Stateless

An endless essay in understanding the human culture of technology, written by Jason Walsh, writer, inter alia.

Shut up and just tell me what the image on the front page is!

L'éléphant bleu, a litho by Henri Matisse.

Why Stateless?

Firstly, it's a joke. I live abroad, away from family and friends, and my family itself has a long history of emigration. Always fleeing.

Finding a decent domain was tricky, given the obvious choice (after .com) was .io, but, oddly enough, I found the thought of a web site named Stateless with a domain registered in the Chagos Islands rather irksome, so here we all are at stateless.zone.

The real reason, though, if any meaning is more real than any other meaning, is that statelessness is a concept from computing, one that users of artificial intelligence (AI) should have a think about. In computing, stateless refers to a system or process that doesn't retain any memory of past interactions. Each request is treated as completely independent—the system handles it using only the information contained in that request itself, with no stored context from previous exchanges.

For the record, large language model (LLM) AIs are stateless: every time you interact, the entire conversation is shoved back through the system. It's a good thing artificial intelligence does not actually exist, as that would be a fairly cruel way to conduct a conversation.

The classic contrast is with stateful systems, which do remember. A traditional shopping cart that tracks what you've added across page loads is stateful. A calculator app that just computes whatever you hand it right now is stateless.

For side-B of the record, the term artificial intelligence is a pox as it does not at all describe the technology. I propose we re-name so-called LLMs as not AI but correlative computation.

What gets published here?

One long essay each week, a series of notes, and copies of relevant articles I have published elsewhere.

In the case of the latter, the texts will be directly copied from the publication they featured in, including any changes made by editors, with only a quick copy clean and hyperlinking into the broader ongoing essay.

What is an endless hypertext essay?

It's a thing from a past future that never arrived. You're looking at it.

Why are you writing it, and why should I care?

Simply, I am interested. I can't speak for you.

Shouldn't this be a wiki, really?

Yes. I wish I had realised that before I started, but, again, here we all are. Good thing I didn't use HyperCard, and I almost did.

Is there a start page?

Not as such, no, but if you want to see the index, such as it is, it's linked to here. Should be of some use to people.

What do I get if I subscribe?

Nothing, at the moment. The newsletter facility is a function of the software this site uses. I may add add something for 'members' later but, at this precise moment anyway, that is not my goal.

How can I contact you?

The usual channels.