mjg2

Seriously, what's hope is left for adults when a 5 year old understands signed Nostr events? The ELI-SWE is the docs I guess? I want to get off the Silicon Valley marketing express.

I don't understand why people cast skepticism or not-devotion as "hatred." There's a whole spectrum for opinions to fall on; I don't care for sports but that doesn't mean I hate baseball.

Thanks for sharing this. It appears your README.md's first paragraph is truncated. It ends with "Carmack which reportedly contains..." What were you intending to say next?

To the author's credit, there's a disclosure that the article is a teaser for deep dive for paid-subscribers only. That's probably why it's light on details.

Ah I see now that I am in agreement with you, thank you for being a patient interlocutor. I do not discard and rule out the possibility of a different substrate being the well-spring from which sentience emerges.

Plainly, based on the current ground trodded and the trajectory laid out by the frontier AI labs, I do not have concrete evidence/proof of sentience having emerged from LLM-based software tools as of June 4 2026 nor do I expect it to happen in the future based on my understanding and observations of this technology. I'm not excluding the possibility but wielding skepticism. I am open to being proven wrong with new discoveries.

Which is why (to return to my lashing of the dead horse) I don't see OP's post as worthwhile. Their post reiterates a point that is already valid (the prior art) with no new substantial discovery. Which is why "unoriginal and pointless" is apt, a novel idea was not presented; it's just some vain virtue signaling.

Roger that, thank you. w/r/g your recapitulation of my point: yes, the story is unoriginal and pointless, and the HN community seems to eat it up-- isn't that odd.

So I still disagree with your elucidated point (as you end with "which is valid"): the OP author is using prior art fiction to bolster their opinion of LLM-based software tools as being a possible vector of sentience, not to disarm our chauvinism like the original author intended. If OP wanted to make that point, they could have written a critical essay instead of farming out their thoughts as tokens.

But still, I look forward to reading the book you suggested to understand and appreciate your perspective more.

I cannot tell if you are asserting my comment is chauvinistic with your use of "we." If that is so: that's a poor counter to my point or assessment of my stance because it assumes I'm making a baseless argument as a "proud human."

My original comment (roughly "there's no intelligence in this article, nor sentience in LLMs") is in response to the blog post's buried lede (that the cumulative activity of LLMs has accrued to a weight of "AGI is around the corner" or "there is artificial consciousness in this matrix").

To be clear, I'm not saying LLMs are useless or a wrong direction in development of "AI," but rather it's the Fool's Gold for the path towards AGI, the pursuit of the academic field of Artificial Intelligence research. A research that I've been abreast of for years before this new age of language models that has made everyone with a keyboard an arm chair expert.

Also, thank you for the book recommendation, it's on my list! :)

Thank you for your point. I don't understand why half these comments are taking this blog post seriously when it ends with "Weights helped me draft and proof this story."

Weights helped me draft and proof this story.

Any HN reader here now, I encourage you to read the original ( https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s... ) in one sitting, go about your day, then read it again. Maybe make some notes on personal critical questions.

Now read the post's topic again ( https://maxleiter.com/blog/weights ) and reflect on the prior fact that weights helped [the author] draft and proof this story.

My reaction (and I'm sorry that it is harsh according to some) is that there is no intelligence found in either the author nor their tool. This is extreme navel gazing, based in science fiction, wanting (wishing) to believe those stories to be true.

I'm skeptical of AI sentience because we must do our due diligence, not because it's impossible. Skepticism is the only respectful approach because to grant sentience is a step away from granting rights.

lol Dude I should be the one verifying your age with this response. I don’t hate Elon, I am wary of his track record and I don’t use X. I drove a Tesla back in 2012, and it’s been a marked downgrade ever since.

I’m not going to keep engaging with someone who makes wild assumptions about my stance and accuses me of lying, ignorance, and evil. I was really hoping for video proof; I know Elon is the type of guy to hold that high with all that SpaceX footage.

Good day sir :)

That's just a man standing by his car. I'm asking for video proof, I'm sorry that wasn't clear off the bat. I also abstain from X due to Elon's track record, so I'm not going to keep searching there for it. Could you please tell me how to self serve on this?

I've driven a Tesla on and off for about 4 years, and I'm thankful to never do so again.

death trap

https://apnews.com/article/tesla-crash-doors-musk-regulators...

It's literally been rated the safest car in America since it's inception.

I'm locating our disconnect a bit better: something can be marked "safest car" for road tests but still be rife with issues, like its obnoxious UI choices, etc.

https://www.tesladeaths.com

Sure they have improved but how do we define success? Is success "It can drive a road it has never been on?" Even then I'm not sure because the model (not the physical car) has probably scanned that road before so it is recalling a prior route while being aware of hazards. Is that learning, or rote memorization?

I think an accolade's merit is based on the definition of done for work delivered. Elon certainly told the public a certain vision of self-driving (a definition of done) and it didn't come to fruition despite PR progress; i.e. a washing machine can do a lot of work, but is it the right work?

We can arbitrate about what "self-driving success" means until the cows come home, but my point is I've seen a lot of self-driving failures from the Teslas I've witnessed in person.

I could never trust a Tesla to drive safely around people. They seem like death traps. Could you share a link to the coast to coast drive please? How aided was it?

Tesla still hasn't achieved their 2016 self-drive goal by their self imposed deadline of 2017, even now a decade later. So, politely, is that accolade merited?

I find your critique very interesting from a perspective-angle: why are you using words like "accommodate," and "foibles," for LLMs? It's not humanoid or sentient: it's a cleverly-designed software tool, not intelligence.

It's not insane at all for humans to alter their behavior with a tool: you grip a hammer or a gun a certain way because you learned not to hold it backwards. If you observe a child playing with a serious tool, like scissors, as if it were a doll, you'd immediately course correct the child and educate how to re-approach the topic. But that is because an adult with prior knowledge observed the situation prior to an accident, so rules are defined.

This blog's suggested rules are exactly the sort of method to aid in insulation from harm.

Biggest issue that stuck out seems to have been that they think the LLM could somehow have an inner dialogue with itself to find out "it's reasoning and motivation":

I'm guessing these are the same type of people who sometimes seems to fall in love with LLMs, for better or worse. Really strange to see, and I wonder where people get the idea from that something like that above could really work.

It's a fetishistic cargo-cult rooted in Peter Thiel's 2AM hot tub party. I still believe the LLM approach won't yield true AGI; despite the very real applications, the majority signal is noise.

The 2025 edition from Penguin

I’m going to suggest books with prose I like: - The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway - Butcher’s Crossing, Willams - Legs, Kennedy - The Passenger, McCarthy

As for sci-fi: Dune!

I just finished this book and complained about it the whole time. The prose is amateur and peppered with cliches (e.g. you should be fined for publishing the phrase "their suit was so sharp it could cut"). His attempt to write about the inner thoughts of the characters was pretty simple. The descriptions of violence and horror also felt child-like, especially the dialogue during those moments (e.g. Redd's introduction). The landscapes are bland, with lots of repetition. Personally, the redaction technique got boring fast when he would take up entire pages of the book to convey absent memories. He could use his words to convey this instead of black-boxes.

I will give the author credit on how they deal with their characters' memories and the re-development of their thoughts, and the usage of time-jumping was reasonable (some books jump around too much, as if these time-skips improve a boring plot). Also the convention for how they solve their dilemma was enjoyable.

Overall, I think the author relies too much on a vocal fandom around the SCP Foundation to glorify the book. I think there is potential for a saga of books but there needs to be more effort in the drafting and editing process to raise the quality of the books to the level the universe deserves.

I was just re-reading the passage from Plato's "The Phaedrus" on writing & the "art" of the letter for an essay I'm working on, and your remark is salient for this discussion on LLM-style AI and social media at large.

That's the whole Microspeak scheme: rename any generic term into a Microsoft term to encroach claim without sweat. Bunch of mooches.

Clean project, well done.

As a classically trained pianist, I'll say the following commentary regarding this thread: there are many ways to learn to "play the piano" and no one is going to agree on "the right way" because there's no true way.

This project is a good way to practice basic sheet music reading as well as to aurally recognize notes and phrases; teaching would require some cultivation of understanding the context and nomenclature. Thanks for sharing!

First, I'm responding the more (politely) trivial remarks.

drugs and alcohol, swimming, bad driving, biking, getting hit by a car whilst walking, getting shot, or suicide.

These are false equivalences-- when has a pool try to groom a child over the span of 3 years?

What if I started Bikesafe an always online dash cam / coach for your rider where AI would identify unsafe behaviour and coach your kid and virtually eliminate bike deaths. Would you feel more safe?

This is wholesale the wrong approach. This is the parent absconding responsibility, which is my driving point of the problem.

Now to the main point:

You are actually expecting a lot from devices that you never had in the real world in the first place ...

I'm not expecting anything from my devices because machines cannot be held accountable for human choices; a gun cannot be held accountable for being misused. The internet is a powerful tool and users should understand the ramifications of certain actions.

If your kid lies you might not get a truthful answer to that question in person or online.

That's a parenting moment that one should relish retrospectively. To teach them good morals and values, to remind them that you love them, and that lying about safety processes can be very dangerous.

This HN post fits into the category of "Pithy blog title with casually anecdotal content."

Software companies will never earnestly attempt to protect children because that action ("acknowledging children are in danger by using our product") acknowledges risk and introduces liability. (VCs hate that shit, especially Silicon Valley VCs.) In the United States, decades ago, laws were introduced to induce accountability of online platforms in regard to IP and child protection laws in the context of user generated content (forums, markets, chatrooms). Basically, these websites/corporations bulked at the weight of accountability ("how are we to monitor every user's action all the time?", "We'll be sued immediately by trolls.", etc.). The parties involved eventually came to a resolution that there's a "notice period" that organizations use to enforce this behavior on its communities.

If I were to write a blog titled "Parent Controls Aren't for Parents", my opening salvo would be "They are minimal-effort guardrails to protect corporations from being sued by negligent parents for post-incident harm."

With due respect, this comment conveys a position of privilege and surviver's bias. I, like you, eschewed online rules as a minor and I luckily benefitted from this time in my expertise. I was lucky. I didn't run into predators when using TF2, Runescape, or MySpace, but that doesn't mean the threat wasn't validated on with persons (children at the time) that fell through the cracks.

The story outlined, one of a child prodigy solo-navigating the gritty online world of pre-2000's, is old and tired. An active parent can support a child at all ages safely in these "hacker" moments that are described without giving them un-reined access to tools. A parent should be able to ask "how was your day today?" and get a truthful answer about online activity, just like the same question being asked at the end of the school day. It's out of curiosity and protection, and from a nurtured relationship.

It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.

I disagree because children, despite how precocious and "old-soul"ed, are not wise compared to online predators.

I appreciate your POV on allowing children to make their own mistakes; life is the best teacher. Yet, to make an analogy, a gun owner keeps their collection locked up not just for their protection but for their family's protection. Some lessons in life have steep prices and are one-way doors, and we should pass that hard-earned wisdom to the next generation without those costs.

I agree. Parents in the 21st century need to realize the call is coming from inside the house: it's their obligation to protect their child. Unsupervised usage without full due-diligence will lead to incidents like what the blog author describes.

The dilemma of online protection is a false crisis because parents would rather let their children play with fire than nurture their babies.

It's all hypothetical for a transaction 5 years in the past. The future you propose is one where Epic is not actually the same: they have more liquid capital towards the mission their stakeholders decide, and less influence on Godot.

However, their stakeholders decided circa 2019/2020 that they want to influence the development of Godot and spent their money that way. Corporate donations aren't at a whim like us individuals who spend $3/mo on Wikipedia or a food pantry, it's considered by the executive team, calculated and green-lit by their accounting team.

Ostensibly what u/skibidithink replied. We should have a healthy distrust of international corporations giving for unapparent reasons beyond being in the same sector. We can gesture about how a gift has no obligations, but no one gets into business to not make money, and true charity is without obligation.

ConcernedApe donated to give back to the foundation he came from, while Epic is out for global domination in the virtual entertainment sector.

I disagree. I think ConcernedApe is actually genuine with his charity and we should see this as a standard for corporations to follow.