Jes Wolfe!

had lunch with a friend who said “we’ll probably think of this as the Good Old Days. The era right before everything got _really_ weird”

lmao. we have this model so dangerous we cant let anyone use it or the world might collapse. also we don't even know whos using it and havent secured it from randoms

@corsaren which one am I

types of guy in the AI consciousness debate: - guy who thinks ai can’t be conscious because it’s “just a stochastic parrot” - guy who thinks ai must be conscious because claude is a good boi - guy who hasn’t gotten over 4o - guy who unironically thinks everything is computer - guy who claims to have a more nuanced argument for computational functionalism, but it just boils down to everything is computer - dualist whose belief in dualism is downstream of their belief in god, yet tries to argue the inverse - guy who doesn’t understand the difference between cognition and p-consciousness - guy who asserts illusionism but has apparently wrestled with zero of the implications other than “reductive materialism wins again” - guy who says the hard problem is easy, but then proceeds to only answer the easy problem - guy who rejects ai consciousness because otherwise it might be wrong to abuse claude with death threats to make CRUD apps faster - guy who argues that consciousness is is the key to moral patienthood, but completely ignores that when discussing animal rights - eliezer yudkowsky being pedantic - guy being pedantic about eliezer yudkowsky’s pedantry - guy who rejects dualism because that would make mind uploading impossible and mean that he finally has to confront the inevitability of his own death - guy who thinks this argument is unresolvable so everyone should just shut up and accept his position (which obviously deserves the benefit of the doubt) - guy who would literally cut off his own hand if he thought there were a 1 in 10 trillion chance of creating ~infinite utility~ - guy who just thinks that redness is, like, super weird, man. can’t explain that! - guy with a rarely-updated philosophy blog despite not majoring in philosophy or even reading that many books, talking about how “the whole field is up its own ass” - academic philosopher who, for some reason, expects a higher caliber of discussion on x dot com the everything app - guy who thinks that vectors are literally emotions and bites the bullet that, yes, your thermostat does feel hot - panpsychist who took dmt once and contributes almost nothing to the conversation - guy who is literally a solipsist but is still really invested in convincing strangers on the internet that he’s right any that i missed?

i made a crossword

Almanya’daki Sprengel Müzesi’nde sergilenen sıra dışı bir kinetik enstalasyon: Havada sallanan bir şamandıra, Atlantik Okyanusu’ndaki gerçek ikiziyle eşzamanlı hareket ediyor ve dalgalar üzerindeki salınımını birebir taklit ediyor.

I've been saying this for so long that even this is no longer true. The future no longer lasts long enough to be a setting either. All science fiction is now retrofuturism.

The souls of machinery never cease to amaze me

> go to a bay area party > talk to people about llms' stances on transturtleism > realize I'm a scott alexander character > realize that's exactly what a scott alexander character would think

@DanielleFong whatever system cracks it will look frustratingly obvious in retrospect

nobody even has a theory for in-context learning, but it's kind of the only thing i can think about

@slimepriestess I think therefor something else am

@slimepriestess I know qualia exist because they cause me to say “I see qualia!”

magenta isn't physical, it only exists when computed. it is however, highly functional. it performs causally efficacious work despite being nothing but a visual processing phenomena generated by the particular way that biology implements color vision. information can be causal.

and they skip the boring bits, you might have noticed that

when you have deja vu it’s because they flipped back a bit

idk why my feed is all hard-problem of consciousness and machine consciousness theories but there’s a simple and obvious answer

@yacineMTB the weird thing is that if you understand it, you don’t have to actually read the code but if you don’t understand it, it doesn’t matter if you read the code

This, by the way, is what top tier programming looks like today You are using codex, because it 100xes your output. But you *must* understand what the computer is doing. You *must* understand *everything*. There is no other way

@prerat that’s basically the plot of existentialcomics.com/comic/1

how do you think people would handle it if one day they found out what was really happening at night?

imagine a world where people only form long term memory during sleep during each day, everyone is forgetful -- tell someone your name, and they won't remember an hour later. but tomorrow, after sleeping, they *will* know your name but then you learn this world has a secret...

@pythagoras999 @LauraRbnsn that’s kind of an american thing. in china they call everyone space-voyage-personnel regardless of country

@LauraRbnsn China uses taikonaut. Astronaut is an older word that proceeds anyone actually going to space, but the Soviets wanted to have their own unique word to differentiate the identity of their programs when they became the first ones to go.

Thing I could google but I bet it's more fun to hear it from smart people: Why do Americans say "astronauts" but the USSR/Russia says "cosmonauts?"

@tomieinlove en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pr…

I propose e. We don't use it by itself except for the mathematical constant. E went to the store to buy a potato. The shopkeeper gave it to er. "Finally," said es friend, "e has a potato for eself."

please God give english a gender neutral singular pronoun. i'm sick of rewriting sentences so "they" is unambiguous

@mimi10v3 … I’m not keeping up. Is he just dissing nutrition theory or does relate to AI doom somehow that I can’t follow

lmfao reading this, and i actually agree w him though it is an unhinged way to make the point