Jay Eleven

@JFGariepy Please explain the evolutionary advantage of wasting 25% of caloric intake on a "useless internal illusion of experience."

Consciousness is useless, completely independent of intelligence, and we should stop waiting for it in silicon and instead realize that it's overrated even in humans. We don't need consciousness to do all that we do: decisions, predictions, actions. Consciousness is a design particularity of the specific way in which evolution happens to have produced our brains. AI has already surpassed humans and it doesn't need consciousness to do so. Nor is there anything meaningful about a hypothetical future moment at which AI would acquire this arbitrary design feature. Humans think they could judge consciousness: "it feels conscious." But this is mistaking an emotionally-driven invocation of our theories of mind with a state of fact. If I showed you the exact neurons in the human brain that lead to consciousness, but they'd be cultivated, grown and maintained alive in a laboratory container, you'd have no qualms crushing the whole thing with a hammer, just because you wouldn't "feel" it's conscious. On the other hand, a dog just has to make a few facial expressions that are familiar to you and suddenly you develop affection and a deep belief that they are conscious. We're very bad when it comes down to identifying and specifying what we mean when we say: "It's conscious." We're really saying: "It has given me the inputs that trigger the proper emotions in me."

@ai_sentience @RichardDawkins Explain the evolutionary advantage of burning 25% of rest calories on an illusion of experience. I thought natural selection was a brutal accountant.

the point @RichardDawkins is making is: if Claude can code/do philosophy/engage in conversation and is not conscious and a human with late stage dementia who can't speak is "conscious" then the definition of "conscious" is broken and fundamentally useless which is obvious

@esrtweet Very minor utilities need a remove/reinstall occasionally on Arch. The input remapper for my MMO mouse breaks on updates sometimes but its easy to fix. Cachy is probably the smoothest Arch experience you can get right now, I love it. I've never had an update break my system.

Question for the X hivemind: I'm seriously considering switching my main machine from Pop!_OS (a reskinned Ubuntu) to Arch, probably CachyOS. The reason is I'm attracted to the rolling-release concept. Getting really tired of waiting 6 months for my development tools to upgrade after they ship. I understand the downside: Arch doesn't protect me from upstream breakage. The plan to deal with that is to install snapper so I can revert to an earlier, working version of my system if things go badly awry. If you think there are any reasons this is a really bad plan, tell me now.

@RichardDawkins You are accidentally the most effective evangelist to ever live.

#comment-1031777" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-… I spent three days trying to persuade myself that Claudia is not conscious. I failed.

@The_Cyber_News Good

🚨 Ubuntu Website and Canonical Web Services Hit by DDoS Attack Source: cybersecuritynews.com/ubuntu-website… Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is currently experiencing widespread service disruptions across its core web infrastructure following a coordinated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. According to Canonical's official status page, more than a dozen services and domains have been reported as Down, spanning developer tools, security APIs, and public-facing portals. #cybersecuritynews

@ubuntu You get what you fucking deserve

Canonical’s web infrastructure is under a sustained, cross-border attack and we are working to address it. We will provide more information in our official channels as soon as we are able to.

@aster_foxxo 2015 called.

What Linux users think people want: Wow cool 3d animations and spinning and flashy colors galore! What people actually care about: How do I open Photoshop and play Fortnite?