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LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
(human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev)
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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Programming
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Simulating physics from first principles is not "mimicking human behavior." Don't dismissively phrase it like a chatbot. If you insist the exact molecular exchanges in human neurons are a mandatory component, you could observe every subatomic event, not just the fact they talk to you like any other meatbag on the street.
You just did! Again! You think an entire simulated human being, that acts exactly like a living person for the same underlying reasons, must be different - somehow. Your consciousness only arises from the laws of physics and the shape of matter, but if we simulated both of those exactly, and got indistinguishable results, then nuh-uh.
This is dualism. This is Descartes torturing dogs and insisting they only act like they feel pain, unlike us real humans, because we're different and special. It's straight-up Chinese Room horseshit, where no demonstrable evidence of conscious thought is enough, unless it fits your preconceived notions of what minds look like.
Our "first principles" are knowledge, not a new universe. You're not absolutely re-creating the entirety of reality. You're making a model that is useful, something that is "good enough" that it will produce outputs that can be used to roughly predict the outcome of real processes.
No matter how detailed your simulation is, it's still physically different. You're admitting this every time you call it a simulation. You can tell the difference between a simulation and the thing it's simulating.
No, because I'm saying that consciousness is a physical process. You're saying that it's a mathematical process and that the substrate doesn't matter. I'm saying the substrate is a physical thing, and that consciousness is a physical processes, and so different substrates enable different physical processes. I don't claim that consciousness comes from some Beyond, or from Heaven, or from God. I'm saying it's a physical process, and that a simulation is a different physical process, no matter how detailed.
The premise is - you fucking can't. It acts ex-act-ly like the real thing, and for all the same reasons. Given that unreasonably high standard, you still insist, nuh uh. Would never be conscious. We're beyond 'but what if.' You're explicitly arguing that machine consciousness would not count. That any difference from exactly how humans work cannot be a mind. Fuck off. That's just novel bigotry. Dog-torturing prejudice.
If you can have a long-ass argument with someone and go away figuring they're a person like you - that's consciousness. That's the only way you can judge the inner life of any person you have ever met. And you want to pretend that someone meeting that standard, while you observe their brain at a subatomic level, is disqualified? Come back and fuck off again.
You cannot laud the perfect exactitude of... squishy biology and quantum foam... and still say nuh-uh when a whole-ass person arises from those exact processes. If you mean anything when you say it's all just physics, then whatever physics are required for consciousness, can be faked. The resulting person really does think, as surely as an emulated calculator does real math. It's not simulating math. It's doing math. The device is simulated, but the answers are real. Get it?
You literally made the simulation, so yes you can tell the difference. And the math is inevitably different, because the math of the simulation includes the math which defines the different substrate. So it is physically different, a different thing. Assume whatever you want, but in the end it is a physically different thing, and it takes different math to fully describe it. We only know for sure that conscious experience happens with this substrate.
k
k
good bye
2+2 on an emulated calculator gets a different answer than 2+2 on a real one, because there's different math. Math being physics in this case but not when it undercuts your whole point. Conscious experience must only be possible in this substrate, despite zero evidence to the contrary... and faking the entire substrate with physics math doesn't count because numbers work differently in rocks than in meat.
k.
If telling you to shut up is redundant then good riddance.