Hacker News: MrScruff

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

MrScruff — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 11:58:32 +0000

That would imply that the biological physical substrate is necessary for conciousness, which I don't think you can say with any degree of certainty. It's not an assumption I would personally make. And while I'm speculating, my own view is that whatever the eventual subjective experience of what it's like to be an AI is, it will be nothing like the experience of what it's like to be a human, regardless of the fact we're training them to interact in human-like ways.

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

MrScruff — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:41:01 +0000

Ah, mea culpa.

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

MrScruff — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:21:23 +0000

My point was the "stochastic parrot" label can be both true and irrelevant. LLMs are predicting the next token based on their training data, so at that level "stochastic parrot" is accurate. But it tells us nothing about the complexity of the system that is responsible for making the prediction. One might argue humans have evolved consciousness in order to allow world modelling that enables them to make better predictions.

The difference between a 1B LLM and Claude Opus matters, because we're talking about emergent phenomena. Is a 1B LLM conscious? I don't know, perhaps a tiny amount. Maybe Opus is more conscious. Is a jumping spider conscious? Perhaps a tiny amount.

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

MrScruff — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:52:25 +0000

I think (rather ironically) you're reacting to the version of my comment you have in your mind rather than what I actually wrote. My point was that "stochastic parrot" is reductionist and irrelevant as most people would agree that a real life parrot has some form of inner life, even if we don't really know what form it takes. For all we know an LLM has to build a complex world model in order to predict the next token.

Incidentally, when I pasted our exchange into Claude it managed to comprehend the nature of my argument. Perhaps its attention mechanism is more finely tuned.

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

MrScruff — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:33:03 +0000

I can't actually figure out what you're reacting to - perhaps you could elaborate?

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

MrScruff — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:19:28 +0000

The reason people are confused by LLMs is that they are stochastic parrots. They do an incredibly good job of emulating human behaviours and speech patterns as that's what they've been trained on. But like an actual parrot, it's impossible to say exactly how much conciousness they actually have. I certainly would argue that a parrot is concious, although likely less so than a human.

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

MrScruff — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:12:23 +0000

What we do know is that conciousness is not binary and that it emerged through evolution. That doesn't entirely rule out your magic tsar bomb particle but it gives a strong indicator as to it's likeliness.

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

MrScruff — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:03:33 +0000

The problem with this is that the word 'hot' only has meaning to a conscious being. And while we don't know what conciousness is, it's extremely hard to argue it's not an emergent property of physics. So if your supernova simulation is complex enough to also model emergent properties like conciousness, the simulated conciousness may well regard the supernova as 'hot'.

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

MrScruff — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:56:58 +0000

Do you believe consciousness to be an emergent property of the laws of physics?

New comment by MrScruff in "Various LLM Smells"

MrScruff — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:46:19 +0000

You can avoid the smells with a prompt. I have a benchmark involving short story writing within specific styles and the level of sophistication achievable is increasing over time, in my opinion.

New comment by MrScruff in "Various LLM Smells"

MrScruff — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:01:20 +0000

This is true, but what is also true is that with each new generation of models (and not just for code generation) it becomes less and less true.

New comment by MrScruff in "Various LLM Smells"

MrScruff — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:57:44 +0000

I’d probably word it differently but I agree with much of the sentiment here. I’m also reminded of the stat where 93% of drivers rated themselves as above average.

New comment by MrScruff in "--dangerously-skip-reading-code"

MrScruff — Sun, 24 May 2026 11:19:42 +0000

Practically, this is just about confidence values, anticipated blast radius and balancing testing vs review overhead.

New comment by MrScruff in "A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro"

MrScruff — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:26:38 +0000

It's ASI with jagged intelligence, which is probably what it will remain for a while.

It still sounds to me like remarkable automation rather than something that's expanding the frontier of human knowledge, for now at least.

New comment by MrScruff in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

MrScruff — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:56:56 +0000

Indeed. To be honest, I think everyone on HN is aware of how LLMs work at this point, it’s not actually adding a great deal to the discussion to keep going on about autocomplete or ‘stochastic parrots’.

New comment by MrScruff in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

MrScruff — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:51:52 +0000

The results being a lot better crafted by hand I would agree with, if one removes any notion of a time constraint. Sometimes the comparison point is between the LLM authored software or nothing at all.

New comment by MrScruff in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

MrScruff — Thu, 07 May 2026 11:54:01 +0000

Which is what?

New comment by MrScruff in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

MrScruff — Thu, 07 May 2026 11:20:17 +0000

I think the other aspect to this which you allude to at the end is that all of these arguments start with the assumption that all human software engineers produce high quality code that meets the requirements, but obviously that’s very much not the case in the real world. After all, 80-90% of drivers rate themselves as above average.

If one compares a single competent software engineer directing a number of agents against a random group of engineers (not necessarily working at FAANG or a YC startup), then those quality arguments are going to be significantly less compelling.

New comment by MrScruff in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

MrScruff — Thu, 07 May 2026 11:12:26 +0000

Is your argument that there is no imaginable situation where someone who was competent at software development could find use for a semi-automated tool for writing software?

That would imply that either the person in question has infinite time, or has access to all software that could ever be of utility to them, which seems unlikely.

New comment by MrScruff in "Claude for Creative Work"

MrScruff — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:04:16 +0000

I'm not saying it's rational or fair.

Hacker News: MrScruff

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

New comment by MrScruff in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

New comment by MrScruff in "Various LLM Smells"

New comment by MrScruff in "Various LLM Smells"

New comment by MrScruff in "Various LLM Smells"

New comment by MrScruff in "-​-dangerously-skip-reading-code"

New comment by MrScruff in "A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro"

New comment by MrScruff in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

New comment by MrScruff in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

New comment by MrScruff in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

New comment by MrScruff in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

New comment by MrScruff in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

New comment by MrScruff in "Claude for Creative Work"

New comment by MrScruff in "--dangerously-skip-reading-code"