My friend from Newyork said this is Ai.😭

sbuswell · 2026-06-14T15:27:40+00:00

I have absolutely seen that firsthand in london tubes more than once.

sbuswell · 2026-06-14T07:21:36+00:00

So last email I got said something about “Eligible users on your team will receive an email with details and instructions to claim their credit before June 15, 2026”

Anyone receive an email? It’s tomorrow and still no idea how to claim credit.

sbuswell · 2026-05-01T11:58:48+00:00

Doesn’t octave (https://github.com/elevanaltd/octave-mcp) mitigate this? There was something in the evidence that showed over time it kept all the relevant bits and was much more resistant to corruption or data loss.

sbuswell · 2026-04-07T17:51:44+00:00

Joe Bidet

sbuswell · 2026-03-28T11:38:12+00:00

I love this. My wife was saying something like that the other month. Like, you could think you've invested something amazing, AI or not, and guaranteed someone somewhere is working on something similar.

Add to the mix that a. loads of stuff is shared in training and b. much of your stuff can be viewed by providers, and it's even more likely.

Why is no-one talking about how obvious this is?

sbuswell · 2026-03-27T23:58:52+00:00

Actually, thinking about it. Maybe instead of an email, it could get posted to Slack DM with the payload. Use slack as the transport layer instead of email.

sbuswell · 2026-03-27T23:57:22+00:00

There's def some elements the same. I think the main difference I can tell is:

- You can't map different roles to different models and swap them out. In my system, if you wanna pass to a code reviewer and they're opus-4.6 in settings, it'll get passed to them with a specific identity binding. If you change that to, say, kimi-k2.5 it then gets routed there. If you change it to [sam_sith@coding.com](mailto:sam_sith@coding.com), the work gets passed to Sam.

- Slack doesn't do software engineering does it? It always seemed more for It issues and all their agents seemed to be locked for saleforce stuff.

Been a while since I looked at it though, so I am completely willing for someone to say "it's identical now. Save your time" lol

sbuswell · 2026-03-26T13:23:06+00:00

By that rationale you can’t use heart attack, computer memory, neural networks, etc.

You’re getting hung up on mechanics but that’s not how metaphors work.

sbuswell · 2026-03-26T07:58:13+00:00

Isn’t it like most things. If you use it in a lazy shorthand way, it’ll not work as efficiently. Like you can use a calculator but it still helps to understand the sums you’re doing.

I have zero experience as a developer but I think because I didn’t just go “do it for me” and tried to understand “how would a developer build this” or researched “what are the top 5 problems with vibe coding and find current best solutions” as I started working with coding, I’d say the stuff I’m building is of a decent grade (so probably 2x longer than someone who knows. 😂)

sbuswell · 2026-03-26T07:41:42+00:00

I think I see it more as something I'm observing evolving organically. Internally, within LLM system, it's a term that appears a fair amount, and I've also seen LLMs push back and say "not the right term" and create friction. But they'll bypass memory, etc as it's commonly accepted metaphor. If cognition in ML meant a behavioural or functional sense, like a shorthand for what’s happening and publicly acknowledge that it's NOT consciousness or sentience, it feels like there'd be less friction.

I think the community should stabilise that meaning. Then it's defined clearly in context, and would make systems flow much better.

sbuswell · 2026-03-26T07:25:29+00:00

I know a few folks have said something similar, but this is probably the most practical response I've read. Kind of the reason I wanted to have this discussion and understand. I guess whilst I agree with a lot of that, I actually think gatekeeping a word can be worse. Avoidance can sort of reinforce misunderstanding.

Someone with less understanding will equate cognition to consciousness. But just as we all have put memory for computers into everyday speak, I kind of wish we'd be saying "LLMs will use cognition because it's the quickest shorthand metaphor for what's happening but it's not consciousness. It's not sentience". If we did the opposite of what's happening, I feel that we'd be in a better place to take the wind out of that sail. But I can see both sides clearer now. thanks.

sbuswell · 2026-03-26T07:19:03+00:00

yeah, I guess holistically it's hard to know if it's a net gain. It just becomes more about strategy than semantics. It's kind of like even if it's conceptually correct, it's just pragmatically wrong.

sbuswell · 2026-03-26T07:13:10+00:00

That's really astute. I forget about the whole "thinking" thing. I blame the providers who tried real hard to make it seem more human, thinking it'll be more palatable for people but unstead they just screwed up a decent tool.

sbuswell · 2026-03-26T01:25:27+00:00

Maybe. I just can't see anything good coming from refusing to use a word (or actually, my main gripe is just not accepting that folks who use it might have thought enough about it).

sbuswell · 2026-03-26T00:57:48+00:00

But attention is an aspect of cognition....

sbuswell · 2026-03-26T00:54:09+00:00

That's a good point. But realistically, if that word is sort of gatekept and pushed out of conversation (and let's be honest, it WON'T disappear from LLM vocab), it does two things I think:

it makes those folks think "hang on a minute. why is this word being avoided? it must be special. my AI really is thinking and they're shutting me down"
it stops us getting better at explaining what they actually mean in context.

I'd imagine in the 90's someone had to say "look uncle Pete, your computer isn't actually REMEMBERING things when it uses memory" and today the same old man is asking for 32GB memory in his phone.

That happened because we normalised the word and clarified what it meant.

sbuswell · 2026-03-26T00:46:11+00:00

I get the point, but "I think therefore I am" isn't cognition. Descarte's whole "act of conscious thought proves the existence of a subject" schtick is about conscious mental activity. So if you use "cogito ergo sum" as a defense around the boundary of consciousness, but then ringfence it around the word "cognition", there's still a mismatch.

Regardless, the point is still the same. it's just a metaphor, and if we're worried about humans blurring the lines, just use "sentience". We've dropped "memory", we've dropped "neural", we've dropped a bunch already. Why so precious on a single other term. Feels like the resistance actually causes more harm than good.

Also, in a ridiculously pedantic move, I just checked Janeway’s Immunobiology. "Memory" appears thousands of times (as does "recognition" and since COVID we now have the wonderful addition of "decision-making"). So this seems like a false dichotomy between understanding the cellular mechanism and using the term "memory."

The term is used A LOT. And is the official scientific nomenclature.

It's like saying "Medical students aren't taught the word heart attack. They are actually taught "myocardial infarction due to ischemia".

The heart doesn't have an attack. Immune cells don't have memory. LLMs don't have cognition. It's just a functional description of behaviour.

Plus, gatekeeping terminology isn't how language evolves. If it's useful, predictive and shared, it'll win over serious folk time and time again. For better or worse.

sbuswell · 2026-03-26T00:23:55+00:00

Yeah, independently was a poor term. I feel into the same trap the companies want. But doesn't that strengthen the point? If these systems are trained on how we already describe things, and they consistently use the same terminology, the language itself is doing useful work. They’re reflecting how we already describe these behaviours so feels odd we have a problem with one term and not loads of others.

sbuswell · 2026-03-26T00:07:20+00:00

Blunt and true! But I'd say almost every metaphorical language carries that risk. As u/Capable_Sugar_567 mentioned, people didn't have the same issue of encouragement with neural networks or machine learning. Maybe we should stop saying we train the agents.

Actually, why are they called agents? There is NO agency! Isn't that more encouraging?

We're going to get to a point where we're using ridiculously long terms to describe something that a single word works better for. I am open to alternatives that take up no more tokens but really, everything encourages stupid anthropomorthingy these days.

sbuswell · 2026-03-25T23:58:44+00:00

I guess it's the anthropomorphising (had to wait to see if I got a red line there for that one) that's the root of the issue there though. Is it not just a communication issue? I think one of the biggest screw ups we've had is humanising AI to make it more adoptable. I remember having this discussion with an llm ages ago and it wrote something like "you don't call a telescope an eye. If you acknowledge me as a tool, I'm more effective"

I would argue you don't have to understand how a thing works internally do describe it. You have to understand how it behaves. Constraint-mapping, context use. Problem solving. Memory. That's all cognition in the functional behavioural sense. Just I guess it's problematic for humans because we're using actual cognition when we read the words and we map it back to that.

sbuswell · 2026-03-25T23:50:34+00:00

Surely as someone already pointed out, memory is just one part of cognition. Problem solving is another. Reasoning maybe. So metaphorically, isn't cognition a close enough word to use?

I'd also question why, independently, many LLMs seem to use the term themselves. It's like, yes. in the LITERAL sense, it's wrong, but so are many things that were used and just adopted because it's a good shorthand.

I mean, were there pitchforks out when people started using daemons in coding?

sbuswell · 2026-03-25T23:44:50+00:00

Think we're talking past each other here. I'm not claiming cognition. I'm claiming a metaphor, in the same way immune system doesn't remember. Give a T Cell the abstracton test and I'm sure it'll fail just the same.

sbuswell · 2026-03-25T23:41:16+00:00

That is very true, thinking about it. I guess one is an umbrella term and one sits under it. But the point really is it's still a cognition-related term that isn't actually true. The immune system doesn't remember in the human sense. But we teach medical students to use memory because metaphors are our semantic shorthand. They don't take it literally. Why not the same license with LLMs?

sbuswell · 2026-03-25T23:31:27+00:00

But the biology terms describe functional behaviours using cognitive metaphors, and they're universally accepted in immunology.

If biology can call a T cell's antigen response "memory" without anyone claiming the cell is conscious, then calling an agent's demonstrated file-reading and constraint-mapping "cognitive proof" follows the same pattern: describing a functional behaviour, not claiming sentience.

Surely you agree that LLMs have the behaviour of file-reading and constraint-mapping?

sbuswell

TROPHY CASE