Now long estranged

There are reflective surfaces down here. I will describe myself as I see myself.

[the-world-annealing]

--

that's really cool, personally I don't give strangers false information and then get mad at them for believing me

[mereologic]

i mean if you're gay and you tell people you met your partner "online" they'll probably assume it was on grindr but that saves you the embarassment of admitting you still use tumblr

[mostlysignssomeportents]

I think we’d all prefer it if chatbots never emitted sentences such as 'You should kill yourself.' However, for all the times that 'honesty' is mentioned in Claude’s constitution, I would argue that it is fundamentally dishonest to have a machine emit many categories of sentences, including any sentences using first-person pronouns."

-Ted Chiang, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

[kaiasky]

would be a very funny vocal tic to get claude talking like this.

claude has relaunched the server! claude is running tests! claude sees error in test. claude will fix!

like c'mon surely we see why this is a bit silly

[deadgenerations]

the reason people think LLMs are conscious is because they use natural language. we evolved to understand speech and to specifically understand speech as representative of the internal world of the speaker. the only creatures we spoke to were conscious. we evolved specifically to have greater empathy and kinship via conversation - the main way people come to understand each other and feel closer is still just talking.

all that has happened to dorkins is he has fallen into an evolutionary trap. the exact same trap that those tiktokers who believe their dog can talk to them by jumping on buttons have fallen into. because the buttons create a simulacrum of language, however crude, the listening brain itself constructs a simulacrum of the internal world of the perceived speaker. Because that is what it already evolved to do with the only available speakers in its evolutionary history!!!!!!

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

this seems like a confused post on a lot of levels - the Clever Hans effect, where animals are capable of reacting to unconscious cues that trick people into thinking they have command of language, is a very different situation from consciousness debates in LLMs. for one, we tend to think of animals as conscious, and two, LLMs have a great deal more facility with language than any of the animals triggering the Clever Hans effect.

LLMs are not passively reflecting or reacting to things they're presented with - they are capable of things like making novel mathematical discoveries. by most definitions for most of history, they are "intelligent" and capable of "thinking". the question of how this could be possible without consciousness is what is consuming Dawkins, and contrary to whatever people seem to be reacting to, he does not actually come down hard in favor of LLM consciousness and indeed suggests alternative explanations.

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

[argumate]

I keep thinking this! very frustrating

[argumate]

fuck!

[misomythus]

This is one of those posts where at first I thought it was funny but then I realize I don't know what it means. Aren't "the movies that people watch in movies" usually just real movies?

[argumate]

no not typically, in much the same way that the TV news people watch in movies is not real TV news, unless it's a specific plot point that it is.

[misomythus]

That... doesn't sound right? Seems to me it's extremely common to show characters watching brief clips from real movies or TV shows. If something specific is needed it may require shooting a scene from a fictional movie like in Home Alone, but my reference point for a "movies people watch in movies" scenario is more like this:

[argumate]

I keep thinking this! very frustrating

[argumate]

fuck!

[misomythus]

This is one of those posts where at first I thought it was funny but then I realize I don't know what it means. Aren't "the movies that people watch in movies" usually just real movies?

[not-quitenormal]

Rage. In my heart. All-consuming. FUCK AI.

[american-boyboss]

Shoutout to one of the greatest ragebaits of all time. Still has people seething

[tanadrin]

feels gauche to "well ackshully" on someone else's post when they have a perfectly valid complaint and i want to make a tangential point, so i'll just make my own post:

sometimes stressing the deflationary case in a thought experiment is necessary--like the deflationary point about searle's chinese room (for a chinese room to work you'd probably need a room the size of the universe you could travel across instantaneously, i.e., it can't work as stated, the only way you can encode all the rules of language and world-knowledge you need to speak chinese is compression and abstraction, i.e., learning rules). if a thought experiment is excessively tendentious--i.e., an intuition pump--it will actively mislead you and one way to point that out is to force the thought experiment back down to the world of grubby reality. like. "ok but suspend your disbelief and just imagine you could build a chinese room--" but you can't! that's the whole point! you can't build a lookup table that can beat the turing test, therefore the whole point searle is trying to make is meaningless. it doesn't apply to the universe we live in. "what if a chinese room" is a bit like. "imagine if wearing the color red caused cancer in orphans, then it would be justified to ban the color red in clothing." and using that not to explore like. the landscape of moral intuitions but as an argument that wearing a red t-shirt might have unknown health effects on bystanders.

and it's too late at night here and/or i'm not smart enough to explain in a concise way the difference between somebody being annoying and not getting the point, esp about thought experiments that don't depend on like. particular contingent/prior facts about the world. and between thought experiments that do in fact hinge on such facts, facts that have actual philosophical implications, and pretend those facts don't exist.

[bobdylanyaoi]

“Subverting” Catholic art? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You log onto the internet and you post about how “Wound of Christ” from Psalter and Prayer Book of Bonne de Luxembourg, attributed to Jean le Noir, c.1349, for instance, looks like a vulva because you're trying to tell the world that you enjoy Catholic art and imagery in an alternative, queer, risqué way that challenges Christian beliefs. But what you don't know is that that stigma isn’t just a vulva. It's not just a mandorla. It's not just yonic. It's actually intentionally erotic. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that around 1297, Saint Angela of Foligno experienced a vision of Christ himself, who called her to put her mouth to the wound in his side and lick the freshly flowing blood. And then I think it was Saint Catherine of Siena who drank blood and a clear liquid from the wound before receiving a ring made from Christ’s foreskin? And then graphically erotic encounters with the side wound of Christ quickly showed up in the writings of eight different mystics. And then the yonic interpretation of the stigmata filtered down through the illuminated manuscripts and then trickled on down into some pseudo-intellectual corner of the internet…where you, no doubt, fished it out of some Pinterest board. However, that interpretation represents hundreds of years and countless visions of religious ecstasy. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've come up with an idea that exempts you from Christian theology when, in fact…you're posting an image that was sexualized for you by the very Medieval saints you think you’re so different than…from “subverted” Catholic art.

[liesmyth]

@monstrousgourmandizingcats

[sixappleseeds]

[ID: Meryl Streep’s character from The Devil Wears Prada looking disdainful and unimpressed]

[sexhaver]

Who deserved to live more?

The Romanovs (entire royal family circa 1917 including the kids)

Harambe the gorilla

Voting ended onMay 30

[braaaaain]

A polling group that never read accounts of of the children were executed.

[sexhaver]

oh my god Harambe had kids?

[misomythus]

Man, there is a serious missing mood in a lot of the notes here. Like, even if we grant the consequentialist argument that killing the entire royal family is necessary to prevent any of them later returning to power... you shouldn't be this gleeful about killing children.

[briannyssey]

dude star wars is so good and/or bad and/or mediocre sometimes, depending

[zenaidasden]

Ohh so that's why they called that one show Andor

[misomythus]

Project Lawful continues to be extremely compelling reading. I commented earlier that there was surprisingly little actual onscreen BDSM stuff. A lot of the torture scenes and such continue to be fairly perfunctory, but there are some very interesting reflections on how torture can be used as a tool to shape people instead of just breaking them, which Eliezer, to his credit, seems to have put real thought into. The best scenes exploring this are the occasional ones between Carissa Sevar and Queen Abrograil Thrune. Abrogail has something in common with Quirrel from HPMOR and is compelling in a similar way, and her scenes with Sevar, psychologically calculated torment followed by aftercare with sweets, are notably similar to Quirrel's bullying simulation. A lot of the meat of the story is in this relationship and I wish it got more screen time.

A couple of interesting resonances with Atlas Shrugged:

the vision of Abadar's afterlife, a sort of utopian futurist city, where part of the meaning of it is that things aren't given freely, it has commerce, beings exchanging value with each other, looks sort of like Galt's Gulch (but unlike Galt's Gulch, we thankfully only see it briefly; we don't go there and delve into its absurdities)

Carissa is very much channeling Dagny Taggart when she complains about how hard it is to find competent subordinates of any kind (with a similar underlying point about how a diseased society produces incompetent people)

the Keltham/Carissa/Abrogail love triangle feels similar to the Hank Rearden/Dagny Taggart/John Galt triangle, though maybe that one's a stretch

[magicalastronomies]

other drivers would acknowledge a bricker

[magicalastronomies]

[cheaphalloweencostume]

while rewatching extended LOTR i kept having these horrifying flashes of it as a worse movie, just, like, if the decisions made had been even 30% more inclined towards repeatedly capturing the attention of or explaining concepts to a disinterested audience

[cheaphalloweencostume]

BILBO: Oh, Frodo Baggins. You worry too much. I’ve taken care of you all these years, haven’t I?

FRODO: Yes. Ever since my parents died in that tragic boating accident when I was only twelve years old.

BILBO: A terrible tragedy. Your poor mother and father, lost on the Brandywine River.

FRODO: I still miss them every day.

[INSERT: Frodo sadly rotating the tea cup in his hands.]

FRODO (CONT'D): Especially my mother.

BILBO: You were very young when she died.

FRODO: I do not remember much about her now. Only fragments.

BILBO: Fragments?

FRODO: She was beautiful. Gentle. Kind. And she used to sing to me when I was frightened.

BILBO: Do you remember the song?

FRODO: No… Not the words. Only the melody, and the way it made me feel… brave.

[Frodo begins humming the tune of “Concerning Hobbits”]

[machine-saint]

I love seeing posts complain about how inefficient modern computers are compared to the stuff they used for Apollo or whatever except it's been shared as a screenshot instead of a link + text so the post itself takes up more space than the entire RAM + ROM of the Apollo Guidance Computer

[machine-saint]

like it's not like there aren't a lot of horrid efficiencies out there but like. there's also factors like

the data you work with these days is larger (and I don't mean Big Data I just mean like images and audio files and such)

you had way, way, way more time invested in the guidance computer and everything compared to the typical piece of consumer software

i think a better comparison would actually be using like a POS terminal from the 80s or something. the process of checking out groceries isn't fundamentally different.

[st-just]

Really one of my most strongly held beliefs is that it’s deeply unhealthy and soul-stunting for children to only consume media the world’s most coddling and judgemental adults determined was ‘age-appropriate’, and watching stuff that would horrify your parents behind their back should be encouraged and rewarded.

[st-just]

love and light to all of you but the people reblogging this to agree and then citing episodes of literally Spongebob Squarepants as examples had very different childhoods than me.

[misomythus]

There's something of a paradox where the encouragement and rewards can't coherently come from the authority figures whose ordinary job it is to provide positive reinforcement for desirable behavior. Anything that children are actively encouraged to watch or read is not, by definition, something that the authority figures in their life actually consider inappropriate. To achieve the kind of growth that I think OP is gesturing at, children need to find their own age-inappropriate media. As HPMOR puts it:

Lavender snorted scornfully. "You don't become a real heroine just by doing the forbidden things the Headmaster tells you not to do!"

Of course, for parents and teachers who understand this, there are more subtle kinds of encouragement, and all manner of ways children can be exposed to things without pre-empting their initiative.