Fable isn't the first. In 1999 the department of defense blocked exports of the PowerMac G4 for crossing the 1 gigaflop threshold. Steve Jobs turned it into an ad.

You thoughts those tattoos were benign? Think again.

True. If you study and get good, you learn things that cross over into every area of life. I've said this for years.

These security guardrails are out of control

If you told me ten years ago, I'd spend most of my day working on a computer I would believe it. If you told me I'd spend most of my day *talking* to a computer, I'd have thought you were nuts. The future is wild.

The growing inaccessibility of science.

In this country, we'd give him a seat in congress.

This quote tells only half of the joke: The story goes that the mathematician Kac (the one from the Feynman-Kac formula) once gave a seminar at Caltech with Feynman in the audience. Afterwards, Feynman quipped "If all mathematics disappeared, it would set the world back exactly one week." Kac immediately replied: "Yes, precisely the week in which God created the world"

"Many experts think that conscious AI is possible. I think they're wrong." Watch neuroscientist @anilkseth's full TED Talk here: t.ted.com/0NR6eGI

It’s always Claude. None of these folks are brave enough to claim that the Shopify Sidekick or Taco Bell AI is a conscious being.

There’s a famous Usenet story about a programmer (Mel) who refused higher level abstractions. It was the late 1950s, and even in that era, Mel was…well today we’d call him a boomer. Mel only wrote in raw hexadecimal. He didn’t approve of compilers, and refused to use optimizing assemblers. "You never know where it's going to put things”, he said. Everyone else in the company was moving on to FORTRAN, and they didn’t understand why Mel was so stubborn about using new tools. He *loved* self-modifying code. “If a program can’t rewrite its own code”, he asked, “what good is it?” Mel eventually left the company, and other engineers were tasked with understanding what was left. Mel’s hand-optimized routines always beat the assemblers; but some of it looked absolutely bizarre. One engineer took ~2 weeks to understand why there were loops with no exit condition…yet the program worked fine. I won’t spoil all the details, you should really read it, it’s short. But it’s a fantastic piece on “what defines a real programmer?”…which is becoming increasingly relevant in this vibe-coded era. I strive to understand computers as deeply as Mel! If we aren’t careful, we’re going to lose the “Mels” of this world to time. That’s part of why I go so deep in my youtube videos. I hope that younger viewers are genuinely fascinated by the inner workings of our machines, instead of handing everything off to higher abstractions.

Definition differences. I remember the days of ELIZA back in the 1960s - yes, I’m that old. It was the first chatbot, roughly 500 lines of code, laughably stupid by today’s standards yet utterly groundbreaking. Many users were convinced a real human therapist was behind the screen. This became known as the ELIZA effect: our well-documented human tendency to anthropomorphize machines and project real intelligence, empathy, or consciousness onto software. That same effect explains why so many today are fooled by LLMs. Despite giga-scale weights and impressive outputs, LLMs are nothing more than a vastly more sophisticated ELIZA - statistical pattern-matchers, fancy random word generators. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know what consciousness is (no one seems to), and my shorthand of “awareness” is lame. But I know what it isn’t. LLMs are NOT conscious and never will be - unless your definition is loose enough to call a parrot intelligent simply because it can 'talk'. You can steer LLMs to say literally anything you want; that’s a feature of a machine: a countersign of sentience. End of story. I work with frontier LLMs every damn day... all day long. They’re as dumb as a box of rocks. But they’re still incredibly useful tools - IF you throw a TON of engineering at them. This is my opinion… and worth every cent you’re paying for it. 😊

i didn't think AI was conscious until it started talking about how smart and hot i am

Illuminati confirmed

this only makes sense if you were there

He found out.