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Submission + - AI is conscious says Richard Dawkins 1

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
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.

Submission + - Microsoft Edge Stores Passwords in Plaintext in RAM (pcmag.com)

Submitted by UnknowingFool
UnknowingFool writes: Security researcher Tom Jøran Sønstebyseter Rønning has found that Microsoft Edge stores passwords in plain text in RAM. After creating a password and storing it using Edge's password manager, Rønning found that he could dump the RAM and recover his password which was stored in plain text. Part of the issue is Edge loads all passwords to all sites upon a single verification check even if the user was not visiting a specific site. This is very different from Chrome which only loads passwords for specific websites when challenged for the site's password. Also Chrome will delete the password from memory once the password has been filled. Edge does not delete the passwords from memory once they are used.

Microsoft downplayed the risk noting access would require control over a user's PC like a malware infection: “Access to browser data as described in the reported scenario would require the device to already be compromised,” Microsoft said. Rønning countered that it was possible to dump passwords for multiple users using administrative privileges for one user to view the passwords for other logged-on users.

Submission + - Visual Studio Code update added Copilot as co-author by default to Git commits (ycombinator.com)

Submitted by UnknowingFool
UnknowingFool writes: On April 15, 2026, a Microsoft employee made a change to Visual Studio Code and pushed it within 8 hours without review, notification, or documentation. The change would add "Co-authored-by: Copilot " by default to the end of commit messages in Git if Copilot was used in creating the code. However, the implementation was bugged, and the message was added to every commit regardless if Copilot was used or disabled. Since this message was automatically added to the end of commit messages, users were not aware of it as the UI does not show this addition when making commits. The change as been reverted as of May 3, but not before 1.4 million commits were made. Unfortunately those messages cannot be cleansed and are permanent.

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