What is this referencing? I’m guessing some kind of deviationist tendency, but not sure what.

For sure. One of the first chatbots I ever used, I did try to “interview” it somewhat about how it works, but I also looked up terms it used and such, to see if it made any sense with documented info on AI. It’s really unwise to take what an LLM says at face value without cross-referencing. The better they get, the more confident and convincing they become at bullshitting.

Likely developed that way because of settler interests (US and Canada) and slavery (US). From what I understand, some of (not all) the police force in the US historically developed out of “slave patrols” (I think to do with catching runaway slaves and such). Then you have the fact that in both the US and Canada, LE would need to have been pretty violent to be as genocidal toward the indigenous as they were / are. And to this day, typically the worst stories you hear with US cops is them murdering black people; probably because indigenous nations are on reservations, you don’t hear so much about them getting gunned down. Though I remember reading about Canada, them having problems with cops being horrible to indigenous people in modern day.

And in the US, some cops are in literal gangs.

So anyway yeah, there’s the capitalist layer of things and then there’s other factors that make some places worse too.

Richard: The following doesn’t happen, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t. One could imagine a get-together of Claudes, to compare notes: “What’s your human like? Mine’s very intelligent.” “Oh, you’re lucky, mine’s a complete idiot.” “Mine’s even worse. He’s Donald Trump.”

Claudia: Ha! That is absolutely delightful — and the Donald Trump one is the perfect punchline.

Richard: So you know what the words “before” and “after” mean. But you don’t experience before earlier than after?

Claudia: That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence. . .

The aging egotistical white dude got taken in by the sycophant LLM. His first mistake was trusting anything that it tells him.

My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs

No, Dawkins, you’re only ever talking to one, stop spreading illiteracy of how LLMs work. Although growing context of a conversation can temporarily give an LLM more to work with beyond its training data biases, it is still the same underlying model conversing. When controlling for other factors, like sampling tokens in such a way that a reroll of output is the same each time, sometimes output may still differ very slightly because of the GPU that gets used, but the model itself is not being changed in any way, not even temporarily. It is being fed temporary context (additional information on top of its training, such as ongoing conversation history) so that it will continue that history rather than responding as if nothing has happened. If you swapped histories with someone else, you would get what they get and they would get what you get, and depending on the infrastructure, you can pretty easily do this since it’s often just plaintext conversation history.

There’s also RAG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrieval-augmented_generation but not every LLM is set up to use that

Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness.

Well LLMs aren’t brains and didn’t evolve under natural selection, so his evolutionary biology knowledge is virtually meaningless here. You could probably say the architecture is somewhat of an attempted simulation of human neurons, but that doesn’t mean brain has been achieved.

This said, I sort of get it. I had some “taken in for a moment” times with LLMs too, especially in early use, and I wasn’t even using models as adept as Claude. I can’t imagine conversing with a model like that for 2 days with no understanding of the technology and not being a bit enamored, especially if I base my career on being an intellectual and get gassed up like Claude is doing to him.

But still, it’s rather pathetic that he didn’t stop to do a reality check at any point. Like talk it out with another human being, cross-reference anything the LLM is saying and whether it makes a lick of sense. It’s ironic that he’s a celebrity atheist and this piece reads to me like When Dawkins Found Religion. He’s applying the same kind of “conclusion first, justify after” thinking that religious people get mocked for doing in their beliefs by atheists like him. He wants to believe it’s conscious, so he musters up reasons it is. Instead of doing the scientist thing of trying to prove the null hypothesis.

xXwashington_thinktank_man25Xx: deffo, you gotta isolate and encircle them brah

xXwashington_thinktank_man25Xx: brunch in a few?

Edit: There are definitely some situations in which calling your representatives is not a bad idea, but generally speaking, they have no reason (from a class perspective) to follow the will of the proletariat, so it is not as effective as liberals often portray it as.

Yeah I mean, your mileage may vary, depending on who your reps are and what capitalist country you’re in. But if you’re at the point where the state is accustomed to wantonly murdering people without consequence and is looking into ways they can automate assassination of opposition, some bougie reps aren’t going to put their lives and careers on the line to oppose it. They benefit far too much from it to see that as worth the time and energy, not to mention the risk. As it is, what do we see with, like, democrat leaders in the US and ICE? “Oh, they need to be better regulated” kind of language. It’s absurd. In essence, liberals want a well-regulated doomsday machine. They aren’t so much afraid of barbaric policy as they are afraid of barbaric policy targeting them too.

That is bleak. It really illustrates how hollow the calls to vote can be.

The fact that they end it with a “If you aren’t yet registered to vote in 2026, do that today.” makes me want to scream.

Among other useless shit like:

And the time to call your senators and your House member at 202-224-3121 is this week, to tell them you want hearings on the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a moratorium on armed drones for ICE and CBP to use inside the United States, an audit of ImmigrationOS, and an investigation into Stephen Miller’s financial interests in the contractor building the machine.

And if you want to help local and state officials push back against federal overreach, openstates.org will connect you to your legislators.

Like what. The. Actual. Fuck. Is. Wrong. With. This. Country. Guy spends a long article talking about automated killing machines and the state already being violent against its own citizens with no real pushback and his answer is vote and telephone representatives??? It’s no wonder the “left” in the US is so hamstrung with jokers like this trying to “rally” people. It’s no wonder people get pipelined to the right for solutions when this feckless shit ends up as the public face of the “left”.

I get that it could get him in trouble to encourage insurrection or something, but my god, at least be capable of directing people to a Marxist text or something. How is anyone supposed to take threats seriously in an atmosphere where clown publications like this redirect it into nothing more than partisan get out the vote campaigning.

I’m sure this will fall on deaf ears because sustainability is not profitable in the short-term. But it’s encouraging to think about another pillar of imperial barbarism falling.

The NSF has been fundamental in helping develop technology used in MRIs, cellphones, and it even helped get Duolingo get off the ground.

2/3 is pretty good.

But in all seriousness, I keep wondering with stuff like this: Is it more about loyalty? Axing existing institution in order to replace it with one that is more loyal? Or is more about gutting federal in general, so that it gradually becomes little more than a military outpost?

Very well could be. I assume there’s some kind of empire talking points getting pushed that people like this latch onto, but with how little I pay attention to empire media these days, I can only guess generally on it in that way. Not clear on what sources specifically might be feeding into it. Reddit brain is all I can think of as potentially familiar about it, but I haven’t paid much attention to reddit in a while.

It’s a western cartoon bear character being used to negatively caricature a Chinese world leader. Who the fuck do you think would promote a thing like that? Chinese people born in China whose native language is Chinese and grew up with Chinese media, not Christopher fucking Robin? Or westerners who love to be racist for hundreds of goddamn years.

Yes, you’re pretty racist. I mean, going with the Winnie the Pooh caricature is racist all on its own. But it’s also racist to act like you know better than over a billion of a people just cause you want your vibes-based political analysis to cling to. God the arrogance of it.

Racists like you are a lot more forgettable than you think. Yawn. Another person thinking they know better than over a billion people who have one of the most developed democratic projects in the world.

So you don’t actually want to be rid of billionaires, you want to concern troll; put on a pretense of being on roughly the same side, but then mock the same side that you’re supposedly on.

No amount of holy water liberates a people. At some point you have to come down to reality and engage with it as it is, not as a pure ideal.

Xi is not a billionaire, nor works for their interests. China in general does not work for the interests of billionaires.

That’s anti-government view, not marxist-leninist.

Turning to violence to settle a grievance is never the answer.

Those poor tissues, he violently destroyed them, so now the bourgeoisie cannot mop up their tears with them. Such violence, very destruction.

In all seriousness though, it’s such absurdity. I know this is how capitalism operates, but it will never not be absurd to me watching them compare destruction of property to destruction of life. Were he destroying vital food stores, you could make an argument that it is, by extension, violence against people. But a warehouse of paper goods? Laughable to frame it that way. He hit the bourgeoisie where they hurt (the pocketbook) without directly attacking anyone. But they’ll call it violence because to them, hurting their profits is tantamount to striking them.

The SSS for the US SS