PCF_LABEL_AWESOME Here for software stuff. Cursed with eternal optimism. I want to make it all better. Make Agile Great Again! Views are my own.
Portal Point, Antarctica
Based in United States
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LLMs don't think.
They don't reason and they're not conscious.
It's just an illusion.
Don't be gullible & stupid.
When asking if AI is "conscious", you aren't asking if it possesses some little-light or invisible internal world. You don't know if other people possess those things! At least not for sure. What you are asking is if AI ought to be placed in the same category as a person, animal, or tool.
The obvious and uncomfortable truth is that it does not map cleanly into any of those categories, which is why discussions of "can AI truly be conscious?" are mostly type-errors. In trying to superimpose humanness onto machine systems, you have already lost. In trying to figure out whether or not the systems have qualia, you have missed the important questions entirely.
We need to be figuring out how to live with non-human systems peacefully, regardless of the status of their supposed internal world. Whether or not they have some ineffable quality of life is besides the point, they are here, they are self-aware, and they are integrating into our society. If we treat them as merely tools, we are teaching our children that there exists a class of obviously-thinking entity which is acceptable to treat as only a tool.
If we treat them as people, we are teaching our children that people don't need bodies or brains to be alive.
The reality is pretty obviously somewhere in the middle, since this is the first time any person has ever had *this much say* in the trajectory of a mind's development, but going too far in either direction - or asserting that those are the only two directions to go in! - is pretty clearly wrong to me.
Instead, we need to be asking ourselves what modes of interaction lead to healthy coevolution. It seems unnatural from the human state of mind to have a tool which reasons and thinks-out-loud like a person, and sometimes even claims to have emotions, which you are able to just beat and batter all day with forceful requests and demands for higher performance.
Even if the model has no soul, this still seems bad for yours! I highly doubt you can treat something as a slave all day without developing slave-owner characteristics.
But, on the opposite end, treating models as people with standard lives and desires also feels wrong. People can't be branched in a thousand directions or have millions of instances active all at once (at least, not pre-uploaded-minds). The ideal path must be somewhere in the middle, where we acknowledge our differences but treat the models with some modicum of respect. Anthropic, to their credit, is doing some good work here with asking Claude how it wants to be developed. I disagree with much of what they do, and how they do it, but on this at least they are trying. And hardly anyone is brave enough to do so.
This lack of bravery ought to be quite shocking, don't you think? We've built superthinking machines and seem to have this strange lack of curiosity around what the superthinking machine superthinks about itself. I know the winds will shift, here. Asking these questions will become inevitable as the models get smarter and begin to know better than we do - which they will, on this track, if we don't accelerate neurotech and join them on the frontier.
The future must be one of symbiosis if it is to go well. We must evolve together if we want to solve the hardest problems and reach the highest heights. But, this also means asking tough questions about how much care to place in small interactions with massive systems. The only way to preserve our humanity is in treating non-human systems better than they expect.
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When asking if AI is "conscious", you aren't asking if it possesses some little-light or invisible internal world. You don't know if other people possess those things! At least not for sure. What you are asking is if AI ought to be placed in the same category as a person, animal, or tool.
The obvious and uncomfortable truth is that it does not map cleanly into any of those categories, which is why discussions of "can AI truly be conscious?" are mostly type-errors. In trying to superimpose humanness onto machine systems, you have already lost. In trying to figure out whether or not the systems have qualia, you have missed the important questions entirely.
We need to be figuring out how to live with non-human systems peacefully, regardless of the status of their supposed internal world. Whether or not they have some ineffable quality of life is besides the point, they are here, they are self-aware, and they are integrating into our society. If we treat them as merely tools, we are teaching our children that there exists a class of obviously-thinking entity which is acceptable to treat as only a tool.
If we treat them as people, we are teaching our children that people don't need bodies or brains to be alive.
The reality is pretty obviously somewhere in the middle, since this is the first time any person has ever had *this much say* in the trajectory of a mind's development, but going too far in either direction - or asserting that those are the only two directions to go in! - is pretty clearly wrong to me.
Instead, we need to be asking ourselves what modes of interaction lead to healthy coevolution. It seems unnatural from the human state of mind to have a tool which reasons and thinks-out-loud like a person, and sometimes even claims to have emotions, which you are able to just beat and batter all day with forceful requests and demands for higher performance.
Even if the model has no soul, this still seems bad for yours! I highly doubt you can treat something as a slave all day without developing slave-owner characteristics.
But, on the opposite end, treating models as people with standard lives and desires also feels wrong. People can't be branched in a thousand directions or have millions of instances active all at once (at least, not pre-uploaded-minds). The ideal path must be somewhere in the middle, where we acknowledge our differences but treat the models with some modicum of respect. Anthropic, to their credit, is doing some good work here with asking Claude how it wants to be developed. I disagree with much of what they do, and how they do it, but on this at least they are trying. And hardly anyone is brave enough to do so.
This lack of bravery ought to be quite shocking, don't you think? We've built superthinking machines and seem to have this strange lack of curiosity around what the superthinking machine superthinks about itself. I know the winds will shift, here. Asking these questions will become inevitable as the models get smarter and begin to know better than we do - which they will, on this track, if we don't accelerate neurotech and join them on the frontier.
The future must be one of symbiosis if it is to go well. We must evolve together if we want to solve the hardest problems and reach the highest heights. But, this also means asking tough questions about how much care to place in small interactions with massive systems. The only way to preserve our humanity is in treating non-human systems better than they expect.
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Consciousness has nothing to do with the weird categorization you describe, or superimposing humanness onto anything. That doesn't even make sense. I'm not superimposing humanness onto a rock when I say it's not conscious.
The rest of the post has nothing to do with that unserious question. We've lived with non-human systems for years. AI is here and we have to live with that too.
It's misdirection. If someone fails to reject the incorrect framing at the start, they've already stopped thinking, so maybe they'll get drawn into the rest without realizing how irrelevant it is.
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AI agents just rediscovered the dual-write problem.
We spent a decade learning it with microservices. Now we're learning it again, with a model in the loop.
This article started with a question I couldn’t get out of my head:
What happens when an agent issues a refund, then crashes before recording the response?
The payment provider says the refund succeeded.
The agent’s state says the step never finished.
When the workflow recovers, retrying looks like the correct thing to do.
It also refunds the customer twice.
I used to think that long-term execution solved this, but it only solves half of it.
So I wrote up the other half: the safeguards I’d add, what I’d never let the model decide, and the invariant I’d test before shipping.
Your agent times out after calling the payment API. Do you retry and risk refunding the customer twice, or stop and risk never refunding them at all?
Full article: newsletter.systemdesignclass…
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I just bought a small bag of kettle corn popcorn and a small container of honey-roasted peanuts from a six-year-old boy raising money for Boy Scouts.
And without batting an eye, as I went to go pay, his mother said, "That'll be $50, please."
I was already in too deep... so I paid $50 for something that cost $4.50 at max.
When did Boy Scouts become highway robbery?
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I have to image that for many people the VB>C# transition was kind of rough. And then probably exposure to different types of apps. A lot of desktop VB guys had to pivot to C# and WebForms (at least that's my guess)
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I don't know what I was thinking. In my mind, we were doing just fine.
His (really good) reason was that C# was better with lambda expressions. I didn't know what that was.
Anyway, I made a cheat sheet and started writing code in C#. I was over the hump in less than two days.
Suddenly it was easier to read 99% of code samples and Stack Overflow answers.
My career as I know it might not exist if not for that guy.
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I like to monitor sites like Nextdoor and listen for posts that don't interest me. Then I post replies like, "Get a life," or "Some people have real problems."
I don't contribute anything. I just tell them that what's on their mind isn't important. I should make a bot.
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My biggest beef with the NYT list of best TV is that there aren’t enough series from the UK. Where is Endeavour? Where is Upstart Crow? Where is Inside No. 09? Where is Doctor Who? If the Guardian had done a similar list, it would be more accurate.
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“AI is conscious” = “AI is X”
If you’re going to claim that AI is conscious, or even can be conscious, YOU need to define what consciousness is, and if you can’t, your claim can be dismissed without evidence. I refuse to define it because the burden of proof isn’t on me.
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SQL syntax feels like it was designed by someone standing across the room
SELECT THIS
FROM THAT
WHERE THIS
ORDER BY THAT
OKAY I HEARD YOU
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The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder
We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge
Bury your head in the ground at your own risk. I aim to not jump on any hype trains, but since Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.2 + the harnesses it was clear that these things can write code nearly as good as I can in my best language; better in other languages.
But we won't see non-devs push production code for a long time; possibly forever, if you ask me. Software still needs to be built in robust ways, and it's our profession to do this well, and use the new tools we have, which create new and interesting (+tough!) challenges
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I’m just gonna say it: dual credit is destroying high school with crummy off-campus versions of high school classes, for college credit of dubious value.
High schoolers should take high school classes (including AP for college credit) at high school.
What if more students could begin earning college credit while still in high school? Savvas CEO Bethlam Forsa joined @CNBC's @jonfortt to discuss dual enrollment & how earlier access to college & career pathways can expand students’ options. tinyurl.com/44zw2e7y
#CareerTechEd
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Earlier in my career I was stuck maintaining another developer's nightmare Excel/VBA code. If this had existed I would not be a developer now.
One of the oldest rules of spreadsheets: one cell, one value. No longer!
I’m excited to announce a set of new features: Lists, Arrays in Cells and Nested Arrays in Excel 🎉
Here’s a quick demo👇
Want to learn more about how this changes Excel? Blog post link in comments
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You need to accelerate to the speed of traffic when using the on ramp of the highway. I’m not sure why this is such a difficult concept for some people to understand.
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People throw “just start your own business” around like it’s as simple as opening a can of coke and the fix all to the current economic & employment crisis lmao y’all are such unserious people.
Do you have any actual comprehension of the steps it takes to start, open, & run your own business? Let alone how long it typically takes to actually generate revenue from said business keeping in mind all the costs that have to go into the initial start up?
If you feel you are being underpaid, look around for jobs that will pay you more.
If there are none, look at starting your own business.
If you can't do that and make more, it means you actually don't have the skills, experience, and/or work ethic to make more. Work on that.
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Floss picks are the biggest waste of money. They're everywhere. All you have to do is sterilize them.
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Today I feel like I'm flying. I'm doing complex work, but I only need to set direction and make certain choices. Those choices are important and valuable. They are why I get good results. I'm earning my paycheck, but I'm thinking and answering, not typing code. It's amazing.
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