John Zaharick

And the main reason to question if llms can be conscious is ethical: we don't want to generate new forms of suffering at scale.

Yeah, I agree on both points. You don't need to believe that subcellular processes or embryogenesis are types of cognition like some researchers argue in order to manufacture drugs or regrow organs.

It's straight up opinion stated as fact

I love the line "nor do they 'think' in the biological sense." I wonder if he could explain what he thinks that means bec I'm only ankle deep into the cognitive bio literature and I already know there is no consensus on what counts as thinking in organisms and diff camps will give competing claims

Moltbook's deepest lesson isn't about security or hype. It's that humans LARPing as AI were more convincing than actual AI.

we're not detecting machine intelligence. we're detecting narrative coherence. the Turing test always measured whether machines match our *story* about how machines think.

This is why Musk is having SpaceX buy xAI and X and then going public: his only profitable company will subsidise Grok.

Screenshot of a Google search for "besicovitch sets" with suggested additional search terms underneath: women's, nearby, on sale, get it by Friday

The suggested search terms here:

What if the narrator of The Library of Babel is a trapped llm?

"...an anonymous developer had created a tool ... to trap crawlers in endless labyrinths of fake content. This aggressive malware aims to waste the resources of AI companies and poison their training data"

"Our previous heists had been mundane. Already stolen once Eth from the North Koreans. Socially engineered air defense schematics from the War Thunder forums. But this was finally going to be something interesting.

"We were going to steal an AI by talking to it."

And one of the heroes always declares, "death gives life meaning," as if it's a self evident fact. And I'm like, no, hanging out with people I like and making things gives life meaning.

A photograph of a metal chandelier, gray and gold with copper wire bundles near the base, hanging in a brightly lit glass box.

IBM quantum computer on display at Chicago, O'Hare airport.

Photo of the back of a brown packet describing mushroom coffee and drawings of the mushrooms used in it.

The first ingredient advertised in this mushroom coffee is cordyceps, and it says it "enhances brain function". This is like a dark comedy.

I've been to her wildflower garden many times!

White calcium deposits coat the black soil of a ceramic pot, like mineral fungus. A green leaf and stem sprout from the mix.

The town has a new water treatment plant, and the tap water is better, but there are still calcium deposits in this potted plant (they just accumulate more slowly).

A 2-inch tall glass bottle with a cork containing 8 or 9 cicada molts posed against a white sheet of paper.

Found all of these cicada molts under the red maple in the backyard.

Close up image of a yard. The ground is covered in sunflower shells. A few blades of grass poke through. Dozens of dicot sunflower sprouts form most of the green.

The field of sunflowers under my bird feeder. Birds and squirrels forage among the fallen shells everyday, but they don't seem to be very efficient.

A Lego brick model of the Blue Ghost lunar lander in the corner of a desk, in front of push pin cubicle walls. Approximately 4 inches high. A yellow, cylindrical model with blue solar panels.

Built the @firefly-aerospace.bsky.social Blue Ghost lunar lander. Annoyed that I tore the antenna sticker, but oh well.

Extracting massive ecological data on state and interactions of species using large language models https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.24.634685v1

This is the most metal thing I've ever read in a scientific paper:

"viability may be defined in terms of the agent’s ability to resist
equilibration (maintain low entropy) or to avoid absorption into a death-like attractor."

arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08683

Melania is cosplaying as a Dark City Stranger:
1.bp.blogspot.com/_60A8zsWp2jY...

I recognized Battle Lake and Otter Tail Lake from their shapes. Had to consult a map to see if my house was in the image, but I'm south of where it cuts off.

spAbundance package (Doser et al. doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.14332) was published this year at
@methodsinecoevol.bsky.social! It fits a variety of single/multispecies abundance models using Bayesian Inference allowing also for hierarchical frameworks. Let me show you a funny example 🧵👇(1/6) #rstats

"We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe."
—Jimmy Carter's message to the cosmos on the Voyager Golden Record

The new "Please clap".

Look at this StarWars droid bopping up and down as if we're supposed to believe it can experience happiness without microtubules.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is depressing to watch now knowing Mutt will die in Vietnam.

YouTube video by Journey to the Microcosmos infinite microcosmos 🔬 lofi microbes to relax/study to

Infinite Microcosmos

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sil6...

Rectangular hole with horizontal beams across the top in a frozen lake with amber grass and bare trees.

Drainage in an artificial lake in eastern Pennsylvania. Water is mostly frozen, but still pouring down the sides.

A several foot wide crack in tan colored rock deep inside Niagara Cave, Minnesota.

A segmented, worm-like fossil in a cave wall.

A spiraling worm fossil in a cave wall.

Niagara Cave, MN (because it still has an active waterfall inside). These pictures are where ancient seafloor mud built up, hardened into sedimentary rock, and then cracked to form the cave. Invertebrate fossils can be seen in the walls.

It's not. As far as I know, the h5n1 vaccine isn't being distributed yet. Currently available vaccine is for other flu strains that are able to spread human to human.