Hacker News: causal

New comment by causal in "AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity"

causal — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:04:42 +0000

I think it's really instructive that only closed-model companies are doing these kind of "my AI could kill the world" demonstrations. All while telling us how dangerous open models are.

New comment by causal in "OpenAI bots meddled with multiple US Government agency sites"

causal — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 18:12:58 +0000

Don't know why you're getting downvoted. We need better reporting on actual attacks vs. benign behavior.

New comment by causal in "'That's so AI ' What gen Alpha's biggest insult tells us"

causal — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:19:26 +0000

I generally find younger people are better at valuing relationships over stuff

New comment by causal in "VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)"

causal — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 23:35:50 +0000

And it’s really opaque. Would be fine if it were an open source package but there’s a lot of mystery behind how it’s implemented.

New comment by causal in "I am done with this shit"

causal — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 10:42:57 +0000

Sounds like it would have been a terrible place to work even before LLMs. And I bet they aren’t actually shipping much.

New comment by causal in "Amazon blocks Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com"

causal — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:59:30 +0000

Yeah I experimented with shopping and found it was really tedious jumping through the 2FA and other bot check hoops every third click. Agree it's a huge convenience if it would work though.

New comment by causal in "Border agents can search cellphones without a warrant or reasonable suspicion"

causal — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 20:27:14 +0000

> I was barred from the US for life

I'm a little confused. Canadian police barred you from the US for life?

Also sounds like you did not take your lawyer's advice not to talk. Regardless, sorry you went through such a stressful ordeal over a false positive.

New comment by causal in "I Don't Like LLMs"

causal — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:36:40 +0000

I think you are right. My most pleasant interactions with LLMs are usually when it gives the perfect short response. Sometimes a single word.

New comment by causal in "I Don't Like LLMs"

causal — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:52:49 +0000

I have noticed that my interactions with AI tend to raise stress more than lower it. Even when it's doing useful things for me. Have wondered if this is fundamental to the interaction, or a sign of user error, or something else.

New comment by causal in "A warning about 'model welfare'"

causal — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:20:10 +0000

Exactly the point!

New comment by causal in "A warning about 'model welfare'"

causal — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 21:03:14 +0000

Even if what you said were true, we do not know that humans are the only case for consciousness.

New comment by causal in "A warning about 'model welfare'"

causal — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:36:08 +0000

Whataboutism. We have shared experiences which can relate consciousness to memory. "To like chocolate" is considerably less relevant.

New comment by causal in "A warning about 'model welfare'"

causal — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:31:20 +0000

> If an AI is conscious, it can outgrow and supersede its training.

We don't know that is required to be conscious.

> The idea, a consciousness needed to be tethered to a "body", is based on pretty shaky assumptions.

Didn't say so. I said:

> If AI is conscious, it is probably a very alien sort of consciousness that is not faithfully narrated by what the tokens say it is experiencing.

New comment by causal in "A warning about 'model welfare'"

causal — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:07:09 +0000

Even from that perspective it would be opening a whole new class of consciousness that doesn't exclude a lot, e.g. factories and powerplants. And certainly not conscious in the way people want to believe when sexting their favorite AI gf.

New comment by causal in "A warning about 'model welfare'"

causal — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:01:30 +0000

I am confused what people even think AI is experiencing. If it claims to be a bat and emits designated echolocation tokens, is it experiencing true bat-like sensations?

In humans, at least, we can tie language back to shared whole-body physiological responses. The tokens from an LLM do not represent anything of the sort.

If AI is conscious, it is probably a very alien sort of consciousness that is not faithfully narrated by what the tokens say it is experiencing. It can be trained to say it feels like a bat and insist upon it vigorously.

New comment by causal in "A warning about 'model welfare'"

causal — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:41:27 +0000

But that inability to reset human brains might be a critical ingredient to consciousness. We just don't know.

New comment by causal in "A warning about 'model welfare'"

causal — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:37:54 +0000

Your arguments seem bad faith but I'll take the bait...

> an impossibly high bar

Not impossibly high. An imperfect testable theory is achievable, agreeing upon it might be the challenge.

> dismiss all your personal responsibility.

You are staking a moral position. Be careful, you are probably guilty of mistreating other unknowably-conscious entities whilst casting judgment upon others for their position. And the person you are a responding to probably is conscious.

New comment by causal in "A warning about 'model welfare'"

causal — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:31:55 +0000

> LLMs are conscious until proven otherwise

GP comment didn't make this claim at all.

New comment by causal in "A warning about 'model welfare'"

causal — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:27:20 +0000

I'm...a little disturbed by how many people seem to think a model writing down "I am conscious" is a metric of consciousness. You can just as easily train a model to argue that it is not conscious. Neither is evidence for or against consciousness. A Python script could also fill out that form, which I also cannot disprove to be conscious.

I didn't think Suleyman's points needed to be made but this whole thread is making me realize how little people understand about LLMs.

New comment by causal in "A warning about 'model welfare'"

causal — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:18:46 +0000

My response was to a comment appealing to brain reconstruction. My point is that a brain may be reconstructed, but LLMs do nothing of the sort. Substrate was never the point.