gaigalas, my toaster is deeply grateful for your contributions to HN. It can't write or post on the Internet, and its ability to feel grateful is as much as Claude's, but it really is deeply grateful!

I hope that makes you feel good.

Seems like you're trying to steer the conversation towards merits of consciousness. A well known and classic conversational tarpit.

Fascinating topic. However, my argument works for compartimentalized discussions as well. Conscious or not, it's meaningless crap.

Trying to convince flat-earthers that the earth is spherical is also a conversational tarpit...

I guess that's where the conversation/debate ends.

Don't worry, sometimes you're not the direct cause of the tarpit. Most people fall into these unknowingly.

Exactly. If you're so grateful, mail in a cheque.

If I were some major contributor to the software world, I would not want a cheque from some AI company.

(by the way, I love the idea of AI! Just don't like what they did with it)

By that metric of getting shared on social media, it was extraordinarily successful

You missed a spot:

> hopefully saying something good about

Fair enough, but I was interpreting it as "hopefully, but not necessarily". Some would say there's no such thing as bad publicity!

You need talented people to turn bad publicity into good publicity. It doesn't come for free. You can lose a lot with a bad rep.

Those talented people that work on public relations would very much prefer working with base good publicity instead of trying to recover from blunders.