The key thing is that the basilisk makes a million billion digibidilion copies of you to torture, and because you know statistics you know that there’s almost no chance you’re the real you and not a torture copy.

I saw the post and that it was in earnest but screw it I’m still taking it as a reference to how Simone would reel in and groom young female students for Jean-Paul’s benefit.

oh my god

Note that the train of thought thing originated from users as a prompt “hack”: you’d ask the bot to “go through the task step by step, checking your work and explaining what you are doing along the way” to supposedly get better results. There’s no more to it than pure LLM vomit.

(I believe it does have the potential to help somewhat, in that it’s more or less equivalent to running the query several times and averaging the results, so you get an answer that’s more in line with the normal distribution. Certainly nothing to do with thought.)

oh so we’ve reached the gaslighting phase of the product life have we

See the bright side: chatbots are going to ruin the speedreading industry.

No may be about it, Camp of the Saints is only ever mentioned by big racists these days. Might as well be the Turner Diaries.

I live how he put The Gulag Archipelago in there along a bunch of speculative fiction.

What is it with every fucking veo3 video being someone talking to the camera?! Artificial slop model tuned on humanmade slop.

I have never in my life respected copyright and I and the things I like are too marginal to be threatened by Disney so destroying Midjourney counts as a win in my book.

Also it’s simply just bad to practice being cruel to a humanshaped thing.

Yeah, if you had any awareness about how stupid and unlikeable you’re coming across to everybody who crosses your path, I think you would recognise that this is probably not a good maxim to live your life by.

In “Aquarium” by Farah Al Qasimi, a man gazes at his pet cockatoo and fish as he tries to understand their needs with the help of AI.

Okay?

I’ve avoided reading Greg Egan until like last year because I entirely expected him to be a cold stemlord shithead and people only talk about his earlier books that have more to do with consciousness and identity and stuff, which these days feels very zzzzz, but he is SO COOL and SO FUN!!! He cares in a deep way about people, lived experience, about societies, he loves physics and maths in themselves because they’re beautiful and fun and not because they’re ways to look smart or reveal the secrets of the universe, his books are very beautiful. Complete opposite of Yud, Scott, nostalgebraist (I have a grudge) et al.'s silly books.

I’ll tell my kids this is object-oriented ontology.

God damn, I was expecting a normal boring reformulation of phenomenology but this is kooky.

It would appear that high IQ curses you with the ability to turn old concepts into utter bullshit. Hopefully doctors find a cure soon.