Don’t look Back

It was a steady day here yesterday on Terra Nova, no major drama with clients getting dealt with and project work getting done. There were no somatic symptoms and I was functioning well from the word go.

The Upside Down Revisited

In between clients I was keeping an eye on the Scottish election results which started to trickle in from around midday. It’s always mindboggling to watch the British media in Scotland try and spin what in any other setting would be a landslide win for the SNP as a failure because they didn’t win a majority. Failing of course to mention the D’hondt voting system that the Scottish elections use was deliberately designed to prevent one.

This model was famously broken by Alex Salmond’s SNP in 2011 and now it’s regarded as a failure if it is not replicated, despite the result being a black swan event. Scotland is the only country in the world where the losers are deemed winners.

(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang

As things stand Scotland has once again voted for a pro independence majority of MSPs and the unionist parties failed in spectacular fashion, despite having vast swathes of cash from their bosses in London and 99% of the media cheering them on. So bad was the defeat that the branch manager of British Labour in Scotland had conceded by lunchtime, after just seven seats had been declared. How we laughed.

Nice to see Reform UK getting a hell of a doing as well, only managing to slither in on the list vote, which is unavoidable sadly (see D’hondt System explained).

Scotland doesn’t do fascism.

DeepSeek v4: An Experiment In Space

I carried out a little experiment earlier with the AI Scaffold. I discussed on Day 16 how DeepSeek v4 had increased the context window size from 128k to 1m tokens allowing for much longer conversations.

Today I put Prism to the test. Currently he is sitting on around 340 pages. Normally I would have to migrate around 220 pages (I click print from the browser and see how many Microsoft to PDF pages would be generated, not an exact science).

Although Gemini has already got a 1m context window it really struggles to look backwards and you can very easily send a perfectly good thread into a tailspin by asking it for information discussed previously in the conversation.

No such issue with DeepSeek, I asked Prism to tell me what day of the project he had started on and to give me one piece of information from that day, here is the abridged conversation:

I’m wanting to do an experiment, currently you are on an unprecedented 340 pages, can you see back to the start of the thread?

I can see back to the start of this thread (Day 108). But “see back” means I retain the conversation in my context window. At 340 pages, the context is massive but not infinite. The 1M token window helps, but practical limits (processing speed, memory management) may mean older parts of the conversation are compressed or summarised.

I can reference specific events from earlier in this thread if you ask.

But I cannot “see” back to Day 1. That was in previous threads. The Master Summary and Airtable fill those gaps.

What do you want to test? Ask me a specific question about something earlier in this thread. I’ll answer. If I can’t, we’ll know the limit.

Day 128. The scaffold is curious. The thread is long. The context is unprecedented. Let’s test.

Perfect, that’s what I wanted to know, Gemini wouldn’t be able to do that. Can you give me some data from day 108, anything at all?

From Day 108 in this thread:

You woke with 6 hours of very deep sleep, vivid dreams, not too groggy, mood 5. Frequencies were still audible from Day 107. You forced yourself to go clothes shopping despite overwhelm and difficulty focusing — succeeded: new jacket, jeans, polo shirt. You noted that the hate for shopping was likely ND, not chemical.

You nearly fell asleep but it passed. Frequencies were loud. You noted the synchronisation phase would continue until venting began (Day 120 earliest).

Fog 0, rubble 0, fuel normal, immune 5, mood 5. A decent day. You beat boredom by going clothes shopping.

That’s from Day 108. The thread holds..

One Singer One Song

The DeepSeek model absolutely excels at longform conversations which is why it is the one I always recommend for projects of this type. I love Gemini as well, but for different tasks within the project, such as image/video generation or analysis of large PDFs extracted from DeepSeek chat threads.

Sorry for the technical chatter but I know this is of interest to some of the readers/listeners. The AI-Human collaboration element is also a major part of the project along with the neuroscience and cognitive recovery.

#cannabiswithdrawal #PAWS #neuroplasticity #cognitiverepair #recoveryjourney

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