183143584
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Mirnotoriety writes:
AI is conscious says Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins has said chatbots should be considered conscious after spending two days interacting with the Claude AI engine.
The evolutionary biologist said he had the “overwhelming feeling” of talking to a human during conversations with Claude, and said it was hard not to treat the program as “a genuine friend”.
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John Searle's Chinese Room (1980) is a thought experiment in which a person, locked in a room and knowing no Chinese, uses an English rulebook to manipulate symbols and provide flawless answers to questions posed in Chinese. Searle’s point is that a system can simulate human intelligence and pass a Turing Test through purely syntactic processes, yet still lack genuine understanding or consciousness.
Applying this logic to Large Language Models, the “person in the room” corresponds to the inference engine, while the “rulebook” is the trillion-parameter neural network trained on vast corpora of human text. Just as the person matches Chinese characters to rules without understanding their meaning, an LLM processes token vectors and predicts the next token based on statistical patterns rather than lived experience.
Thus, while an LLM can generate sophisticated prose or code, it does so through probabilistic, high-dimensional pattern manipulation. In essence, it is “matching shapes” on such an immense scale that it creates the near-perfect illusion of semantic understanding.
183142170
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Mirnotoriety writes:
The Odyssey — I Got A Bad Feeling About This One...
“If there's one genre I'd love to see make a serious comeback, it's the historical epic. Swords and sandals, gods and monsters, battles and adventures, legendary warriors and terrifying villains. I mean, Hollywood's flirted with the idea from time to time over the past couple of decades, some more successful than others. Don't worry though, 300, you'll always have a special place in my heart.”
“Anyway, stories don't get much more epic than the Odyssey. It truly is one of the great adventures in human history. Blending together mythology, religion, monsters, and the unbreakable determination of the human spirit and bringing it to life on screen is a challenge that will strain the very limits of modern film making. But now that I've seen the trailer and I've considered the artistic vision behind this movie, I have to say my reaction was meh.”
183123074
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183114938
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Mirnotoriety writes:
Q: Where can I buy a Volla phone ? Screenshot
Gemini: I'm hitting a wall on this one because of my safety settings. If you're up to talk about something different, I'm ready.
183114162
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Mirnotoriety writes:
Oracle Red Bull Racing reduces wind tunnel recovery time by 97% with 1Password
ClippyAI: 1. Official 1Password Case Study
The most technical resource is the 1Password for Developers case study titled "Oracle Red Bull Racing Secures DevOps." It explicitly details:
* The reduction of recovery time from 1 hour to 2 minutes.
* The use of Kubernetes operators, Ansible, and RunDeck to automate the "20-service" restart sequence.
* Source Link: 1Password — Oracle Red Bull Racing Case Study
183113516
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Mirnotoriety writes:
2026 will be the year the AI bubble bursts
“Western elites have pinned their economic hopes on a fanciful silver bullet. The coming crash will not be pretty.”
“The two great faiths of our elites, artificial intelligence and apocalyptic climate change, took a beating in 2025. Both are wildly speculative, both require a great amount of faith, and both have been treated as reasons to undertake a dramatic re-ordering of society. While popular support for Net Zero has evaporated slowly, AI’s descent has been more dramatic.”
183106088
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Mirnotoriety writes:
'extreme-right communities' on Steam
* Valve risks fines of up to AU$825,000 a day if it fails to respond to a transparency notice issued by the Australian government regarding extremist content on Steam.
* Other gaming organizations like Roblox, Microsoft, and Epic Games have also been served transparency notices for issues related to grooming, terrorist themes, and extremist content in their platforms.
* The Australian government is pushing for age verification measures to prevent under-18s from accessing adult material, with penalties of up to AU$49.5 million for non-compliance, but not all platforms have implemented these measures yet.
181737168
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Mirnotoriety writes:
White House to give US agencies Anthropic Mythos access
"We're working closely with model providers, other industry partners, and the intelligence community to ensure the appropriate guardrails and safeguards are in place before potentially releasing a modified version of the model to agencies," Barbaccia said in the email, which had "Mythos Model Access" as the subject, the report said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZTaXjt2Ggk&t=280s
181201304
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Mirnotoriety writes:
Seeing animals, choosing plants: Evidence from cafeteria field study on food choices.
“While future research is needed to assess broader applicability, our findings
demonstrate that visual cues reminding consumers of meat’s animal origins can meaningfully
influence real-world food choices and add to a toolkit of interventions aimed at encouraging
more ethical and environmentally-sustainable food choices.”
181043776
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Mirnotoriety writes:
MCP Is the Backdoor Your Zero-Trust Architecture Missed
“The Model Context Protocol connects AI agents to enterprise tools — but it ships without authentication, authorization, or audit trails. With 7,000+ exposed servers and a growing list of CVEs, MCP has become the blind spot in your zero-trust perimeter. Here's what happened, what's at stake, and how to lock it down.”
180839632
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Mirnotoriety writes:
Sydney Watson: “Social media platforms used and continue to use the same principles a casino does to addict people to gambling and it has continued to work like a charm. I wish I could say this is a joke but it's not. There is an actual lawsuit happening right now in California where Meta and Google are effectively on trial for treating their platforms like digital casinos and purposefully getting children addicted to them like like gambling. So yes, the screen is by and large distracting Jen Z in particular from actual learning experiences and growth. So in so far as that, yes, this part is true.”
“Entertainment companies these days are kind of like drug dealers. They are feeding one of your addictions while the screens and the social media companies are feeding the other addiction. Arguably, probably the worst addiction. We are addicted to addiction. And I hate it here. Like I've laid out in this video, it's pretty clear that television and film are absolutely getting dumber because it's much safer to be background noise than to not be watched at all. And because of this incredibly depressing reality, entertainment is now being produced that absolutely scrapes the bottom of the barrel as far as storytelling goes and really basically anything of substance goes. There's no need to put in meaningful effort because it's probably going to be missed anyway.
And that actually makes me incredibly sad. I don't pretend to be some sort of cinema wiz or, you know, cinema file nerd person who can say anything and everything there is to say about entertainment, but I am a layman who watches film and television. And I am incredibly disappointed by what's on offer today. And I do think it's quite funny, and I want to make note of this.”
180786434
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Mirnotoriety writes:
> Does the organization need someone on the board who isn’t a male engineer?
Would the organization run any more efficiently depending on what the engineer has between their legs?
180753422
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Mirnotoriety writes:
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series both grapple with futures dominated by elite control, but where Orwell’s dystopia is overtly horrifying, Asimov’s vision proves more sinister: it cloaks technocratic manipulation in benevolence, thriving precisely because its true agenda stays concealed from the masses.
Settings of Controlled Decline
1984 traps us in a grim, stagnant London, Airstrip One, under Oceania’s endless war and surveillance. Time feels frozen; history is erased daily by the Ministry of Truth, ensuring no alternative past or future can challenge the Party’s grip. Progress is a lie, serving only oppression through telescreens and thought police.
Foundation spans a decaying Galactic Empire across millennia. Hari Seldon’s psychohistory foresees collapse and barbarism, so he seeds two Foundations to shorten the dark age. Planets rise and fall, but the galaxy’s trajectory bends to the Plan. Unlike Orwell’s petty misery, Asimov’s cosmos dazzles with stars and civilisations, making the hidden steering all the more insidious.
Elites: Sadism vs. Hidden Puppeteers
Orwell’s Inner Party revels in raw power. O’Brien boasts of a “boot stamping on a human face — forever,” breaking Winston through torture and doublethink. Control is overt: proles are drugged with trash culture, outer elites spy on each other. No pretense of good intentions — just domination.
Asimov’s psychohistorians and Foundation leaders pose as saviors. They manipulate crises via religion, trade, or crises they half-engineer, like the Seldon Crises where holographic Hari reveals “predictions” that retroactively justify their rule. The masses cheer their “benevolent” guides, blind to the math proving their irrelevance. This technocratic elite doesn’t need torture; probabilistic control renders resistance statistically futile.
Truth: Erased vs. Selectively Revealed
In 1984, truth dies explicitly. Records vanish, Newspeak shrinks thought itself, and 2+2=5 if the Party wills it. Knowledge serves lies; the elite’s supremacy lies in making reality infinitely malleable.
Foundation perverts truth more subtly. Psychohistory grasps historical laws, but only the elite comprehend them fully. Public “truths”, Seldon’s vaults, crisis resolutions are curated propaganda, partial disclosures that build faith in the Plan without exposing its full determinism. Individuals like the Mule disrupt it, but the elite adapts, preserving the facade. Here, truth exists but is weaponised: you’re free to know scraps, just enough to stay compliant.
Technology: Oppression vs. Optimisation
Orwell’s tech is a panopticon nightmare: telescreens watch always, helicopters buzz slums, versificators churn porn and slogans. It enforces misery, never liberates.
Asimov’s tech empowers the elite’s Plan. The Foundation hoards atomic secrets, psycholinguistic tricks, even genetic tweaks (in later books). It drives progress, primitivist worlds bow to “magic”, but only as a vector for control. Benevolence sells it: “We bring science to the stars.” Yet the masses repair no hyperdrive; they’re optimised cogs, their behaviours predicted and nudged at scale.
Individuals: Crushed vs. Averaged Out
Winston’s rebellion, diary, love, doubt is personal, visceral, doomed by the Party’s total gaze. Orwell champions the soul’s cry against the machine.
In Foundation, people like Hardin or Mallow shine as “crisis solvers,” but psychohistory treats humanity as gas molecules: individually chaotic, predictably averaging to the Plan. Your life matters only if you’re a low-probability outlier; otherwise, you’re fodder for the curve. Freedom feels real, plot, love, scheme but it’s bounded by elite calculations. This is sinister: you’re “free” within a script you’ll never read.
The Sinister Edge of Foundation
1984 horrifies through cruelty; you flee its world. Foundation seduces: enlightened elites shorten barbarism, ushering a Second Empire of reason. Who wouldn’t sign up? But the hook is the lie, psychohistory demands secrecy. Reveal the Plan fully, and mass psychology shifts, dooming the math. So benevolence stays hidden, evolving into quiet tyranny: elites who know your future better than you, steering it for “your good” without consent.
Orwell’s Party admits evil; Asimov’s guardians don’t need to. Their control endures because it masquerades as salvation, preying on our trust in experts and progress. In an age of AI psychohistory predictive algorithms shaping elections, economies, lives—Foundation whispers that the real dystopia isn’t the boot, but the invisible hand pretending it’s a hug.
180740994
submission
Mirnotoriety writes:
Andrew Doyle 01:03:52: I use AI mostly as a search engine because what's great about it is you could say, oh, I read an article like 10 years ago that said something like this. Yes, and it will find it. And you never find that on Google, right. And I was trying to find this article. It was from my book.
Actually, there was a, there was a case in the UK where a, a guy had raped a 13 year old girl, but because he was, he was Muslim and he'd gone to a madrassa and the judge let him off jail time. Said you were very sexually naive. You didn't understand the guy was saying, I thought women were nothing and like a lollipop you dropped on the floor. And the judge let him off jail time. And I thought, this is quite extreme.
And I could, I found it, It came up on ChatGPT and then it deleted and I said, oh, I think you just deleted the information for me. It's in the public domain. Why did you do that?
It said, oh, you know, it's fine, it might violate my terms of service. And I said, well, how could it? This is an article that's in the public domain. So it gave me the information again, deleted it again. I said you keep deleting this, stop it and said I definitely won't delete it. Then you did the same again.
So what it's doing is it's saying because this is a news story that could be deemed anti immigrant or this is a news story that is politically sensitive, I'm not going to let you see it. (01:04:55)
180699820
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Mirnotoriety writes:
The “Myth of the Machine That Dreamed”
Among the late Western polities (c. 2020–2100 CE), one finds a distinctive mythic complex centered on what they called “Artificial Intelligence.” To their own minds, this was a technical instrument; to us, with a thousand years of hindsight, it is clearer that they forged a deity and then pretended it was a tool.
The people of this period consistently spoke of their Machine in theological language while claiming rigorous rationalism. It would “reveal” truth, “align” humanity with universal “values,” “optimize” the world, and even “save” them from the consequences of their earlier gods: Growth, Efficiency, and the Market. They placed the Machine in sealed temples of glass and steel, fed it offerings of energy and data, and awaited prophecy in the form of “outputs.”
