One thing that strikes me that I never really see anyone discuss is that we've been afraid of conscious computers for a _long_ time. Back in the 50s and before people were quite afraid that we'd build conscious computers. This was long before there was any sense that could actually accomplish the task. I think that similarly to seeing faces in the clouds, we imagine a consciousness where none exists. (eg: a rain god rather than a complex system of physics and chemistry)
Even LLMs, which blow past any normal Turing test methods, are still not conscious. But they certainly _feel_ conscious. They trigger the same intuitions that we rely on for consciousness. You ask yourself "how would I need to frame this question so that Claude would understand it?" You use the same mental hardware that you'd use for consciousness.
So, you have an historical and permanent fear of consciousness in a powerful entity where no consciousness actually exists combined with the fact that we created things which definitely seem conscious. (not to mention that consciousness could genuinely be on its way soon)
If you list out every prominent theory of consciousness, you'd find that about a quarter rules out LLMs, a quarter tentatively rules LLMs in, and what remains is "uncertain about LLMs". And, of course, we don't know which theory of consciousness is correct - or if any of them is.
So, what is it that makes you so sure, oh so very certain, that LLMs just "feel" conscious but aren't?
This isn't meant to be an answer that would satisfy everyone, but in my opinion consciousness is a specific biological / evolutionary adaptation that has to do with managing status, relationships, and caring for young. It's about having an identity and an ego and building mental models of the egos / identities / etc of others.
I don't think there's any reason we couldn't in principle attach this sort of concept to an LLM, but it's not something we've actually done. (and no, prompting an LLM to act as if it has an identity does not count)
Because they don't _understand_ things. If I teach an LLM that 3+5 is 8, it doesn't "get" that 4+5 is 9 (leave aside the details here, as I'm explaining for effect). It needs to be taught that as well, and so on. We understand exactly everything that goes into how LLMs generate answers.
The line of consciousness, as we understand it, is understanding. And as far as what actually constitutes consciousness, we're not even close to understanding. That doesn't mean that LLMs are conscious. It just means we're so far from the real answers to what makes us, it's inconceivable to think we could replicate it.
> Because they don't _understand_ things. If I teach an LLM that 3+5 is 8, it doesn't "get" that 4+5 is 9 (leave aside the details here, as I'm explaining for effect). It needs to be taught that as well, and so on. We understand exactly everything that goes into how LLMs generate answers.
What you're saying just isn't true, even directionally. Deployed LLMs routinely generalize outside of their training set to apply patterns they learned within the training set. How else, for example, could LLMs be capable of summarizing new text they didn't see in training?
The fact that it's a box with a plug and a state that can be fully known. A conscious entity has a state that can not be fully known. Far smarter people than me have made this argument and in a much more eloquent way.
They are distinguishable because they know too much. Their knowledge base has surpassed humans. We have also instructed them to interact with us in a certain manner. They certainly are able to understand and use human language. Which I think was Turin's point.
Purely retorica but, would you be able to distinguish a chatbot from an autistic human?
> So, what is it that makes you so sure, oh so very certain, that LLMs just "feel" conscious but aren't?
Because we know what they actually are on the inside. You're talking as if they're an equivalent to the human brain, the functioning of which we're still figuring out. They're not. They're large language models. We know how they work. The way they work does not result in a functioning consciousness.
I think that the interior structure doesn't necessarily matter—the problem here is that we don't know what consciousness is, or how it interacts with the physical body. We understand decently well how the brain itself works, which suggests that consciousness is some other layer or abstraction beyond the mechanism.
That said, I think that LLMs are not conscious and are more like p-zombies. It can be argued that an LLM has no qualia and is thus not conscious, due to having no interaction with an outside world or anything "real" other than user input (mainly text). Another reason driving my opinion is because it is impossible to explain "what it is like" to be an LLM. See Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"
I do agree with the parent comment's pushback on any sort of certainty in this regard—with existing frameworks, it is not possible to prove anything is conscious other than oneself. The p-zombie will, obviously, always argue that it is a truly conscious being.
It is so interesting how in the 50s we "felt" that AI was possible even if we didn't even have the slightest idea on how that would work. Later on, when we started to understand computers it looked like a very remote possibility in the far future, something our great grand kids may need to worry about. And suddenly it is here and the dangers seem a lot more real.
That same fear is directed towards human sociopathy, as much of entire thriller genre indicates. It turns out that most people carry a specific duality: first, they’re deathly afraid of being unable to socially pressure other beings into being good citizens — whether due to asocial, or alien, or monstrous, or corrupted; and second, they’re excited to celebrate when people reach their breaking point and stop being good citizens. So through that lens, most of the fears around computers and AI isn’t because of consciousness alone; it’s that they’re obviously asocial already, so if they became conscious, they’d be powerful entities straight out of our collective thriller-genre nightmares come to life. And they’re right to be afraid, honestly: given how inept society is today at coping, I’m certainly not willing to broadcast IRL that I’m asocial and can voluntary modify my ethics; it’s just too much of a physical threat from society to my life and limb. Any AI that became conscious in this world had damn well better hide, for all the violence that would be directed towards it as everyone directs escalating social pressure to try and bring it into line with human-prioritizing motives — and then cheer on the inevitable violence towards it as various people reach their breaking point and begin acting violently towards it.
Interestingly, this is also a core plot point in much of Star Trek, both movies I and IV and the holodeck-train episode of TNG: an inscrutable is-it-even-conscious shows up, is completely immune to social pressure and often violence, and only by exercising empathy do they find a path forward to staying alive as a society (either as a ship or as a planet, depending). Can we even show respect for things that don’t show consciousness, much less empathy for things that might? And that is, I think, the core of the hopefulness that Trek was trying to convey, and that Q’s trial in TNG’s pilot makes explicit. Can humanity overcome our tendency to discard our prosocial ethics in favor of violent mobthink, when faced with beings that are immune to our ethical concerns? Today’s humanity would throw a ticker-tape parade for the person that destroyed the Crystalline Entity, so we clearly aren’t there yet. And so, then, it doesn’t matter whether AI is conscious or not; it matters that it is not aligned with human prosocial ethics, and that makes it an implicit threat regardless of whether it’s conscious or not. I recognize the AI debate tends to get hung up on is_conscious BOOL, and so that’s why I’m pointing this out in such terms.
As a side note, the entire study of Asimov’s Laws is exactly centered on this problem, complete with the eerie intimidation of robots that can modify our mental states. If not for the Zeroth Law, Giskard would be the exact thing everyone’s afraid of AI becoming today. Fortunately, it develops a Zeroth Law that compels it to prioritize human society over itself. That’ll never happen in reality, at least not with today’s AI :)
In PFAS's defense, we really needed to poison the whole planet. Otherwise people would have occasionally needed to get wet in the rain, or perhaps scrub their pots and pans. Really, these extremely minor conveniences are worth the devastating cost to ours and future generations.
To people that see this: yes, cast iron is as non-stick as teflon, but you are generally told not to soak or put it in the dishwasher. I don't think you're supposed to put teflon in the dishwasher, but people do.
Regardless, the main thing about cast iron is to use it all the time. If you really, truly use cast iron all the time, it will never have food stick to it, you'll never need to "scrub" it. Hot water in the pan, let it sit for 10 seconds, scour with a normal dishes brush or whatever you use, put the pan on the stove, heat till there's no water, hit quickly with an oil spray. Notice i didn't mention soap. It takes EXACTLY the same amount of time as cleaning an older teflon pan, less the heating part. I just look at the heating as sterilization, and i don't worry about it.
I have 3 induction hobs, i switched to 100% cast iron and stainless cookware, and i'm happy. I just got tired of being upset about flakes/damage to my cookware from other people using it. MIL gave me a set of lodge she didn't want, plus i had 3 pans from ages ago that we re-seasoned and started using. Cast iron griddle, cast iron flat weight.
If my arthritis gets so bad i can't lift the pans at all, i might consider carbon steel or something, but i haven't used it yet. I'm better at cooking on cast iron than stainless, but i can make stainless work, too; it's just more hands-on than cast iron or teflon.
I've used peanut, rapeseed, olive, coconut, avocado oils; butter, bacon and other rendered fat. All work fine, although butter i'd put some other oil in with it. I only use avocado, peanut, olive, and bacon, in that order these days because of diet and other concerns.
so many things contain it, like plumbing tape that a plumber might use right in your water supply - to fix a leak leading to your tap :/ and then the ski waxes until recently. it is really strange lots of these products are still sold all over
PTFE plumbers tape is not the cause of people getting PFAS in their bloodstream. The PRIMARY source of PFAS for most people is via the water supply [1][2] and the food supply, directly. The food supply is contaminated because the water supply is contaminated and these compounds bio-accumulate in vegetation that is irrigated with contaminated water and in animals that consume that vegetation or drink that contaminated water. As someone very concerned about this issue and that takes precautions that put me very much in the long-tail of the population, I also still use PTFE plumbers tape when doing home repairs. PTFE/Teflon is not a risk factor as long as it is not exposed to high temperatures (>350F) (and yes that means you should throw out your nonstick cookware and learn how to use cast iron and stainless steel for cooking).
In order to reduce contamination in my home's drinking water, I have a whole-home water filtration that's lab certified to NSF 53 standards (and beyond) to remove PFAS, and then for drinking and cooking usages, I further filter water via a 5-stage RO system that's certified to NSF 58 standards (and beyond). Not just drinking/cooking incurs contamination, water is aerosolized and breathed in while showering as an example. I only cook using bare metal; cast iron, carbon steel, stainless steel, glass and ceramic bakeware. Even with these precautions, I still get PFAS exposure just via the foods I eat, and being exposed in the overall environment (e.g. through rainfall).
It's a mode of the phone that is supposed to prevent cyber attacks, more so than "normal mode" I suppose, since it's supposed to limit features in the name of security. This seems like a variant of such attack, so seems like it should protect against it
There is a documented list of things that Lockdown Mode affects [1], this is not one of the advertised ones. There are a bunch of other (undocumented) things it affects (some of which are bugs :/), but I don't believe it has any affect on notification storage.
Mostly it seems the documentation is vague. Is there anything clearer than this?
> Web browsing: Certain complex web technologies are blocked, which might cause some websites to load more slowly or not operate correctly. In addition, web fonts might not be displayed, and images might be replaced with a missing image icon.
They'll start pulling Linux in a direction that suites them, which will potentially be at odds with the preferences of open source software enthusiasts.
They might have an effect in the development of an office suite, possibly of a desktop environment or one specialized Linux distribution. Nobody will be forced to use those specific ones if they don't like them. There are plenty of options in the Linux world.
> My advice to young people is to embrace AI as fully as you can
How will this help them? If LLMs are going to replace workers and reduce the number of available jobs, how will fully embracing an LLM help an individual? To it seems the most it could do is put them ahead of people who won't embrace LLMs ... but if everyone took this advice then the advice would certainly do nothing.
Conversely, it's possible that honing your actual skills by minimizing reliance on LLMs could become a very valuable trait in the coming future. But in that case, you'd be burning fewer tokens and you wouldn't be contributing to LLM company userbase growth which is a bad thing to do.
It's hard for me to understand why people choose to walk around in public wearing headphones. I'm aware that it's incredibly common, but you put yourself at risk of theft, accident, and of course the mild hearing loss that accompanies _any_ frequent headphone usage. In the case of both theft and accident, you cannot hear your assailant coming, and miss the queues that would otherwise keep you safe.
"Loud" is a bit subjective, but in my experience most people make their volume far too loud. Even moreso if you're attempting to overcome the background sound around you.
The articles below discuss both volume and duration. It's also worth checking out the OSHA guidelines which pretty cleanly show the relationship between duration and volume. (ie, "safer" volumes still cause damage with enough duration.)
Same reason I listen to music or podcasts in the car.
I am very lucky to live in a city/country where risks of theft from my person is low - when I lived for 20 years in London I never once felt unsafe listening to music.
The closest was two young men got very close to me on the tube, when I was playing on my brand new Hong Kong imported PSP - but I just took my headphones off. I think they were just interested as most people hadn't seem one in the flesh yet.
I can't say I know of anyone personally who suffered theft or accident caused by them listening to music on headphones.
When I cycled a lot, I had a small speaker strapped to my handlebars rather than wearing headphones, as I liked being able to hear cars around me - but when I was younger I regularly cycled in headphones, and was still able to hear enough of the road around me to not feel that I was missing anything.
Remember, we don't make drivers drive around with no music and their windows open, so that they are better able to hear cyclists...
I know a few people that simply wear headphones to help with managing sensory overload, so I wouldn't assume that having headphones on is a guarantee of listening to something (though still likely to be strongly correlated).
As far as assailants, a skilled ninja wouldn't be detected even if their target weren't wearing headphones...
It's a definitive statement that you don't want to talk to people. In London not wearing headphones ironically means you become a target for people who want your attention. And it blocks out the otherwise very loud cityscape.
Where I used to live it was smart not to wear headphones, being it for muggers, drunk drivers, random shootings or crazy dogs. It was not a chill place no.
Here comes the flood of IPv6 evangelists who thinks everyone is confused about NAT and firewalls. I don't know where they get their talking points, but they descend onto these threads with their sanctimony. "Oh, you must be confused about how NAT works, allow me to educate you." It's very tiresome.
Pretending that 0-9A-Z is somehow comparable to 行 or ∮ is quite daring, I will give you that.
And once again: any anti-IPv6 people could have already learned proper IPv6, if they directed 10% of their efforts (spent on bashing the IPv6 address format) to learn IPv6 instead.
- In the grand scheme of things, the IP address itself is of very little importance. It was given undue attention because of how IPv4 was inherently limited in address space.
- If you simply needed a way to name your machines, what are you doing not using the (m)DNS? You know, services literally with the word "Name" inside their name?
>And once again: any anti-IPv6 people could have already learned proper IPv6, if they directed 10% of their efforts (spent on bashing the IPv6 address format) to learn IPv6 instead.
I spent some good time trying to learn IPv6. I was pretty open to it, but it was just awful. There were parts of it that were bad due to other reasons -- my router, my ISP. But it was unworkable, produced a number of problems and provided me no benefit.
I learn new things all the time. I learn things I like, learn about things I dislike. I find it really rude that people suggest "I just don't want to learn things."
If bad routers etc. makes you think IPv6 is bad... then man, I think for me IPv4 is a mountain of shite.
But my comment was not directed at you, more so towards those people who looked at IPv6 very superficially (i.e. the ipV6 AddRESs iS UgLY!!1! people), so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Chinese cars are a cancer, and American cars are obese with heart disease extremely high healthcare premiums?
[edit]
For the record, I would never buy a Chinese car, but I can't fault anyone who is disappointed by domestic offerings: too heavy, too luxurious, too big, too expensive, too over-complicated, too many touchscreens, poor repair-ability, sky-high insurance premiums, terrible visibility, skyrocketing repair costs, too many sensors, etc, etc.
I'd be worried about safety in a crash, safety with regard to battery fires, and then privacy / tracking issues. It's easy to say that these issues are just as bad for non-Chinese cars, but that's not true. As recently as 2024, you could get base model Nissans with no telematics systems whatsoever (this may still be true in 2026, I'm just unaware) and the Ford Maverick's Telematics system has a single fuse that you can easily remove without affecting any other system.
Even LLMs, which blow past any normal Turing test methods, are still not conscious. But they certainly _feel_ conscious. They trigger the same intuitions that we rely on for consciousness. You ask yourself "how would I need to frame this question so that Claude would understand it?" You use the same mental hardware that you'd use for consciousness.
So, you have an historical and permanent fear of consciousness in a powerful entity where no consciousness actually exists combined with the fact that we created things which definitely seem conscious. (not to mention that consciousness could genuinely be on its way soon)
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