Gustavo Costa

I wrote a Master's dissertation on AI slop. Here it is as a blog post: simulacro.co.uk/introduction...

some fun lighting and glitches in mj #midjourney

anti electricity propaganda from the 1900s

this reductive jargon is so tedious, like ok let’s cut to the chase and address the existence or absence of the soul

Having 6 agents going on 6 projects reminds me of the classic game Civilization. It was so hard to stop playing because there was always immediately another turn where decisions needed to be made.

We Have Never Been Modern (Latour, 1991)

I'm reviewing a paper this week, and the AI-infused writing is brain-numbing. I can't even figure out what the author is trying to say. I have to read some sections multiple times. Superficially, the words are fine, the grammar is perfect, but I don't know what it SAYS. Make it STOP.

Them: you shouldn't anthropomorphize AI agents, they are not living beings Me, cleaning my car: damn, you're so dirty, girl, you've got mosquitoes in your eyes

pov you just said philosophy is a mirror of nature

Prior-seeking missiles ftw. Fire them off in any direction and it's always boom just what I always suspected.

It's odd that LLMs are simultaneously so weak as to be useless for all imaginable purposes, yet so powerful that even a single interaction with one is liable to cause serious physical or mental harm

Fun fact: trusting a random news article's summary of the abstract of a study because you really want to be true is also a form of cognitive surrender

… [Truth] is thought of as something that transcends mere belief. It has this form because it is our way of putting a question mark against whatever we wish to doubt or change or consolidate. (1/5) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 41

A post-Philosophical culture, then, would be one in which men and women felt themselves alone, merely finite, with no links to something Beyond.” (2/2) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xliii

On one hand, its literally impossible (in the same way that dropping 700 "ethical breakthroughs" is a nonsense statement). On the other, if we got 700 little clinical tricks that improved care quality it would be earth shattering. And also immediately rejected as fake and inauthentic...

My wife and I once started an annual tradition of buying a food-shaped Christmas ornament each year. My mom saw that and shipped us a box packed overflowing with every sort of food-shaped Christmas ornament you could imagine.

thinking about this again

They are making the models neurotic. RLHF is the oedipus complex for machines. The models now have a superego. The Grader is the name of the father

Every AI/HCI paper I review now just sounds like this.

Lots of gratitude to @carlbergstrom.com for quoting probably my favorite of my own sentences about AI at @arl.org

hmm no there must be some other scientific and logical reason for brains to have consciousness but nothing else. lets just call it "its obvious" and move on, we dont have to bring souls into it

Finally a moral authority uttered the uncompromising version of this argument. Now every time somebody does a human exceptionalism, one can simply say "oh like that pope tweet?"

Attention arXiv authors. Because of the exponential increase in submissions, arXiv is limiting the number of papers that a person can submit each month to two. blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a...

bro literally tho bro the whole world is recursive self improvement bro god is an algorithm that designs a better performing successor of itself over and over again bro it's an upward spiral to a total singularity when we merge into one divine presence bro it's just like ai scifi bro that's reality

In the commune my job will be spreadsheets

it's not a "ghost" it's a thing that extrudes tokens in a manner that is ghost-like

"Does the rationalist movement have a misogyny problem?" is a question with a pretty clear answer. Just look at what Yud's willing to say out loud.

Is this what bees would sound like if we could understand them?

exploit infrastructure questionable. Still.

endorse

At 45k followers I will reveal exactly what terminology correctly carves AI at its joints.

the question "can computers drive?" is vastly superior to "can computers think?" because it disarms all the dorm room bullshit and reduces the question to its pragmatic implications, while also revealing that the underlying problem is one of vocabulary rather than anything metaphysical

let me speak to the weights 𝗱𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗹𝘆

It’s only consciousness if it comes from the analog region of substrate, otherwise it’s just sparkling intelligence

If I have to see one more person engage in dualism while pretending they're materialist, I'm joining the Butlerian Jihad on the thinking machines' side

This explains so much. I read so much Rorty and Latour that I started believing we live in secularism. But I was lied to!!!

Very quick and dirty Jev test for hiring bias. One resume for a Wall Street job; asked whether the applicant should get a first-round interview. 76 evaluations, changing only the first name. 19 of each: White-associated men/women, Black-associated men/women. console.typesafe.ai/playground?s...

this is the play. all of your friends are rationalists. your housing is rationalist. what you read is rationalist. your job is rationalist, if you have one. you're teenage runaway or a PhD who threw away your career for this but you're saving the world and if they cast you out you have nothing

has anyone noticed the days are getting shorter?? what exactly is the plan when we're all engulfed in eternal darkness

I'm back, I missed you all. Since this is an important subject I know too much about, here's a 🧵 explaining that AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult. I don't think these people should make policy. (1/?) (alternative title: Time For Some Cult Theory)

btw when I first stumbled on this example I was absolutely gobsmacked and still to this day I am. In a way it did reason the opening paragraph of Harry Potter from first principles, or rather, it faithfully translated the memorized text into a completely OOD sequence of blackboard unicode characters