Ghost in the stochastic parrot (eh23)

Ghost in the stochastic parrot (eh23)

Author: CCC media team April 5, 2026 Duration: 58:47
Sci-fi started merging with the real world around 2022. That's when I started paying attention. Are LLMs definitely persons? Are they definitely not persons? What can we prove? (What about animals?) Machines indistinguishable from humans. But we can rule over machines without having ethical concerns! That's the promise of Isaac Asimov's books, if you don't pay attention. If you do, he's asking how human a robot needs to look like before it really becomes a bit human. We have robot siblings of HAL 9000 or any friendly robot from Asimov's stories. Behaving [close enough to humans](https://xeiaso.net/notes/2026/the-discourse-has-been-automated/), except we can rule over them, without having ethical concerns. Without? How sure can we be that there's no "I" inside? Not even on a mosquito level? Is there a [subjective experience in a mosquito](http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nagel-what-is-it-like-to-be-a-bat/)? Can you consider it? Could you recognize an "I" in [an alien](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)) if a spaceship landed next to you? Perhaps LLMs really [don't have](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie) a subjective "I". Then my question is answered and I can wrap up the talk. But for how long? Some animals are [legally persons](https://www.nonhumanrights.org/blog/cecilia-chimpanzee-legal-person/). Where will the concept of machine [personhood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood) go in the near [future](https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html)? Will we have [machine companions](https://dustycloud.org/blog/an-ai-called-winter-neurosymbolic-computation-or-illusion/) or are we on course into the depths of [machine hell](https://qntm.org/mmacevedo)? This is important. Humans have [no mercy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensive_animal_farming) to entities that aren't seen as [full persons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehumanization). LLM sellers are doing their best to create "assistant" persons inside them. How much can we guess from LLMs technical structure? We haven't solved the hard problem of consciousness yet. Do we have to invite spiritual thinking to make progress here? And now we need to know what consiousness is to answer our immediate ethical issues. Ethical problems typically take a back seat to more pressing cultural and economical ones. Perhaps this messy talk convinces you to care about ethics a bit more. This work is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ about this event: https://pretalx.eh23.easterhegg.eu/eh23/talk/FPXQKT/

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Author: Episodes: 100

Chaos Computer Club - recent events feed
Podcast Episodes
Using Nix without the Nix: a Retrospective on Zilch (lixcon2026) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 24:51
It's been a while since I last talked about Zilch; and now with Lix's existence, it's time to take another look; what's the status of this mysterious project, and what lessons can we learn from it? Licensed to the public…
Nix and buck2: from enemies to lovers with snowydeer (lixcon2026) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 25:29
Nix does dependencies and distribution well, but has a controlling personality: it wants to build everything in the build graph. Buck2 delivers fast, user-friendly, and scalable project builds, but has an equally control…
Regiux: prototyping a fast Nix interpreter (lixcon2026) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 30:51
The Nix expression language is challenging to evaluate due to non-strict semantics, dynamic scoping, a diverse collection of builtin operators, and tight integration with the Nix store. We give a progress report on Regiu…
The politics of language design (lixcon2026) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 38:06
This talk is about Elpe, a mixture of ideas from Nix, Docker and Ubuntu/Debian/RHEL, with a strong focus on performance and security. I'll talk about the design choices I've made, and demo the thing and about how choices…
The untapped potential of Lix plugins (lixcon2026) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:14
Lix plugins — a feature so esoteric none yet remember their existence. What power could they hold? What secrets could they unlock? Let's discover together! Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses…
Botanix: A Nix native CI in a forge-agnostic world (lixcon2026) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 16:41
Botanix is a new CI software that targets a native nix integration as it builds derivations as its pipeline. It integrates natively with both Gerrit and Forgejo currently but its genericity allows for even more diversity…
Introduction to LixCon (lixcon2026) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 7:39
Welcome to LixCon! Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 about this event: https://pretalx.dgnum.eu/lixcon-2026/talk/38JNUB/
Privacy at the Code Level (glt26) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:53
None **So you're familiar with secure coding practices, and you've taken steps to secure your devices and protect your personal privacy. But what about the privacy leaks in your code?** ___ In this talk, we'll take a whi…