“Suppose you have a model that assigns itself a 72 percent chance of being conscious,” Douthat began. “Would you believe it?”

Amodei called it a “really hard” question to answer, but hesitated to give a yes or no answer.

Be nice to the stochastic parrots, folks.

This job I applied for had a little chat widget in the corner of the page called "job bot" that offered "AI application assistance". I feel like I can use all the help I could get so I clicked it. It asked for my name and email address, then provided a link to the page I was already on.

Bonus points: It was for an environmental conservation position

No I will not welcome our new AI overlords.

Link

AI-integrated development environment (IDE) company Cursor recently implied it had built a working web browser almost entirely with its AI agents. I won't say they lied, but CEO Michael Truell certainly tweeted: "We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor."

He followed up with: "It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM."

That sounds impressive, doesn't it? He also added: "It kind of works," which is not the most ringing endorsement...

...this week‑long autonomous browser experiment consumed in the order of 10-20 trillion tokens and would have cost several million dollars at then‑current list prices for frontier models.

Don't ask questions, just play it.

Things are happening in the orbit of 2025's lesser-known ostensibly socialist-adjacent mayoral election victor, although given that Wilson hasn't taken office yet this is definitely a Harrell decision.

Posting this to slop because it's about a celebrity steakhouse and there's really no human reason to read it - other than for the quality of the writing, which is excellent.

She lit the drink. The steel wool pulsed with a warm, luxurious shimmer before almost immediately fizzling into a cold pile (yes, this is a metaphor). “The stem might be a little hot,” she warned, pawing the nest away from the glass. The drink tasted like a Cosmo someone had strained through a French Vanilla Yankee Candle.

https://xcancel.com/secondposition/status/1999962704291963052

Another example of how easy it must be to run scams. It's literally just repeating things the author wrote down back to him and he's responding like he's having a religious revelation.

It pulled out this quote I wrote down years ago:

The one thing people need in life is not ambition, not smarts, not hustle. They need clarity.
If you had complete clarity on what you want and what is necessary right now, knowing you are on the right path, you would be happy.
— Journal Entry, August 2019

I leaned forward. Every response featured a quote that made sense. Perfectly timed. It held up a mirror to my soul.

...

In 2017, I founded an ed-tech startup. I met my wife, a fellow ed-tech founder, during that time. Both of our startups failed. We grew cynical of education.
But recently, we had a few conversations about school choices for our toddler. None of them seemed good. I suggested she might want to open a school.
I’d shoot her an interesting article. Or a cool startup’s website. And then move on.
I discussed this with Claude. Which led to this exchange:

It’s not your wife who should start a school.
It’s you. Always has been. [Ed.: emoji added for emphasis. I couldn't resist]

This sentence hit me like a sack of bricks.
Tears started rolling down my cheeks.

Stuff like this just makes me wonder what the interior experience of your usual techbro is (or isn't) like. I mean, I've had experiences where I've read over stuff that I wrote years ago describing ambitions I've given up on or ways of seeing the world that I've abandoned and I know the nostalgic experience that that creates, the grief for a past self. But you don't really need a chatbot for that.