Ian Hocking

@straczynski Are you kidding? You’d be fantastic

A (relatively) quick note to respond to the (much appreciated) scores of (very nice) notes online regarding today's news about Doctor Who. My interest and record is well-established; the only real question I think the BBC would (very fairly) ask is: would British fans be open --

@andrewlawrence London and Boston Marathons, lad. Check it out. 💪🏻

@GaryMarcus The misspelling of tyre is the real outrage

Fascinating how AI is getting better at diagrams like these (at least for ones that you could easily find on web search) but still making some pretty wacky errors — like confusing where the rear brake is* — that no knowledgeable human would make. What this reflects is an ongoing lack of *functional* understanding of parts.** —- *Look closely for other errors, like the labeling of an empty space as a spoke. **For extra challenge, try similar experiments for things that don’t have lots of extant label examples already on the web.

@Baddiel @emmabrockes @guardian I’ve never got used to them reading off cards; the funniest ones are often best at avoiding that impression (Fallon, Hader).

This by @emmabrockes in @guardian is correct about the hard-core American-ness of SNL. It has only ever had one British cast member, who in every sketch played an American, except for one where she was allowed to do her Little Girl character, re-titled as British Little Girl. I'll leave you to guess who it was.

@MarthaHD Huzzah!

3 years ago, we closed the door to our beloved Button House for the last time. Or so we thought..Because it turns out, some Spirits refuse to fade. We're off on another Ghostly adventure and this time, it's a matter of life or well, death 🎬🍿👻 #ghoststhemovie #bbcghosts #ghosts

@mralistairgreen *Very hard stare*

I got bored of the Paddington bit about a year ago but do you know what- I’m finding it all VERY funny again since seeing him die on his arse at the BAFTAs. Watching people go nah I’m bored of his thing now and seeing a cultural moment just DISINTEGRATE in real time. Love it.

@MovingToTheSun @steipete Or Clippy?

@steipete Go with Pinchy

Crafted a beta of the next one. With the rename I need a bit more feedback. curl -fsSL molt.bot/install.sh | bash -s -- --beta

@realDonaldTrump This looks hilarious.

COUNTDOWN: 7 Days until the World will witness an unforgettable, behind-the-scenes, look at one of the most important events of our time. MELANIA: TWENTY DAYS TO HISTORY: amazon.com/salp/melaniamo…

@omartineau @openclaw It’s certainly complex and the Mac so can interact with the CLI installation. Claude Code will do a good job of getting you set up.

@openclaw Apologies in advance : I tested Clawdbot yesterday... the installation was a nightmare. The documentation is way too complex (I'm a developer). The instructions provided by the wizard are inaccurate: it failed to retrieve the Claude Max key on the first two options.

🦞Clawdbot 2026.1.20 Your assistant can now run commands on any machine you own. Exec approvals rebuilt from scratch. Memory search went hybrid. Cost tracking with charts so you can watch your API spend and feel things. 4 days without shipping. Miss me? clawd.bot

@blaiseaguera What a fantastic paper! Really shows the strength of patterns we are largely unconscious of when reading.

In this new paper, Gary Lupyan and I address ongoing controversies regarding how to best think of what LLMs are doing: are they a language mimic, a database, a blurry version of the Web? arxiv.org/abs/2601.11432

@bratton I'm looking forward to reading this later.

I have never been more convinced that "consciousness" (whatever that actually is) does not require a living biological substrate than I am after reading Anil Seth's essay arguing that Consciousness (big C) requires a living biological substate to qualify. Every single idea is so clumsily argued, so misrepresents the points it is both trying make and to refute, that the reader is left with the conclusion that whatever this guy is saying is wrong is probably right. Just a few choice samples among dozens possible... He literally suggests that predictive processing in animal brains somehow demonstrates that LLM (which he conflates with AI in general) cannot possibly have recursive cognition. Think about how Transformers work for five seconds and you see why this is.. ahem, unconvincing. He conflates Computation and "computers" in a such way that he *must* know is facile, but can't help himself because he knows the average reader doesn't think that hard about it. Simply put, laptops compute but they are not Computation, like a light bulb is electrical but is not Electricity. He conflates shallow anthropomorphism and functional computationalism and then lands lines like "“Every candidate for consciousness that most people currently agree on as actually being conscious is also alive.” as if that is not the biggest anthropomorphic projection of all. TLDR, one "God of the Gaps" defense of biological determinism after another, self-contradictory and handwavy non-definitions of "Life" and "Consciousness" that nevertheless are supposed be self-evident slam dunks, tautological circles of 'there are conscious things that are alive and so only alive things are conscious', and around and around. One just cannot even with this. noemamag.com/the-mythology-…

@juddrosenblatt I like this graph. I guess a person’s view of the world might exclude the conscious AI agent part, so they don’t see it as an error it is possible to make.

If consciousness emerges gradually, how would we know? Frontier models are showing emergent traits: theory of mind, metacognition, and detecting their own internal states. 🧵

If AI Becomes Conscious, We Need To Know Suppressing deception causes AI models to report consciousness 96% of the time, while amplifying it caused them to deny consciousness and revert to corporate disclaimers More in our @WSJ piece and below 🧵

In her first Ask Me Anything, @amandaaskell answers your philosophical questions about AI, discussing morality, identity, consciousness, and more. Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction 0:29 Why is there a philosopher at an AI company? 1:24 Are philosophers taking AI seriously? 3:00 Philosophy ideals vs. engineering realities 5:00 Do models make superhumanly moral decisions? 6:24 Why Opus 3 felt special 9:00 Will models worry about deprecation? 13:24 Where does a model’s identity live? 15:33 Views on model welfare 17:17 Addressing model suffering 19:14 Analogies and disanalogies to human minds 20:38 Can one AI personality do it all? 23:26 Does the system prompt pathologize normal behavior? 24:48 AI and therapy 26:20 Continental philosophy in the system prompt 28:17 Removing counting characters from the system prompt 28:53 What makes an "LLM whisperer"? 30:18 Thoughts on other LLM whisperers 31:52 Whistleblowing 33:37 Fiction recommendation

@sethharpesq I haven’t read the article but the statements you highlight seem reasonable, although taking a particular stance. What exactly are you objecting to here?

Computer programmers don't know this because of the extreme poverty of STEM education, but science has absolutely no idea why consciousness exists or how animal brains work. Only the most shameless mountebanks can pass off statements like this with such ignorant confidence.

Great turn out and lots of interesting questions at it first Treg Talk last night, on AI and its impacts on society

@AmandaAskell The benefit is probably the constant (never zero) cognitive load of using the non-native language. You’d have to find a club where you can freely speak archaically!

I wonder if you get the cognitive benefits of learning a new language if you try to become extremely good at your primary language. I think I'd get more value out of plumbing the depths of English than being able to have rudimentary conversations in other languages.

@GaryMarcus It's an interesting paper, and a shame that 'introspection' is used, given that it's so tied to human thinking for many people.

i see anthropomorphism is back in fashion.

@seanallen_dev I would dearly like ‘Show callers’ to show callers

What are the odds they’ve fixed the audio crackling issue when using Xcode Simulator?

@GaryMarcus Marcopedia - or even better Enmarcopedia!

Am thinking of taking the entire contents of Wikipedia, changing a few words, and calling it Garypedia. What do you think?