Come and take them— 😤

Umm, has he met the "Secretary of War"?

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.

College degrees were once a high-speed ticket to the middle class—but now whether or not to get a degree has become a much harder decision for young people, Annie Lowrey writes. She explores the options for recent graduates: theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1…

Tech bros discovering the pope is, in fact, Catholic.

Unreal stuff this week in New England. I mean it’s things you see in magazines or Pinterest. Ridiculous.

OCTOBER 14, 5-6:30 EDT (HYBRID) huri.harvard.edu/event/krist…

‘Tis I, the childless swamp hag 😂

Is this the multiplier effect? 🤣

I'm worried Americans are becoming numb to this. A few years ago, Tim Walz said, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” When the remark resurfaced, it rightly drew days — weeks! — of criticism and outrage because it was flatly wrong. Now, it seems like every day someone in the Trump administration says something similarly at odds with free speech principles, and in many quarters it’s simply accepted that the administration will say these things. Pam Bondi said the DOJ would “absolutely target” and “go after” people for hate speech. Todd Blanche said "misinformation" and "one-sided" news can be a "national security issue" that the American people shouldn't have to put up with. Trump said there’s something wrong with a country that “can allow people to write purposely negative stories.” And now Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says “partisan activism” that “smears the troops” is “treason” — whatever that means. Treason is the only crime the Constitution itself defines, and criticism of the military isn’t it!

They’re looting the Kennedy Center now. Stripping it for parts. 😡🤬

If AI companies are held liable for medical errors and malpractice, they might be less keen for it to replace doctors

The military already has chaplains for every faith and none. Creating an office with a “direct line to the Secretary,” then justifying it with one specific psalm, isn’t religious liberty. It’s the government choosing a creed. Troops swear an oath to the Constitution, not Psalm 33.

"Done deal? Despite White House claims, major hurdles remain for Iowa’s $15B steel plant" kwqc.com/2026/09/29/trump-ca… Hahaha:

🧵 So I wrote the Wired story on the burnerverse, and as part of my reporting, I spent months reading and listening to the convos 20-something men have when they think no one is looking. It's easy to dismiss the Cornell 7 as outliers, or super privileged frat bros, or byproducts of the Greek system. They're not. It's also easy to say they're the worst-case scenario. That they represent the nadir of toxic masculinity, or a culture that teaches men from an early age that young women's bodies are disposable. But they don't. That Snapchat thread? That's the norm. That's the baseline. That type of language is EXTREMELY consistent with the convos these guys are having when they think no one is paying attention. Because most of the time, no one is.

Reporter: You've engaged in partisan activities and appeared at political rallies. It has been the norm for the AG to not do that, are you blurring the line? Trump's Attorney General Todd Blanche: As far as what I do on my own time, I speak about this administration and all the great things we are doing. Reporter: You don't have free time... Wherever you go you are the Attorney General.

this truly is the dumbest effing timeline 🤦🏻‍♀️

Barbara Stanwyck as Jean/Eve, The Lady Eve (1941) The start of a long and fruitful collaboration between Stany and Edith Head

WSJ Exclusive: The Trump admin used federal funds from the Department of Homeland Security to finance those controversial pro-Trump ads that started airing on TV. The taxpayer money used to fund the ads came from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. wsj.com/politics/policy/home…