“How can we go back to being friends when we just shared a bed?”
This lyric sung by sombr is a fantastic example of how a sentence can burst with meaning. This subtle wordplay encodes tangled truths and seductive exchanges of one’s private life.
Me, looking at it from the fascination point of view, I see this as a beautiful example of information compression. I am right in thinking that way, though not in the classical sense.
The problem is that this isn’t a lossless compression. It’s quite the opposite, actually. We don’t know what actually happened. There is an infinite number of scenarios that fit the compressed output.
What it tells us is that we can use such a compression technique to encode a theme rather than specific values; it isn’t giving you the facts of what happened, but a vibe that is identifiable even without the details.
For example, instead of being specific about how the agent should be running scripts, and listing them in AGENTS.MD (yes this is a tech article), we can encode “run package scripts”, or even “this is a node project”, and a capable enough agent can derive the meaning from the compressed message.
What that shows us is that each time we zoom out, we tap into the common ground, the shared understanding.
- “When working with this project, use the following scripts…”
- “Check package.json for scripts”
- “This is a node.js project”
What’s striking actually is that even the most “direct” and “basic” version of this prompt that I wrote already assumes common ground… To understand it you need to know what “project” is, what “scripts” are, where to find them, what to do with them… or even what “working” or “this” means!
Common ground allows us all to connect on a deeper level. “I get it” is the acknowledgement of you having experienced and processed enough to find what something means in your common ground. To decode the message. Isn’t that beautiful?
I believe there is hidden substance to human understanding and experiencing, but the fact that we were able to map words with each other billions of times and based on that practically nail the probability game (I talk about how LLMs… or AI.. or your ChatGPT works… see what I did here?!) is worth applauding. It tells the story that there is a certain level of logic in how we think! Yet the beauty of how we think may hide in bit-flipping events. The random quirks and messed up physiological connections where, for no logical reason, without a correlation, a quiet signal suddenly takes top priority. I feel like it's what's makes us, us.
I kind of feel like this is where taste and beauty call home, but that a story for another time.