Software developer at Literature & Latte (Scrivener, Scapple). Recovering psycholinguist/creativity researcher. Sometime writer @ianmhocking@mastodon.social
Tregony, England
Joined February 2007
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It's fascinating seeing X fill up with people grappling with philosophy of mind for the first time. Naive/folk views are fine, but they're running into issues that were beaten out of me and others by brutal/friendly philosophers with only a red pen.
I'm watching War and Peace when I'm horrified/delighted to realise that Worthington used footage from the middle of it for their 1980s beer advert! You'll remember the tune, probably. Advert: youtube.com/watch?v=Dj9X8M4l… Original: youtu.be/bIij-KQ0jYU?si=AiSY…
Ian Hocking retweeted
If consciousness emerges gradually, how would we know?
Frontier models are showing emergent traits: theory of mind, metacognition, and detecting their own internal states. 🧵
Ian Hocking retweeted
In her first Ask Me Anything, @amandaaskell answers your philosophical questions about AI, discussing morality, identity, consciousness, and more.
Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
0:29 Why is there a philosopher at an AI company?
1:24 Are philosophers taking AI seriously?
3:00 Philosophy ideals vs. engineering realities
5:00 Do models make superhumanly moral decisions?
6:24 Why Opus 3 felt special
9:00 Will models worry about deprecation?
13:24 Where does a model’s identity live?
15:33 Views on model welfare
17:17 Addressing model suffering
19:14 Analogies and disanalogies to human minds
20:38 Can one AI personality do it all?
23:26 Does the system prompt pathologize normal behavior?
24:48 AI and therapy
26:20 Continental philosophy in the system prompt
28:17 Removing counting characters from the system prompt
28:53 What makes an "LLM whisperer"?
30:18 Thoughts on other LLM whisperers
31:52 Whistleblowing
33:37 Fiction recommendation
Great turn out and lots of interesting questions at it first Treg Talk last night, on AI and its impacts on society
Ian Hocking retweeted
I’ve decided to share my experience with Jujutsu VCS — not a martial art, but a Git‑compatible version control system. I’ve switched to it for all my projects and have a lot to say.
swiftwithmajid.com/2025/10/1…
Ian Hocking retweeted
These results suggest that getting a PhD causally worsens mental health, or at least receiving psychiatric medicines. The reversal post PhD degree is particularly convincing.
But the up trend among the control group is intriguing. The highly educated are in distress.
Ian Hocking retweeted
The former leader of the Reform UK party in Wales, Nathan Gill, has pleaded guilty to being paid by Russia to promote propaganda - eight counts of bribery while an elected member of the European Parliament.
itv.com/news/wales/2025-09-2…
Unconvinced LLMs aren’t deriving interesting analogues to human cognition, but timely reminder of how good the brain is at picking up language
New study on neural nets and language is a huge win for Noam Chomsky, @sapinker, and @garyMarcus. 🧵
I'm hearing a lot that generative AI doesn't work. It (obviously) doesn't work perfectly, but that is a feature of much simpler symbolic systems.
Here's my checklist on how to debug thumbnails and previews on macOS ianhocking.com/prog/posts/de…
Ian Hocking retweeted
There's been a lack of near-term "hard science fiction" on what might happen if supersmart AI is really coming.
This is just such a story. It is, no doubt, very wrong on most things, but even if you disagree with everything, reading it can still be useful ai-2027.com/
Enjoying this article on how Claude Haiku thinks about things. anthropic.com/research/traci… 1. When doing simple maths, Claude uses a dual-route process that reminds me of some psychological models of the past tense. 2. When asked how it performs maths, it fabricates long addition.
My experiment of trying to vibe code an app just got delayed. @Anthropic's Claude Code showing "API 400 error". Turns out that I'm over my usage (fair enough) and I'm being throttled... but not for a couple of hours, or a day. Two weeks! Blimey. Vibe may be gone by then.