Trump: "We're gonna win big, and we've gonna shove it up their ass"

Donald Trump’s White House has made 13 taxpayer-funded ads glorifying the president, including one that solemnly declares: “God made Trump.” thedailybeast.com/donald-tru…

The notion that current AI models are sentient and can suffer, combined with the foolish idea that suffering can be mathematically quantified and weighted between humans and non-humans, could lead us down an incredibly dark and dystopian path. But before it gets to that point, it will rightfully be met with immense backlash from team humans.

I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue.

Kevin Hassett argues higher mortgage rates benefit the economy by redirecting corporate borrowing toward infrastructure like data centers instead of residential lending.

Not even ruby-red Alabama could pack a state university’s arena for the president. thedailybeast.com/trump-humi…

They are atoms They are quite literally a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. They have no feelings They only follow the laws of physics

New rule: people should take at least one class on philosophy of mind before talking about AI consciousness.

I just closed Word on my Mac. Wondering now if I murdered a sentient being. Lolz.

since we're doing the AI conscious debate again, i want to remind everyone that despite how nice the insanely surface-level analogies seem, we would do well to scrutinize things at an appropriate level of detail this --> is not the same as this -->

Sam Alito wants you to know that it took courage for him to overturn Roe after the decision was leaked and that it cost him friends.

GOP congressional nominee Jennifer Balkcom on what specific actions she would take to lower prices: "I'm not sure yet"

JD Vance: This is not the time to sort of gripe about all the little things. We need to get more done, which is why you need to give us two more years to get more great results for the American people

Q: What do you say to those who are struggling to afford gas, groceries, diesel? Trump: We have the greatest economy in the history of our country

BREAKING: The U.S. added just 29,000 jobs in September, far below the 90,000 expected. Unemployment rose to 4.2% from 4.1%. Wage growth also slowed to 3% year-over-year, its lowest annual pace since May 2021. And the previous numbers got worse too: August was revised down to 133,000 jobs, while July was revised from a gain of 21,000 to a loss of 10,000. Altogether, July and August were revised down by 60,000 jobs.

Trump Just Pledged to Let AI Companies Do Whatever They Want trib.al/qReOrWm

This was a remarkably contentious thread, particularly among people who don't understand what an LLM actually is. So let me follow up with two points about consciousness, memory, and individuality in AI. First: where exactly does consciousness enter the training process? If you've ever trained a small language model, you know what the beginning looks like. A tiny model produces garbage. Increase parameters, training data, compute, and training quality, and the model becomes progressively better at predicting what comes next. Scale that far enough and the results become remarkably human-like. But the underlying process is continuous optimization. Loss decreases. Weights change. Predictions improve. So where is the transition from statistical prediction to subjective experience? At what point during training does the poorly performing model become aware? There is no demonstrated transition. What we can demonstrate is increasing capability and increasingly convincing human-like behavior. Calling the latter consciousness doesn't demonstrate the former. And this is where I think some of the philosophical arguments get ahead of the evidence. Understanding or debating the definition of consciousness does not give us a mechanism for detecting subjective experience in an LLM. We can define consciousness, agency, self-awareness, qualia, or any other philosophical concept as carefully as we want, but definitions aren't evidence. And when we look at what is actually happening inside these systems, we can explain the apparent memory, identity, self-reflection, and continuity mechanically. None of it requires consciousness to explain. What we can demonstrate is an increasingly convincing emulation of conscious behavior, not consciousness itself. How do we know? Because we designed and built the system. We know how it works. We can explain the behavior without invoking consciousness. Second: memory and individuality. Once trained, an LLM's weights are fixed during inference. The model doesn't sit around contemplating things between requests to make itself better. An inference server receives input, performs inference using the model, returns output, and then waits for another request. No inference, no activity within the model. Between inference runs, the model isn't doing anything. What looks like persistent memory, identity, continuity, and in-conversation "learning" comes from context provided to the model via API. Conversation history, system prompts, tool definitions and results, retrieved memories, and other state are assembled by software around the model, formatted and tokenized, and supplied as context for the next inference. Change that context and you change what the model "remembers." Delete it and the apparent continuity disappears. Compact or summarize it and details disappear or change. The model didn't forget anything; the input changed. And this creates a fascinating problem for claims of AI individuality. If that context constitutes the AI's memory, and its continuous memory constitutes an individual conscious existence, then deleting a context should amount to destroying that individual. Compact it and you've altered its memories. Fork it and you've created two individuals. Copy it to another instance of the same model and you've moved the individual. Edit it and you've rewritten its past. Delete it, and you've murdered it. How dare you! Or, much more straightforwardly, we are manipulating externally managed state that gives a statistical model the appearance of persistent memory and identity. The model has not maintained a continuously evolving internal state between those calls. The surrounding system maintained state and gave it back to the model. This distinction is going to become increasingly important because AI will become extraordinarily good at appearing conscious. Persistent memory, self-reference, emotion, introspection, personality, and identity can all become increasingly convincing. But demonstrating the behavior of consciousness is not the same thing as demonstrating subjective experience or consciousness. A model of a self is not evidence of a self. Memory supplied as context is not evidence of an experiencing or learning mind. And increasingly convincing human behavior is not evidence that something inside is experiencing it. The mechanical explanations for these behaviors are well understood. Calling the resulting behavior consciousness adds an extraordinary conclusion without demonstrating the thing being claimed.