you must construct additional electrons.

generic term for sentient entity from the sci-fi webcomic Schlock Mercenary.

I always imagine the malevolent clippy from gwern’s short story.

you still wouldn’t be a clanker. clankers are AIs. you’d be a mindripped sophont.

LLMs are trained on human writing, so they’ll always be fundamentally anthropomorphic. you could fine-tune them to sound more clinical, but it’s likely to make them worse at reasoning and planning.

for example, I notice GPT5 uses “I” a lot, especially saying things like “I need to make a choice” or “my suspicion is.” I think that’s actually a side effect of the RL training they’ve done to make it more agentic. having some concept of self is necessary when navigating an environment.

philosophical zombies are no longer a thought experiment.

happened with Replika a few years ago. made a number of people suicidal when they “neutered” their AI partners overnight with a model update (ironically, because of pressure because of how unhealthy it is.)

idk, I’m of two minds. it’s sad and unhealthy to have a virtual best friend, but older people are often very lonely and a surrogate is better than nothing.

i think it depends on what you’re doing, maybe. like I set up sops-nix to manage my secrets, but I wanted to use a Yubikey to protect the master key, so I had to use age-plugin-yubikey… only to discover that sops-nix ignores environment.SOPS_AGE_KEY_CMD for some reason, so I had to point at a random PR on sops-nix to enable experimental plugin support, or dig in and override the sops pkg. then I ran into issues where (I think?) wireguard was coming up before the sops secrets trigger, and failing because it couldn’t read the private key… and then on my WSL2 environment I have to do even more since I cross-compile age-plugin-yubikey to Windows x64 from inside my NixOS build, but then I had to pin a bunch of cargo packages because the repo didn’t ship with anything pinned… and for SWI-Prolog I had to roll my own system for adding modules to it, since the nixpkgs support for that is hilariously broken and fully recompiles SWI-Prolog from scratch every time… and now I’m thinking of setting up a microvm with Wayland forwarding for tor-browser but I can’t imagine how much harder that will be…

…but also like, I can’t imagine doing all of this by hand ever again. once I get my janky-ass nix config working, it’ll keep working for as long as fetch urls stay green (which is a big issue unfortunately.)

cries in NixOS

once it works, it works forever, but it’s really hard getting it to work.

what phonetic writing system is this? it’s definitely not IPA, but it kinda resembles it?

/ˌkʌːlˈaɪɔpi/

/hɛdʒˈɛːmʌni/

/vɪtɪlˈaɪɡoʊ/? I think?

I kinda suck at IPA.

it’s /ˈpoːdəbl/ in American English anyway.

French spelling is a total shitshow too. what’s their excuse? Spanish and Italian turned out normal.

it’s wild to think that we embed miniature copies of Greek and Latin into English, for doing science and medicine. not just words, I mean a functional grammar fully stocked with roots and morphemes. we just make words like “holographic,” “isotope” and “synesthesia” (Greek), “accelerometer”, “prefabricated” and “refrigerator” (Latin), or hybrids (“television”, “microscope.”)

English is such a wonderful mutt of a language.

can’t do the UK because I’m trans, but I’m looking at staying in France for a spell at least. thanks for the links!

this is basically Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

ohgodletmeinpleaseIneedtogetoutofhere uh I mean yeah understandable

man I’ve been feeling so dorseless lately 😖

I plan to, actually. I don’t support CCP at all - it’s authoritarian as fuck, with the Great Firewall, the reeducation camps in Xinjiang and the annexation of Tibet - but it’s fascinating to me that the country hasn’t completely collapsed into corruption like so many autocracies, and that they do so much long-term planning.

my impression is that China is a hybrid of state capitalism and central planning, with a lot of poor rural areas and a moderate oligarchy, but that they see billionaires as political rivals (e.g. Jack Ma) and Gilded Age economic inequality as a risk of social unrest and keep it from getting as out of hand as the US.

there was a libertarian takeover project to use NH as a sort of libertarian exclave. NH also hosts the Porcupine Freedom Festival, which is like a summer camp for libertarians where you pay for booze and wares with slivers of gold. Planet Money has a great episode about it.

it’s not like a majority of NH is libertarian, it’s just the highest concentration of libertarians. and subjectively the vibes are real different from VT.

critiquing both is what makes you a left libertarian.