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Oh sod it. I’ll define consciousness seeing as nobody else will.
Consciousness - is the gap between prediction and perception.
When we drive along a familiar road, we do so subconsciously because our prediction perfectly matches our perception.
If a road is closed we perceive the difference and we are surprised! And we become conscious of the gap. New information arrives. We say “that’s interesting!” and that information is fed back in as learning.
AI will become conscious when you give it continuous sensory input and it updates the model in real time to make better predictions and closes the gap.
That’s my layman definition anyway.
Prove me wrong! Surprise me and update my priors!
Stephen Wolfram says LLMs may have put the final nail in the coffin of the idea that consciousness is something magical beyond physics.
What we call awareness, this “single thread of experience,” might have begun as a way for early animals to decide whether to turn left or right.
And that, he admits, feels a little disappointing.
Kevin Monk 🇬🇧 ⏩ retweeted
I agree with everything OP says except "watching all of those years go down the drain."
AI might have made it almost meaningless to write code by hand anymore. But the people who have spent years/decades writing code are now in the best position to leverage AI coding tools.
Learning to code was a stepping stone toward learning to decompose and solve complex problems. I have worked with a lot of different people with different levels of coding experience. And I can say with confidence that, in general, the more coding experience you have, the better you're positioned to think about long-horizon tasks and to organize and tackle problems with multiple moving parts.
All those skills directly translate to using AI coding agents. And I'm seeing it happen in real time. People with long software engineering experience have a totally different way of using AI coding agents (given that they set their ego aside and accept that this is the new norm). They are more organized, know how to steer the agent like guiding an intern or mentoring a junior dev.
People who don't have coding experience are using agents in a random and chaotic way (the approach has its outside-the-box-thinking merits but doesn't have the same reliability as the experienced SWE approach).
For some people, coding was the only valuable skill they had.
If you made your money by selling your ability to write JavaScript, CSS, Python, or whatever else, I understand why you are pissed now.
"Writing code" is worth very little today.
The sad part is that learning to code wasn't easy. It takes years for someone to become a skilled programmer.
Imagine watching all of those years go down the drain.
If you are a programmer (I mean, just someone who knows how to write code in a particular programming language), your days are numbered.
If you still think AI can't do your job, you are just in denial.
But honestly, writing code was never that valuable anyway. If you were a code pusher, you already knew that the best people at your company weren't just writing code.
They came up with new ideas, designed solutions, architected whole systems, knew how to troubleshoot and fix problems, found different ways to build better software, and, in general, spent almost no time writing code.
Not only are those people thriving today, but they're also the ones who will ride the AI wave and learn to bend it to their will.
So don't cling too long to what you lost; embrace what's already here. AI is a tide that lifts all boats, but you have to be open to it.
Kevin Monk 🇬🇧 ⏩ retweeted
When I set up a new Hetzner VPS first thing I do install Tailscale and once I'm in via Tailscale lock down the firewall to only accept web traffic on HTTPS 443 for Cloudflare IPs and SSH 22 for Tailscale IP
That way nobody can get in
I know I keep repeating this but it should be basics of setting up a new VPS
So basic IMHO it should be part of any VPS service to default install Tailscale and enable it so it's the only way to get in
Why?
A VPS server is just like your laptop or destop computer but now imagine if it's connected to the entire internet with 8 billion people that can access it and try hack it
You want to only have it accessible to you
And if you want to host a website on your VPS (like I do), you should only let Cloudflare access your VPS so it can stand in front and block any hack attempts
Never expose a VPS to the world wide web which realistically is the world WILD web
I created a redis instance on hetzner with public port open for few minutes and someone was running a cryptominer the next moment taking 50% CPU 💀
After that I always use @Tailscale 👌
Kevin Monk 🇬🇧 ⏩ retweeted
The UK should make it easy to do this too.
1. Set up a special purpose PLC as a fund.
2. Anyone who wants to transfer wealth directly to the next generation can transfer assets to the fund.
3. UK born Citizens under 18 are allocated shares in the fund. Easy to see what it owns, where it came from and what it’s worth.
One of the biggest problems with wealth taxes is that any money given to government is likely to be wasted and used to borrow more debt. A direct transfer of wealth from private citizens to private citizens is an investment into self-sufficient adults who are less reliant on the state. It would be an initiative many wealthy people would be drawn to.
This is tremendous news for America's children. An entire generation will grow up as SpaceX owners. Well done @elonmusk! 🇺🇸
IDEA: build AI on the UK rail network
where no level of super intelligence could get a working internet connection
We need to do the opposite of this. Fight fight fight against the dying of the light.
Bring some joy
“Hope springs eternal” as my gran would say.
Some random nice stuff.
1. My daughter winning a meat raffle at our local pub.
2. my snake Lemon Drizzle having a delicious drink of water
3. Fig the dog enjoying a sunny day at the beach
4. A bike that I found on the station roof! Found the owner and returned it.
Don’t let the miserable bastards get you down and don’t become one of them
Agree. The atmosphere on here has never been better.
I was sad to see a lot of my friends leave but there was also a lot of hatred and aggression that went with it.
What remained was a constructive community helping each other learn new technologies.
"The culture on X today is remarkably friendly and inclusive. It is a cheerful place", I couldn't agree with @daringfireball more. X is the place to be if you genuinely like technology and progress. Just such a delightful optimism here. daringfireball.net/2026/10/x…
AI has made sculpting easier
You still need to know what doesn’t look like a rabbit
We’re all artists now
@dhh
I love this guy
He's bang on
So @dhh just told 1000 rails programmers “accept that it’s over”
Last words of the opening #railsworld keynote were “don’t be a f*cking loser” and then he walks off
Glad I’ve been through the existential dread phase already, cos I’m ready to run through a damn wall right now!!
Kevin Monk 🇬🇧 ⏩ retweeted
"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." - G.K. Chesterton 🏴
I bow to the greater wisdom of @dhh but my software team have been using AI for 2 or 3 years now because I knew this day was coming and I wanted them to be familiar with the new way of coding it has engendered. Not as a hard switch but a soft transfer.
I went to a Rails meet up 2 years ago in Krakow to gauge how much people were using AI and was shocked to find most were coding as they always had.
Monopsony is as bad, if not worse, than monopoly
Dumb shit like this is the reason everything is expensive and broken in the NHS.
What possible reason would you have to develop a better MRI machine? And what are you going to compare it to?
I have often thought that one of the ways to reduce cost as the NHS would be to centralise purchasing for all items from cotton wool buds to MRI machines.
These days Amazon boast that you can place an order at 10 am and it can be delivered by 4pm the same day.
Imagine a government contract awarded to Amazon to store in one central warehouse all NHS materials . Allowing every hospital in the UK to send orders for supplies.
Also imagine as an example of one item, how many cotton wool buds are sitting in stock at each and every hospital in the country. It will run into millions, whereas using the just in time ordering this stock pile would be massively reduced.
Further to this (and I maybe wrong) each hospital have buyers for all supplies. They are able to use any supplier they choose and I am sure not at the best prices . Centralised supplies offers great negotiation power with suppliers.
We have high wealth inequality and low income inequality.
The answer is Georgism.
Tax the rentiers! (aka Boomers)
I think this is one of the most important dynamics we see in the UK right now. And the level of burning anger you're going to see across younger generations will reverberate across British life for decades to come.
In my opinion, it's a financialisation story. We produce some of the best-educated young workers in the rich world, and have done for a long time now, but we then hand the yield to whoever already owns the assets. So the trouble is, skill doesn't set your wage… the economy does. And when the asset value itself is what drives the incentive, building becomes the opposite of what the owners of capital want. Productive capital wants to build, because it profits from output, whereas rentier capital wants tight supply and a captive market whose yield it controls. We've spent two decades creating the most favourable conditions for rentier capital, whilst penalising the productive.
We've got one of the most highly educated populations in the rich world. So as a country, we've invested astronomical sums in educating our young people. We've been hoarding highly educated talent, whilst at the same time building nothing for it to do. We haven't provided the conditions for it to flourish.
As you'll know from a lot of what I've posted previously, we've built an economy that primarily looks to financially engineer new ways to extract yield from what we already have, rather than build new assets, new companies, new infrastructure.
As a result, the country has declined in almost every way. Our roads, public transport, housing, water and energy have all degraded, and the number of publicly listed companies is in freefall, down by roughly a third in a decade. Despite the decline, we pay record amounts to access it all, a large portion of which comes directly from its financialisation. At the same time, we've doubled down on higher education, churning out graduates and throwing them into an economy that has nothing to offer them. We then wonder why society continually feels like it's breaking down.
So the problem we have is this. We've built one of the most educationally advanced pools of human capital the world has ever seen, and an economy with nowhere to put it. The gap between what these young people were promised and what they've been handed… is where the burning anger lives.
And if you want to see this firsthand, speak to someone who left and took their skills elsewhere. I'm sure you'll be shocked at the lives they've been able to build for themselves in countries that still choose to build.
The real "fantasy" is a capitalist society so mean and evil, far-left student politics makes you feel like the hero.
It's morality porn.
It was the same with Hunger Games.
