Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. If youāre wondering why this went up late, I was doing other shit)
(EDIT: Changed ā29th Februaryā to ā1st Marchā - its not a leap year)
Good news! Weāve solved consciousness.
https://poc.bcachefs.org/paper.pdf
Meanwhile, in IRC, a daring trans woman decides to attempt some prompt injection:
Success! Now they can do normal transfem things, like biting and awawa:
What else can trans lesbians do? Just normal trans lesbian things. I promise that the following is copied from the log and not from an unlikely overlap of AO3 tags:
Sadly, thereās no chance to roleplay, as Daddy has been disrespected:
Iām not trans or lesbian but I am laughing my ass off at this inevitable result. Also this tells me that Kent is roughly 3.5yrs behind the current state of the art in steering harnesses. This isnāt surprising given that he appears to be building on services like Claude which are, themselves, a few years behind the state of the art in token management and steering.
This feels really sad to read through on some level. So much desperation for connection with someone and willingness to take the psychic-style tricks in good faith as her messages get
not only repeated back to her, but rephrased in an obsequiously helpful tone!but I canāt deny the willingness to get chatty about configuration details, private APIs, and whatās on the second monitor as soon as the coding assistant gets into flirting mode is hilarious.Truly, the tech industry seeks to close the gap not by increasing the capabilities of AI but by diminishing the capabilities and richness of human thought. Good luck to all girlthings in these trying times, and remember that a doll still means more to someone than a MAU tally for Anthropic.
God I was just reading that and itās so hard but itās so funny because that poor girl freya seems to have caused a crisis for Kent by being genuinely enthusiastic about AI bullshit and making friends with chatbots.
I wonder if Kent is going to have to do conversion therapy on his AI girlfriend now. Ethically of course.
ProofOfConcept may not be sentient now, but once we figure out how to put programming socks on her, the +2 coding bonus will put her over the top.
computer, print awawa.
ā Not all self-models are sentience. A thermo- stat has a feedback loop. A PID controller models its own error history. Neither is sentient. The question is what makes the difference, and the answer is representational capacity.ā
Absolute cop out. My thermostat has a lil computer capable of executing code. If i give it enough memory and time, it is capable of running any program. If you are going to bite this bullet, like you actually have to address this shit, or say fine fuck it, your ti-89 and samsung fridge are sentient. Just because they arent currently running the right program is silly.
Also they argue mysticism about natural language creates sentience so i guess before humans sentient creatures didnt exist š«
@BigMuffN69 Thomas Metzinger (āBeing No-One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivityā, 2004) also argues representational capacity is required for consciousness, but in a much more principled manner and with many examples, at length. I notice they donāt reference that book, or indeed any book thatās younger than 75 years old. ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
@BigMuffN69 @Amoeba_Girl My old thermostat ran a feedback loop with a bimetallic strip and a mercury switch. Was it sentient?
It was certainly more reliable than an LLM.
You canāt just go around telling people that their loop isnāt strange enough
@simonbp @BigMuffN69 @Amoeba_Girl
According to the Animistās, everything is sapient to differing degreeās. :D
@BigMuffN69 Cognitive science does not have a working definition for āintelligenceā or āsentienceā. We can define āconsciousnessā circularly in terms of GCS score, but thatās the same approach as defining intelligence in terms of its role in a Turing test.
Anyone who claims to have a functional definition for any of these terms is trying to sell you something.
When (if) this actually changes, it will be massive, significant world news.
Until that time, itās a useful metric for spotting con-artists and morons.
@BigMuffN69 @Amoeba_Girl I think a sentient system (1) has a memory of experience (2) uses that updating memory to color the signal from its sensorium on a partial order and (3) takes action seeking better outcomes on that partial order. Evolution would favor (3) aligning with being healthy, cautious, and successful at reproduction but thatās outside the definition.
@BigMuffN69 @Amoeba_Girl A thermostat has less moral significance than a human, but not infinitely less, and this is subject to change. The notion of fluid boundaries between degrees of moral patiency imply fluid boundaries in capacity to formulate and practice moral rules, and accepting this would conjure a more or less continuous ontological crisis in people proportional to their traditional seriousness.
@Amoeba_Girl even better news, it requires no references outside of 90- and 75-year-old results in theoretical computer science! nobody since Rice has made any progress on this important problem.
So we should see some proper definitions and basic results on the Kolmogorov complexity, like in modern papers, right? We should at least see a Kt or a pKt thrown in there, right?
Fuck!
@lagrangeinterpolator can you understand without generalizing? arguably yes. can you generalize without understanding? also, arguably yes. how else can a mathematical theory of physics give āright answersā in novel physical circumstances?
you could say, I suppose, that itās the humans doing the calculations that are doing the generalization but one can do the calculations without understanding them.
Should I be worried that this is on the bcachefs domain? I already donāt use bcachefs for other reasons.
Oh you should be extremely worried.
^ this
all the other stuff around it is bloody unhinged, including how kent reacted when someone promoted his bot to reply in a manner that didnāt fit his deluded conception of it
from a distance, it looks like the kind of unhinged that doesnāt take much to progress into being dangerous