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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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I don’t care enough to get into a 50-page yudkowski talmud brain debate on the theory, I admit it. But my explanation of this particular quirk has an elegant simplicity that smells of truth, in my opinion. AI enthusiasts here think they’re talking to a novel, alien intelligence. The one-shotted normies are not that different, they think they’re talking to god. I think they’re talking to Karen.

Does your theory need to change if I can demonstrate LLMs solving questions that were not previously on Quora, or otherwise on the internet? I'll admit it solved that particular problem poorly, but it seems a pretty critical issue for any parrot-style claims.

Nah, I don’t think it has solved anything in a truly novel way. I’ll just stay a sceptic until the evidence gets stronger, incontrovertible. I don’t want to turn into one of those AI fiends, hanging onto a new AI’s every burp, feverishly fantasizing about utopia one day, extinction the next.