Yeah I’m psyched for this.

(parenthetically, there are a ton of tools in the philosophy of language that have hidden inside them that same assumption that where there's smoke there's fire, so be careful to excavate the assumptions inside your tools before you go too far down the path)

There's still a lot of thinking to do about how these things impact people, individually and globally, but stop trying to figure out the sneaky new kind of fire that's making it all happen. It's just smoke. No fire. Focus on the thing for what it is.

And that can take a lot of time, arguing how an LLM is a new kind of psuedo-mind, or gets to be personified for some reason, or should count as having some brand new kind of thought. But no. It's not any of those things. It's just a smoke machine.

But LLMs make smoke without fire. They're not thinking minds at all. And it is in fact wild that we can have all of this smoke without any fire. The mistake I see is people going "okay, this is a cool new source of smoke. There must some cool new kind of fire that made it."

I love this fact.

I like your stuff so much I’ll watch it in whatever form whenever it crosses my feed.

Does your rant have certain similarities to past rants, in a way some people might find controversial?

A skeleton walks into a bar and says “gimme a beer and a mop”

I know how you can make a plausible looking actuarial table real quick.