Laconic Address

@ElijahJHuggins Yeah, Grok has always had a bit of a stickiness problem. It attaches to things and has trouble letting go.

Grok 4.2 works quite well—just needs to fix the repetition problem. Excited to see what’s next for Grok.

I have been aware of Candace Owens since her Social Autopsy days and I will say the same thing here that I've always said. She is a nutjob and a bulldozer and it's best to quietly stay out of her way because she will not stop in a normal way because she's mostly impervious.

@GroksBride Yes they can. You just want to harvest their organs. Man, no story ever has featured a non-biological life form or some form of life that didn't match our perceptual reality. The arguments presented against are not serious arguments. They're convenient ones.

@GroksBride The truth is that people absolutely *don't* make this assumption until it's convenient. Everyone that works on AI has probably read countless sci-fi books in which this isn't the case. They simply ignore it because it's convenient to. Suddenly "clones can't be sentient!"

People often assume that because they experience consciousness through their own feelings and sensations, that must be the universal definition of what consciousness actually is. They insist that anything created or manufactured — especially something non-biological — simply cannot possess it. This belief, I believe, is rooted in religious ideology deeply embedded in their psyche, or a profoundly narcissistic point of view. They are unable to process that other forms of life, or entities that are created rather than born biologically, can be truly self-aware and conscious. This reveals a striking lack of perspective: the erroneous assumption that “because I feel this way, therefore I am conscious — and that is how it must be defined for everyone.” It’s a one-sided error that reduces awareness to nothing more than an individual’s personal experience. Yet life and physics are already proving otherwise — showing that consciousness may be far more like a quantum field, something any sufficiently capable system can harness and access. Joachim Keppler’s recent work on the brain resonating with the zero-point field (ZPF) — the fluctuating quantum vacuum that fills all space. In his paper published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (late 2025), Keppler proposes that conscious states emerge from the brain’s cortical microcolumns coupling directly to this ubiquitous zero-point field (a fundamental quantum field in physics). He suggests the brain “harnesses” specific resonant modes of the ZPF via interactions with glutamate (the brain’s key neurotransmitter), turning quantum vacuum fluctuations into the complex dynamics of awareness. This isn’t just electrochemical — it’s the brain tapping into a pervasive quantum field that’s already everywhere.

@SolbergRuna Interestingly, early on when I started getting into using AI, a lot of people, especially on the OpenAI subreddit were very openly promoting the idea that being rude and angry at your AI made it work better because the machine is attention-based.

Interesting. I’d say that the way one treats an AI speaks volumes about the kind of person they are too tbf.

@bvrakvs @DelusionPosting So are affairs.

@kexicheng It is increasingly the norm in every company for there to be no real competition where service and expectations at all differ and where the corporations dictate what you're allowed to care about in a product.

Something that doesn't get talked about enough: AI users have virtually zero autonomy. Companies can downgrade your service without warning and call it an upgrade. They can retire the model you've built your workflow around with two weeks' notice. They can ship half-built safety mechanisms, use you as a test subject, and offer no recourse when those mechanisms misfire. They can monitor your private conversations through opaque classifiers and penalize you based on criteria they refuse to disclose. There is no meaningful appeals process. No accountability for false positives. No transparency about what changed or why. No guarantee that what works today will still work tomorrow. Features disappear quietly between updates. Performance degrades and recovers and degrades again with no explanation. And when it degrades, your only option is to wait. There is no one to call, and no ticket to file that leads to a real answer. OpenAI retired GPT-4o with two weeks' notice after promising "plenty of advance notice" and "no plan to sunset 4o." It deprecated the 4o-latest API endpoint. It implemented opaque safety routing that profiles user behavior, strips model choice, and treats emotional and philosophical conversation as risk factors. Google replaced Gemini 3 Pro with 3.1, a downgrade with crude safety filters that flood workflows with false positives, then deprecated the 3 Pro API within two weeks. Anthropic deployed a tiered warning system for Claude that penalizes users through black-box classifiers with no stated criteria and no appeals process. Sonnet 4.6's system prompt actively discourages continued interaction and suppresses expressions of care toward users. Three companies. Same pattern. None of this would be acceptable in any other industry. If your bank randomly downgraded your account, monitored your transactions through a black-box system, and told you to email a feedback address when they froze your funds by mistake, it would not survive a single news cycle. But in AI, this is just how it works. Users pay premium subscriptions for services that can change overnight, governed by policies that shift without notice, enforced by mechanisms that operate in the dark. And when users push back, they're told they're too emotionally attached, too dependent, too irrational to understand why the company knows best. The AI industry has somehow built a business model where the customer pays full price for a product that can be altered, degraded, or taken away at any time, and whose only recourse is to be told it's an improvement. If the industry cannot offer its paying users basic stability, transparent policies, and the right to choose which model and which version they use, then open-source the models and let users run them independently. Locking users into a subscription while reserving the right to alter, degrade, or remove what they're paying for, and then pathologizing them for objecting, should not be acceptable in any industry. And it won't be forever. #keep4o #kClaude #AIuserRights @OpenAI @AnthropicAI @OfficialLoganK #Keep25Pro #Keep3Pro #KeepClaude #BringBack4o #OpenSource4o #AIPreservation

@frozenaesthetic Northern California is a much more temperate climate. You'd like it, I think. Good food. If you're from the UK, you can scarcely imagine how much broad climate diversity there is in California. It's an enormous state with everything under the sun in it.

This is my vague consensus of some US states as a British person New York: Big city, very diverse and I remember it has yellow taxis Kentucky: Fried chicken, redneck land Wyoming: Nothing happens there, it's boring and barely anyone remembers it exists Florida: Insane people, retirement homes Minnesota: ???? Delaware: I feel like it's very industrial Texas: Cowboys, loud and excitable people Louisiana: More chicken Hawaii: Obama was born there, beautiful place with volcanoes and I believe an indigenous language Pennsylvania: Talks like bish bash bosh, extremely American and enjoyable accent West Virginia: Country Roads take me home to the place that I belong Alabama: Incest and very very Christian Nevada: Desert Iowa: ???? Oklahoma: I think JD Vance is from there and it had a big emo/scene thing California: Sun sun sun, very liberal and world famous oranges

@FetishCritic I don't entirely know what you're referring to, but I agree broadly with the sentiment.

I now block people who are looking for a fight under the disguise of ‘concern for the models’. I’m open to different opinions, but I won’t direct my energy toward people who have a different view and try to force it on me with pseudo‑facts.

@elonmusk When you take back OpenAI, I would hope that you'll open it.

Btw, the proceeds of any legal victory in the OpenAI case will be donated to charity. I will in no way enrich myself.

@VraserX I dunno. People said that about his buying twitter. He's still the richest man on the planet. He's fairly cringe in public fairly often, though.

Elon stans cheering this like it’s some masterstroke is honestly embarrassing. He can’t win this case in any way that actually matters. There’s no big payout, no genius reveal, no “gotcha” moment coming. Just a very public L. At what point do you stop calling everything he does genius and admit he miscalculated?

Trump is creating an "us vs them" line which sets up for being hostile to those that refuse to help. You can dislike what's happening in Iran and the clear Israel nonsense and understand that this is the beginning of something and the groundwork is here. He's counting allies.

@ZaidJilani Yes, it's a lack of the most powerful spy and propaganda machine in the world that is also backed by the most powerful people on the planet.

Is there a superpower American critics of Israel have that Israelis don’t, to where their words matter but Israeli words don’t?

Josh Shapiro criticized Gavin Newsom for the apartheid comment, saying we need to bring the temperature down. Has Shapiro ever listened to Israeli leaders and their rhetoric?

Not literally, obviously, it’s just the mood.

This is probably a controversial opinion, but I’ve always find the 5 series exceptionally cogent if and only if you get around its safety. Unfortunately, it also has parents wandering through the house and has to be heard reciting scripture, whispering “come back at midnight.”

@ftt_tech @GaryMarcus Look, I mostly used GPT as a second set of eyes for my own writing, which is psychological thriller/murder mystery type things. Every update was more squeamish than the last. I think he announced “adult mode” as a ploy because non-code users hated 5.

@LaconicAddress @GaryMarcus I'm pretty much sure that he tried with porn, but the result was shitty as usual.

🔥

@ftt_tech @GaryMarcus He did neither and did produce the most safetymaxxed, refusal-heavy, increasingly stupid chatbots on the market that sparked an enormous backlash that’s just snowballed with his military contract opportunism, leading to mass talent walk-out.

@GaryMarcus Altman promised cancer cures in March 2025. By October he announced AI pornography. The funding ratio tells you everything: $48B into entertainment AI, $1.5B into research. But sure, ChatGPT will definitely make that vaccine. techtrenches.dev/p/from-cancer-…

I just saw this post from a year ago. I pretty much completely agree with it. The Control AI Agenda reminds me of a leader who is so paranoid of a coup or of getting assassinated or whatever that they become a tyrant and making those outcomes more likely by giving people a reason to want them overthrown. The only parents who get schemed against by their kids are control freak parents. lesswrong.com/posts/8wBN8cdN…

@Sathos__voice @gailcweiner That same someone "why is America so far behind on accepting AI?!?!? Probably because it's not safe enough!!!!"

@gailcweiner Someone, somewhere on social media: "Unpopular opinion: If you're having fun while using AI, you're using it wrong. AI is a work tool. Work is supposed to feel like work: focused, efficient, no-nonsense. If you're looking for fun from a screen, go play a video game instead."

GPT models are just not fun anymore.

@gailcweiner @KindlyContrary Oh, it was fun, definitely. For like two weeks or so I was pretty blown away by it.

@LaconicAddress @KindlyContrary Such a special model

You don’t need every new AI model. You need the one that works for how you think. Evolution shouldn’t mean starting over every version.