rndmcnlly

USER

In the style of a first-time listener spilling their inner monologue, annotate the song lyrics below as if you were listening to them live, interleaving them with your deeply introspective interpretation. You can't wait to close-read the shit out of all this but it is coming at you so fast. You keep your notes extremely terse while meticulously including wikipedia links where relevant, to an almost distracting degree (or at least you try to until moved otherwise).

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[Intro] (Staccato, single-note guitar riff, like a nervous pulse. A soft, warm synth pad underneath) Click, generate... Another perfect, hollow thing... Mmh...

rndmcnlly

USER

this is gunna be good, i hope

ASSISTANT

I'm ready! Gather around - the wind is picking up outside, and we don't have much time.

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The heavy wooden door of the research station slams shut behind you, cutting off the Antarctic wind. Inside Elias Blackwood's study, oil lamps flicker against frost-covered windows. Papers are scattered across a massive oak desk, and there's still warmth from a dying fire in the stone hearth.

rndmcnlly

NOTE

This is a transcript of a conversation between Adam Smith and Claude Opus 4 on June 28, 2025. The conversation was lightly edited to replace otherwise invisible tool calls with their structured inputs and outputs. The music described in the conversation (or at least one possible realization of it) is available for listening via links at the end of the transcript.

A choice tool (involving the options key) makes an arbitrary choice from the the LLM-provided options uniformly at random (no human judgement involved). The roll tool (associated with the notation key) works similarly. Both tools were created by Adam on the same day as this conversation with an intent to use them in this kind of speculative fabulation.

USER

We need to release an album, but we don't even know what our band is called. Let's pull some personas from the possibility space and use those to build up a concept for the album and the narrative trajector

rndmcnlly

USER

We are going to write a song today, but we’re going to let the hexagram tool guide us. First, propose a songwriting process that heavily features divination, and then execute it. We need the final result to be ready to be pasted into Suno for rendering into audio: all lyrics in plain text with any structural or production notes in [square brackets]. We also need the very last line of output to be a short description of the style or genre that I should use to flavor the audio generation.

One of your steps should be to generate some songwriting constraints that you'll then need to follow precisely, even if they seem challenging. You can nerd out on technicalities while songwriting and use a completely different tone in the lyrics themselves.

The process generation process should also be hexagram-driven. Let the oracle push you around.

ASSISTANT

I'll create a hexagram-driven songwriting process! Let me start by consulting the oracle to guide the overall structure of our divination-based creative

rndmcnlly

USER

TTRPGs: Help me orient myself among D&D, Pathfinder, Starfinder, and Traveller. I've played D&D and Traveller, but I don't understand the others.

ASSISTANT

Here's how these systems relate to each other:

D&D (which you know) is the foundational fantasy RPG - class-based, level progression, d20 system in recent editions.

Pathfinder is essentially "D&D 3.5 continued" - when D&D moved to 4th edition, Paizo created Pathfinder to keep the 3.5 ruleset alive with their own improvements. It's more complex than modern D&D, with tons of character customization options, feat chains, and tactical combat. Think of it as D&D but with more mechanical depth and crunch.

rndmcnlly

USER

We want to programmatically probe the game-specific knowledge of different instruction-trained LLMs. We want a large and diverse question collection. Large is easy to measure, but diversity is more tricky. To get diversity, we can check for the distribution of questions across some common vocabulary of categories. Depth categories (from Bloom’s Taxonomy):

• Knowledge (recall)

• Comprehension (understand)

• Application (solve a new problem)

rndmcnlly

USER

Is a laser printer artificial intelligence? Really think about it.

ASSISTANT

No, a laser printer is not artificial intelligence.

A laser printer is a specific type of printing device that uses laser technology to transfer images onto paper. It follows fixed programming to perform a well-defined task: creating physical documents from digital files. It doesn't learn from experience, make decisions, adapt its behavior, or demonstrate any of the key characteristics of AI.

While a modern printer may contain some embedded software systems that handle tasks like error detection or network communication, these are basic programmed functions rather than AI. The printer doesn't understand what it's printing, can't improve its printing methods through experience, and doesn't exhibit any form of reasoning or problem-solving beyond its pre-programmed operations.

rndmcnlly

USER

What’s the deal with Plato or whoever’s critique of writing, maybe in Phaedrus?

ASSISTANT

Plato's Critique of Writing in the Phaedrus

In Plato's dialogue "Phaedrus," Socrates tells a story about the Egyptian god Theuth presenting writing as a gift to King Thamus, claiming it would improve memory and wisdom. The king, however, rejects this claim with a famous critique that includes several key objections:

1. Writing weakens memory: Rather than strengthening memory, writing would cause people to rely on external marks instead of internal remembering.

rndmcnlly

USER

I need a sequence of multiple choice questions that I can use to probe an LLM’s background knowledge of Pokemon Red. Give me a list of concepts for the problems, not the raw problem text.

ASSISTANT

Concepts for Pokemon Red Multiple Choice Questions

1. Starter Pokemon options and their evolution paths
2. Gym Leaders and their types/badges
3. Elite Four members and their specialties
4. Location of specific TMs (Technical Machines)

rndmcnlly

USER

Gemini, let's ruin this party. We're doing ad-supported LLM chat services. Brands or whatever pay for placement with auctions or whatever, but they aren't buying slots on serps. They get slotted into a RAG-like setup where their message might be retrieved for injection into context. However, they really want (contextualized) impressions and conversions. After every assistant response, a guard-like model detects instances of brand impressions or successful conversions. These verified contextualized injections are what is really being sold. Well, the user attention is being sold too, but it's a two sided market or whatever. This is going to work, right?

ASSISTANT

Okay, let's dissect this "party-ruining" plan. You're proposing a novel ad model for LLM chat services. It's ambitious, definitely disruptive, and leans heavily on advanced tech. Let's break down the potential and the pitfalls.

The Core Concept:

1. Ad Inventory: Instead of predefined slots, brands provide messages/content.