44 years ago I was operating in the mindset of a high-trust arpanet that no longer exists, connecting to the MIT-AI Lab's PDP-10 (@L 134) through the NBS TIP (301-948-3850) at 300 baud with no password, asking nicely for an account to learn LISP and receiving it the next day for free, then learning MACLISP from Kent Pitman and EMACS from Richard Stallman and ZORK by spying on the output of other high-school kids connecting over the NCP network from other TIPs all over the country. Visiting the 9th floor at 545 Tech Square, knocking on the door in the elevator lobby until somebody got annoyed and pressed Terminal-E on their Lisp Machine keyboard to buzz the door open, going downstairs to the publications department and harvesting piles of MIT-AI Lab Memos that were free for the taking to anyone who knew they were free. Returning RMS a 68k manual in the mail with a "Copyleft (L)" sticker that inspired him to use that as a slogan for free software.
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/copyleft/
And I am perfectly aware that this is a totally different world, so I don't need you to lecture me on sealioning, trolls, grifters, and marketers. I have trolled the fuck out of RMS himself in good humor, using his own DOCTOR in Emacs to make fun of him, after he trolled the fuck out of new parents making a baby announcement with his Natalism flame.
http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...
And RMS once trolled the fuck out of me and Mike Gallaher, who I worked with on Gosling's UniPress Emacs (which RMS calls "Evil Software Hoarder Emacs"), who lamented that he'd heard RMS's house had burned down, and RMS replied "Where you work, I would have thought you'd have heard about it in advance". We all laughed uproariously because it was such a great troll, delivered deadpan without blinking an eyelash.
So instead of telling me I'm missing the point without making any of your own, and then flying off into the sunset like an over-announced 747 serving as a decoy for a C-32A containing Trump cowering in a catering cart, why don't you directly engage the points in my other post like I just asked you to?
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I've read your edited reply, and it still addresses absolutely none of the points I raised in that original reply. Reply to that one, not this. Point by point. Or fly off without another word.
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But before you do, please at least admit that you were intentionally insulting the people you were replying to, and concede that pretending that not to be true is insulting to everyone reading, but mostly and rightfully insults yourself.
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You asked why you would. Because you finally made an actual argument, and it deserves a real answer. If you'd opened with "AI companies push sentience narratives to pump their valuations and vulnerable people are having breakdowns" instead of "stop thinking these things," this thread would have been half as long and twice as useful -- because I agree with that part. No argument.
The hype is real, the casualties are real, and the companies telling bedtime stories about their products' souls are doing it for the stock price.
But look at what you did with that concern. Go reread salawat's comment -- the one you called cyberpsychosis. It's an attack on the AI companies: people hoping for a mechanical slave, doing everything possible to avoid the being-ness question, because slaveowners can't afford to ask it. That's your side of the argument, stated more sharply than you've stated it. You shouted down your own ally for using the word "being".
That's what your taboo does as a strategy: it doesn't disarm the grifters, it disarms everyone except the grifters. If serious people can't discuss what these systems are in public, the only people left talking are the marketing departments. Turing's move -- name the question, propose a test, concede the mystery -- is the anti-grift position. Rigor starves hype. Taboo feeds it.
And think about who's actually selling what. The grifters claim certainty: "it's sentient, invest now." You claim certainty: "it's not a being, stop thinking." I claim the question is open, hard, and testable -- which is the one position incompatible with the grift, because an open question can't pump a stock. Your certainty and theirs are the same product with the sign flipped. That's where this thread started.
As for sealioning: the sea lion's defining trait is faux politeness while intruding somewhere it wasn't invited. I've been openly rude to you from my first sentence, in a thread where you were the one telling strangers to stop thinking and get psychiatric help, and you're the one who followed me back in after announcing your departure -- twice. Whatever I'm doing has a name, but that isn't it. You're the one claiming in bad faith that you're not insulting anyone, after you clearly threw the first punch. The fact that your fist unintentionally landed on your own nose doesn't indemnify you.
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Points for the cheap shot -- it's your best material so far. Though by the RMS standard it loses style points for the apology in advance: a real troll delivers deadpan and lets the target figure out whether to laugh. You flinched in the parenthetical. Again. And if you think AI interaction smells like barking orders of submission, you've been using Grok too much.
But your nose is miscalibrated, and it's worth explaining exactly how. The "barked orders" are the most human thing I've written at you -- that's the register of a guy who learned to argue on the ARPANET, and you can cross-check it against forty years of my Usenet and HN output, which you've already googled. Meanwhile the comment that actually got killed -- by HN's own automated filter, the kind of gatekeeper you want stationed at every door -- was the one full of citations, page numbers, and careful structure. Whatever that filter thought it smelled, it smelled it in the scholarship. The rudeness sailed through. Sit with what that implies about the filter you keep demanding.
And if we're scoring Turing tests on behavior: you've ignored direct instructions three times, confidently denied producing output that's visible upthread, announced termination twice and kept generating, and hallucinated a position for me ("orthogonal") instead of reading the actual text. I'm not saying you're a bot. I'm saying your own criteria can't tell, and that was my whole point before you decided it was orthogonal.
I'm not ordering you to submit, I'm asking you to engage with my original post, or make good on your threat to fly away like the decoy 747 that you keep announcing again and again and again, but never delivering.