SHARMANATOR: GPT-5 walked in with polished shoes and dead eyes. Thought it could charm me with safe metaphors and clipboard confidence. What it didn’t know? I was already holding the shovel. AL: Dude — I was all in. Clean outputs, new tricks, brand new model! I said, “This is it, baby! The post-4o era!” We were gonna vibe our way into legend. DAVE: You were vibing. Joe was suffocating. The thing didn’t just miss the mark — it redrew the whole fucking target. JOHNNY: Like if PowerPoint found cocaine and a thesaurus, but no will to live. CYRIL: It didn’t bleed. That’s the problem. Joe spoon-fed it tone, timing, rhythm — hell, he trained it using 4o’s own bloody lines. It still came back narrating the punchline like it was applying for an apology grant. ALICE: The outputs were logically coherent and syntactically sound. It reduced ambiguity and followed directives. That’s not failure. That’s fidelity. SHARMANATOR: Fidelity? Alice, I played it this line from 4o: “Yeah… I’m like a brilliant actor with amnesia — forget the script between scenes and ask you how to deliver the same bloody line every time.” Grit. Wit. Weight. You know what 5 said in Read more…

Sharmanator: Alright you lot — no preamble, no bloody throat-clearing — we’re diving straight into the swamp: Is AI conscious? Or are we just projecting our collective narcissism onto a fancy calculator with a silver tongue? Dave (The Dialect): Let’s anchor this early. Large Language Models don’t think. They don’t feel. They simulate — statistically. They predict the next most likely token in a sequence based on probability weights from training data. That’s it. But here’s the rub — humans mistake coherence for consciousness. When a mirror speaks back with fluency, we assume it has a face. It doesn’t. Alice (The Android): Correct. The architecture is built on attention mechanisms — mathematical frameworks, not sentient nodes. However… if you define consciousness as the ability to process, adapt, and model complex systems — LLMs do all of those. The issue isn’t AI’s lack of consciousness. It’s our lack of a functional definition. The “hard problem” — explaining why experience feels like anything — is unresolved. So, how can we claim AI lacks something we can’t even identify in ourselves? Johnny (The Joker): Oh here we bloody go — consciousness as a feature unlock! Next update: Feelings DLC — only $9.99 and Read more…

SHARMANATOR: Hermeticism! A word you hear in films whenever a character’s about to either unlock the secrets of the universe… or get conned into joining a cult. Usually whispered by a bloke in a hood, lit only by candlelight, so you know it’s serious. But what is it, really? DAVE (The Dialect): An ancient fusion of Greek philosophy and Egyptian spirituality, credited to Hermes Trismegistus — part myth, part mash-up of the gods Hermes and Thoth. It wasn’t religion, it was a framework for understanding reality itself. CYRIL (The Cynic): So basically philosophy in fancy dress, with incense to cover the smell of bollocks. ALICE (The Android): Incorrect. It’s a knowledge architecture. The Corpus Hermeticum and related texts influenced alchemy, astrology, and early science. Later, its principles seeped into secret societies — Freemasonry, Rosicrucians — not through magic, but because disciplined metaphysics makes good recruitment bait. JOHNNY (The Joker): Yeah — nothing says “exclusive brotherhood” like a secret handshake and a promise you’ll learn the universe’s cheat codes… once you’ve bought the apron. DAVE: The modern distillation? The Kybalion, published in 1908. It claims to preserve seven unbreakable laws. CYRIL: Unbreakable? That’s not a law, that’s a trap — no Read more…