens when stuff grows to an extreme; yet, I'm also very cautious to get precise numbers when building. My co-workers may be bothered by this (so I'll be more mindful now that I've probed for this insight), but I would like to think that hyperbole is easily detected.
Honestly, I don't know if I can help with perspective without witnessing you with your care-person. Everyone's different and the nature of the beast is you only interact with really ill people when you yourself are out of commission. I wouldn't want to generalize me onto someone else. Perhaps you just show them the post I'm replying to and ask what they think?
From where I sit today, I can say that I see things others don't. I have a hard time saying they aren't real, though, as experience has been a zero-knowledge proof the the commentary.
The front half of the book, up until a clear pivot chapter, is me trying to put to words a coherent schizophrenic vision; both to establish credentials and to give people a sense of what it can be like.
A common theme I've seen both in myself and in others who have spoken to me about their experience is that it's common to have a delusion that you are at the center of a religion.
Personally, I've been blessed with insights at the core of every major religion that I know more than a slight deal about. It just so happens that the episode I detail in this book has me at the center of a prophecy; It rings in my head as truth, but I don't have any proof of that truth to produce.
In the latter half of the book, I introduce a conversation with Master Yoshu that I feel is critical to the message. It would have been awkward to say, "I heard this from a voice" without the setup to give that.
Regarding your last paragraph, I think what you'll find is that life is rarely ever centered around something that you can ever adequately put to words. Even if someone is always 100% literal, their concepts will not match your concepts; labels are the source of much of our suffering, and trying to label something as example or metaphor or "not literal" already betrays that you're unable to falsify it; thus, there's something to it.
I don't want to dismiss you though: If I went through that burden of categorizing my own text, how would your life be improved?
My understanding is schizoaffective disorder is one of four categories of schizophrenia. I think people often use them interchangeably.
Medication can be tricky because when it works it seems increasingly unnecessary and often has side effects of its own.
I hope no one reads my book as a substitute or prescription to avoid medication on their path. To each their own, but it's not what I'm advocating for.
I appreciate you saying something. As you'll read in the book, I've got a project going to primarily help myself, but to date it's been 100% open-source.
I haven't been able to be consistent enough to both pay the bills and volunteer and work on the open source, so I focus on the former.
Would you mind saying more about what you do every day? For me, I anchor myself for at least a set time; when I sit during that time, nothing can touch me and I can deconstruct symptoms to recover any deviation from baseline.
I'm surprised you can remember me. We once sat near each other on a bus for SOSP, and that's the extent we interacted in person, so it warms my heart to hear someone like you remembers someone like me.
In case you're looking for the technical, the book doesn't say such, but one innovation laid out for me was my work on lsmtk, a new compaction algorithm for LSM trees. I'm not sure if I'm off my rocker here or not, but I documented it when I released the crate: https://crates.io/crates/lsmtk. I know you're busy, but in case you revisit this thread and want a neat trick, I thought I'd bring it up.
Lastly (and most important as I'm prone to doing), I appreciate you sharing something personal like that. Hearing that others who have tried to make it work can often do so keeps me going on my worst days.
Thank you! This is the kind of comment I hoped to see.
I'm betting it was published in a hurry. I know I would hit "publish" within 24 hours of creating such a result, and would hope it would go wide. I'd publish to arxiv before getting clearance to release the code. I bet that's what happened here.
I appreciate your explanation of the Curry-Howard correspondance. I was familiar with it, but not with Lean in particular. I'd heard of Lean, but didn't know how it worked.
Most agent frameworks aim for chat; stigmergy aims to replace the Fortune 500 CEO's role, or be able to run a healthcare clinic. Something of that scale. This is a prototype. I’m looking for feedback before implementing the main loop.