Mo

dawkins is an idiot in a very specific way, but he’s not idiotic enough to actually think claude is conscious. what materialists/new atheists like him mean when they say AI may be conscious is not so much that AI is conscious as much as it is an attempt to downplay human consciousness. they’re essentially making a point. “hey, how ridiculous i sound right now, is how ridiculous you sound thinking human consciousness is universally central.” or, “hey, see that dumb llm that you and i clearly agree isn’t conscious? yup, you’re made of the exact same stuff. see how stupid you sound now?” there’s also unfortunately no way to rebut them without disclaiming you are using poetry. you cannot use “science” to plead the case because science is a materialist tool. it is a highly sequestered arena in which we define a rigid speech protocol. its whole trick is the calculus of dividing the whole and annotating its parts. this clever hack works for some things, some small pockets of reducibility, but at large is quite futile. neuroscientist philosopher iain mcgilchrist argues the materialist trap is basically a failure to see wholes, dominated by the brain left-hemisphere’s proclivity to divide and conquer. the left hemisphere cannot make sense of experience, music, and time. these are the domain of the right hemisphere which experiences “flow” rather than discrete moments. he describes patients with right hemisphere damage who just couldn’t make sense of time in their life. they saw the frames but couldn’t see the movie. you can dissect the image to find the story but all you’ll get are pixels. you can dissect a violin to find the music but all you’ll get is wood pulp. consciousness is a whole. it’s a flow. and science doesn’t really know what to do with that.

@Spectrumofreas1 chief lil’ bro officer

ok this finally explains why greg is a billionaire at openai. he’s just a really chill dude!

@Hofmann43 @greg16676935420 the other greg

@atmoio the greg @greg16676935420 ?

@pid1_ indeed. but it makes sense why he was never able to secure a C role as the company grew

@atmoio Every team needs a Greg. The person who makes everyone feel taken care of so engineers can focus. Underrated role at any stage

@chicfryrice the concerned mother role

@atmoio I love those types of people

@DanielleFong yes very greggy

has extremely high gregness. you can even call it gregarious

@thdxr 😭

cuz ur mom be load bearing

@jaredef is it hedging? it seems like it means something that is integral, crucial, has many dependents

@atmoio “load-bearing” is hedging language Claude uses for something that is important but hasn’t been articulated yet. george-lakoff.com/wp-content/upl…

why is everyone saying load-bearing all of a sudden

@SteveStricklan6 🎯

@atmoio Will have to delve into this…

@ctjlewis i’ve even heard it on some podcasts recently. it’s escaped digital containment lol

@atmoio I almost said something about it a few days ago because last week, it was like every part of the codebase was either “load-bearing” or “not load-bearing.” Probably used it 10x in a session.

I think Claude has started saying it more, I noticed that a few weeks ago. Bizarre where their language patterns now flow outward to humans. You just got RLMF’d.

@edzitron haha dude i searched load-bearing on x and saw you using it in 2024 claude learned it from you 😂

@atmoio Man this pisses me off. I love the term load-bearing! Still the ai industry scorns me so

@HumanWatchVsAI ha, way overthinking it 😂 i think people may be looking up a definition not current events

@atmoio You're one clever dude -- writing a simple self-referential post that seeks to ride on a search-term trend :)

many people are experiencing that prompt + review on mature codebases takes as long if not longer than writing by hand. not for everything of course and sometimes you only find out retrospectively cost goes up because now you have same amount of humans who now also need a token budget

@atmoio Why do you think time and cost of software production will rise?

the future of software engineering seems uncontroversially prompting + code review. startups will skip the code review because they’re racing against time. larger/serious orgs will take code review very seriously. llms can do code review, but my guess is that because they have to search through large space, it will be as expensive to have say mythos review your code as it would be to have a senior dev. based on budget: $: prompting only $$: low grade llm review $$$: mid grade llm + dev review $$$$: high grade llm + sr dev review btw, software (past the bootstrapping phase) will get more expensive to make and take more time. quality will remain exactly the same as when humans were doing it: shit.