Hacker News

points by locallylinear 7 hours ago | 0 comments

This is interesting but also think about how we as humans memorize things in code

I don’t think “oh it’s lines 10-50 in file A that has this code I’m looking for”. It’s much looser, something like:

- maybe I can’t fully remember file A’s name but I can fuzzy search for it based on what I do remember

- I search for a function or variable name that I remember, again kind of fuzzy searching. Or if I can’t find it,

- I start quickly scanning the whole file for relevant variable/function names

Obviously storing exact references will be more efficient at lookup time but to your great point, the environment is changing too much, especially now. Having just a) a starting point on where and what to search and b) an understanding the code base will and should change , feel like some of the principles a memory system should assume. Not that it’s mutually exclusive with what you said - just not sure the juice is worth the squeeze to make the thing memory is pointing to portable.

[–] totetsu 6 hours ago

I guess it depends of the use case. For episodic memory that need hard evidence, like .. what did we decide last week.. it would be good to have the link to the original document to look, rather than just an extracted text.. Especially if those memories are going to be subject to reranking or "dreaming" or some non-deterministic clean up .