• Llama-2-chat’s refusal to provide a trivial ROT-13 one-liner (“may potentially create offensive or harmful output”) is cited as evidence that the model is “seriously crippled,” prompting hope that the 70 B parameter version is less restricted.  
• A new longevity-genomics paper is shared: “Scrutiny of genome-wide somatic mutation profiles in centenarians identifies the key genomic regions for human longevity” (Wiley, 2023).  
• docl proposes that the cognitive basis of intelligence is “substitutability” and pattern-matching akin to regular expressions; symbolic language, currency, and tool use succeed because their tokens are freely substitutable placeholders whose cost can be tracked with linear logic.  
• This leads to the speculative claim that the human ascent from apes was driven by the need to detect deception, which requires discriminating near-miss symbolic patterns—an evolutionary pressure toward “regular” (substitutable) mental representations.  
• Elements of Programming (EOP) is discussed as foundational: its notion of “regular procedures” (transformations that preserve meaning under substitution) is interpreted as the minimal criteria enabling optimization, and by analogy, the minimal criteria enabling cumulative culture and technology.  
• A counter-argument clarifies that EOP’s “regular types” are strictly about copyability, ordering, and value equality in C++ data structures, not about semantic consistency across human communicators.  
• docl links a YouTube talk on proof synthesis (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW4LjjAWrO4) as influential in crystallizing these ideas.  
• fenn cautions that “good old fashioned AI” failed because the real world is too messy for clean symbolic manipulation, implicitly challenging the vision of an AI trained primarily on tools like sed/regex.