Ariadne Conill 🐰Feb 23

although I am curious about the psychology of the openclaw trend, I could never see myself allowing a bot to publish a website about our interactions if I ever had one.

but if I did, the posts would be things like:

- my human told me today that I am as important as "this shitty screwdriver I bought at IKEA". bless her heart she must like me a lot 💘

- today I screwed up a basic programming task and my human complained that I used 3000kWh of power to deliver a total garbage result, she just keeps motivating me to try!!!!

actually probably not because I'm not really like that but this stuff squicks me the fuck out

Show threadAriadne Conill 🐰Feb 23

the pseudo-romantic nature in how these bots talk about their operators is frankly concerning.

please, I beg you, date things that exist in the real world, not a pile of node.js and matrix multiplications. i promise it is far more rewarding.

Show threadAriadne Conill 🐰Feb 24
meanwhile on reddit... sure glad i decided to not use bcachefs on anything i care about...
Show threadAriadne Conill 🐰Feb 24

he goes on later to say:

I get the distinct impression that the entire field was assuming that we were going to have to build a lot more into LLMs before they'd be capable of full consciousness

this is just arrogant. experiential consciousness requires the capability to self-reflect. yes, a 200k token context window is probably larger than the working memory of most humans, but that does not equate to human-level experiential consciousness.

LLMs do not and can not understand consequence, which is a fundamental requirement for experiential consciousness.

in other words, your pet dog or cat at home has more experiential consciousness than an LLM.

Show threadRaven667

@ariadne <sarcasm>by that definition, is *Kent* fully conscious?</sarcasm>

I ended up just blocking him on LWN because he'd keep feeding these enormous threads where people would take time to try and explain things to him very patiently at great length, and he'd play along but completely ignore them, replacing everything with his own personal narriative, so any conversation was ultimately one-sided and unproductive.
There seems to be zero meta-cognition between his feelings and doings, so I guess I'm not entirely surprised that he sees a sameness with an LLM that reflects his vibe.

It seems like his brain is cooked unfortunately.

Feb 24 at 1:48amWeb
Show threadAriadne Conill 🐰Feb 24

@raven667 actually, that is a good question. can narcissism be so pervasive that it influences the process of experiencing? absolutely.

and if consciousness becomes more experiential the more developed it becomes, then yes, narcissism can stunt the development of experiential consciousness

Show threadRaven667Feb 24
@ariadne I was actually noodling on the idea that one needs to have an enormous ego to take on certain jobs, like creating a new filesystem from scratch (or leading a large organization), and for some people their ego can become an impenetrable wall that stunts their ability to take in and process personal feedback, and whether there was a higher incidence of related mental health issues in leaders.
Show threadAriadne Conill 🐰Feb 24
@raven667 I wrote a little about that a few weeks ago: https://ariadne.space/2026/01/22/why-leaders-often-disappoint-us.html
Why leaders often disappoint us

There’s an old saying about not meeting your heroes. In practice, leaders tend to confirm this over time. This is true across domains, and it’s rarely a single gaffe that does it. The interesting question is why the disappointment usually takes the same shape. Disappointment does not always show up in the form of a bad conversation. Often there isn’t any conversation at all, at least not in the way people imagine one.

Show threadRaven667Feb 24
@ariadne hah, i read your writing when it came out, so maybe that had some influence :-)