Maybe the very first sentence of your story shouldn’t have me stopping to work out whether you meant January or August.

You’re fixated on charitably reading between the lines when far more pertinent – the entire point of this discussion here – is that the possibility is being raised at all. Is water conscious? Should we consider the ramifications of drinking fluids that react to potential gradients? Why would anyone be conjecturing the consciousness of computer software if they did not already think it were plausible, and why would they spend any time discussing it in preference to anything else?

“A recent paper showed birds change their behavior when they think that they’re being tested, they’re aware they are being tested.”

“Now, normally, when you say something’s aware of that, that means it’s conscious,” he continued. “Being conscious and being aware are pretty much the same thing.”

If that’s the case, he said, then it’s hypocritical of us to give intelligent beings like birds “fewer rights than us.” And for that, we must quickly atone.

“We should make them so they really care about us,” he said. “And if we don’t do that, we’re toast.”

Yes this definitely sounds like the logical conclusion you would reach from just wondering whether something is hypothetically conscious, pure thought experiment, no opinions revealed here

Relativity also has its origins in classical electromagnetism, which absolutely relied on so many dang experiments by countless people over decades.

I guess this is the "now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind" trap… or something. (seen previously)

Once again, slop machines only work ‘well’ when you can externalise the pain and costs onto someone else (in this case, millions of stressed-out sysadmins and webmasters)

Cory casually adopts the latest slopaganda

It's possible for some of the code produced by an LLM to be slop

Technically true, in that it’s the only move he’s ever had

Just as AI and quantum computing that doesn’t suck is always just a little bit off in the future, data centres that churn through horrendous amounts of water are always a thing of the recent past.

Have I misunderstood what they meant by ‘superexponential’? I thought they were doing exp(exp(t)) but I am inferring that it’s somehow even sillier than that?

I dare say that’s why they shouldn’t be confused.

effective journalists

I have gazed too long into the abyss, and interpreted this as some kind of effective altruist

Effective journalism: always be sure to talk up the billionaire class for the dividends to society these titans of industry yield. Wouldn’t that be crazy.