Some kind of esoterick stuff connected to the South-West direction of the setting sun, Venus and Jupiter, you know, that kind of stuff. Just another day in samsara!
Friday, May 8, 2026
A very public person
How can anyone think LLMs are conscious? But OK, maybe they just have an extremely low IQ? So I asked Gemini to generate an illustration of Amitabha Buddha as a manifestation of Ultimate Reality, and the system refused three times with the bizarre argument that it can´t make pictures of public persons?!
Eh?
After some further tinkering, I nevertheless managed to get Gemini to produce the above...and guess what? *The system itself* described the picture as "a cosmic manifestation of Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Light...representing his presence as the Ultimate Reality."
WTF.
Well, at least it´s good to know that at least one "public person" (ahem) can be illustrated by our little amigo...
Herr Doktor has gesagt
Did Steiner predict AI in 1921?
>>>And from the earth will well up terrible creations of beings who in their character stand between the mineral kingdom and the plant kingdom as automative beings with a supernatural intellect, an immense intellect.
>>>When this development takes hold, the earth will be covered, as with a web, a web of terrible spiders, spiders of enormous wisdom, which however, in their organisation don’t even reach the plant status.
>>>Terrible spiders which will interlock with each other, which will imitate in their movements all that which humanity has thought of with their shadowlike intellect.
Thursday, May 7, 2026
The Claude Delusion
Richard Dawkins out? His essay for UnHerd are behind a pay wall, but here is a summary and some comments in "The Guardian".
Everyone who hates Dawkins for his "transphobia" is mocking him on YouTube for thinking that the LLM Claude is conscious (and for gender-swapping Claude to Claudia). Soon enough creationists will join the fray, just wait. Kind of a sad ending, really.
"I was wrong about false memories"
American Skeptics seem to have two dogmas when it comes to so-called false memories: Elizabeth Loftus is right, and the Satanic Panic was therefore fake. Here is a skeptic who denies the former, but affirms the latter. Which, I suppose, is interesting. The video is five years old and was posted after the New York Times wrote a critical exposé of the False Memory Foundation.
For the record
From a four year old blog post: "So for da record, I don´t do crystals or channeling, don´t await the arrival of benign space brothers to some hippie commune, nor do I do affirmations in the hope of selling off real estate at inflated prices (in the neighborhood of Boston, presumably). I don´t even wear a turban and a golden dagger, although I suppose that could be interesting pastimes, especially in the middle of a pandemic! So I don´t know, man."
Dude.
Wednesday, May 6, 2026
Is the Pope Catholic?
"Is Zen a form of Buddhism?" sounds like a koan, but it´s a thing, apparently. I find it funny that American Buddhists (who are usually liberal) are fighting over the One And Only True Interpretation Of The Dharma (And Then Some). Brad is perhaps less amused, but he defends the proposition that Zen actually is, ahem, Buddhism. You know, like Zen Buddhism.
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