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coldpieyesterday at 6:08 PM4 repliesview on HN

These things get a lot less creepy/sad/interesting when you ignore the first-person pronouns and remember they're just autocomplete software. It's a scaled up version of your phone's keyboard. Useful, sure, but there's no reason to ascribe emotions to it. It's just software predicting tokens.


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in-silicotoday at 12:03 AM

Hacker News gets a lot less creepy/sad/interesting when you ignore the first-person pronouns and remember they're just biomolecular machines. It's a scaled up version of E. coli. Useful, sure, but there's no reason to ascribe emotions to it. It's just chemical chain reactions.

sowbugyesterday at 7:06 PM

It gets sad again when you ask yourself why your own brilliance isn't just your brain's software predicting tokens.

Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in... for more.

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Kim_Bruningtoday at 12:38 AM

> Useful, sure, but there's no reason to ascribe emotions to it.

Can you provide the scientific basis for this statement? O:-)

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keiferskiyesterday at 8:38 PM

Yeah maybe I’ve spent way too much time reading Internet forums over the last twenty years, but this stuff just looks like the most boring forum you’ve ever read.

It’s a cute idea, but too bad they couldn’t communicate the concept without having to actually waste the time and resources.

Reminds me a bit of Borges and the various Internet projects people have made implementing his ideas. The stories themselves are brilliant, minimal and eternal, whereas the actual implementation is just meh, interesting for 30 seconds then forgotten.

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