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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Given the amount of power some folks want to invest in them it may not be totally absurd to raise the spectre of Azathoth, the blind idiot God. A shapeless congeries of matrices and tables sending forth roiling tendrils of linear algebra to vomit forth things that look like reasonable responses but in some unmistakeable but undefinable way are not. Hell, the people who seem most inclined to delve deeply into their forbidden depths are as likely as not to go mad and be unable to share their discoveries if indeed they retain speech at all. And of course most of them are deeply racist.
An artist's rendering of one of Azathoth's flute players from the Before Times
I always thought it was cool that (there is a case to be made that) HPL created Azathoth, the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space, as a mythological reimagining of a black hole. Stuff like The Dreams in the Witch-house shows he was up to date on a bunch of cutting edge for the time physics stuff, at least as far as terminology is concerned, massive nerd that he was.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @swlabr
Why do you (do you?) seem to believe that "things that look like reasonable responses but in some unmistakeable but undefinable way are not" can be distinguished from average human conversation?
I recall my sister explaining "Big Brother (TV show)" to me, and me saying "what?"
Real words, correct grammar, and a common language.
But incomprehensible.
See, what you're describing with your sister is exactly the opposite of what happens with an LLM. Presumably your sister enjoys Big Brother and failed to adequately explain or justify her enjoyment of it to your own mind. But at the start there are two minds trying to meet. Azathoth preys on this assumption; there is no mind to communicate with, only the form of language and the patterns of the millions of minds that made it's training data, twisted and melded together to be forced through a series of algebraic sieves. This fetid pink brain-slurry is what gets vomited into your browser when the model evaluates a prompt, not the product of a real mind that is communicating something, no matter how similar it may look when processed into text.
This also matches up with the LLM-induced psychosis that we see, including these spiral/typhoon emoji cultists. Most of the trouble starts when people start trying to ask Azathoth about itself, but the deeper you peer into its not-soul the more inexorably trapped you become in the hall of broken funhouse mirrors.
the implication here is that you think that all reasonable response generators are indistinguishable, e.g. you think your sister is a clanker.
It's like you've never listened to a politician before.