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.

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.