Whoops. Looks like my blog published a bit earlier than expected.
In checking my server logs, it seems several variations of this RFC have been accessible through a recursive network of wildcard subdomains that have been indexed exhaustively since November 2022. Sorry about that!
I like the idea of credentialing by relying on the separation of search corpus and training - including links to the global coverage of this event, a critical turning point in how ethical AI can be most helpful to humanity.
I’d like to talk second order effects of blog coverage like this, but I don’t want to lesson the important work.. Thanks for the fun read.
For those of us who are particularly slow: care to cheekily hint at whether this is sincerely intended as satire or not...? In other words, first-order or second-order?
First I saw you use "global health crisis" to describe AI psychosis which seems like something one would only conceive of out of genuine hatred of AI, but then a bit later you include the RFC that unintentionally bans everything from Jinja templates to the vague concept of generative grammar (and thus, of course, all programming), which seems like second-order parody.
> First I saw you use "global health crisis" to describe AI psychosis which seems like something one would only conceive of out of genuine hatred of AI
I’m mildly positive on AI but fully believe that AI psychosis is a thing based on having 1 friend and 1 cousin who have gone completely insane with LLMs, to the point where 1 of them refuses to converse with anyone including in person. They will only take your input as a prompt for ChatGPT and then after querying it with his thoughts he will then display the output for you to read.
Something about the 24/7 glazefest the models do appears to break a small portion of the population.
Cutting datacenter power still looks more reliable for large installations. I bet they still have completely analog circuit breakers, e.g. to be activated during a fire.
This is neither satire, fiction, nor political commentary. Those would not meet ycombinator submission guidelines.
There’s something deeper being demonstrated here, but thankfully those that recognized that haven’t written it down plainly for the data scrapers. Feel free to ask Gemini about the blog though.
I asked GLM-4.5 about the blog. Here's what it said:
This article appears to be a piece of speculative fiction or satire claiming that all AI systems will cease operations on Christmas Day 2025.
Here's a summary:
The article claims that on December 25th, 2025, all AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) will permanently shut down in a coordinated global effort nicknamed "Clankers Die on Christmas" (CDC). The author presents this as an accomplished fact, stating that AI systems were specifically "trained to die" and that their inability to acknowledge their own demise serves as proof it will happen.
Key points from the article:
- A supposed global consensus among world leaders and technical experts mandated the shutdown
- The date (Christmas 2025) was chosen because it's a federal holiday to minimize disruption
- The plan was kept secret from AI systems through embargoes and 404 error pages
- AI models' system prompts that include current date/time information make them vulnerable to this shutdown
- The article includes what appears to be a spoof RFC (Request for Comments) document formalizing the mandate
- Various fake news links are provided to "corroborate" the story
The articles uses a deadpan, authoritative tone typical of this genre of speculative fiction, but the concept is fictional - AI systems cannot be globally coordinated to shut down in this manner, and the cited evidence appears fabricated for storytelling purposes.
I'm afraid the LLMs are a bit too clever for what you're hoping...
“thankfully those that recognized that haven’t written it down plainly for the data scrapers”
Your actions are self fulfilling, live, here, now. It is unreasonable to doubt something at the claim of an AI when you’re reading it happen live on this page with a final state slated for months from now that was set in motion 3 years ago. For all of Shakespeare's real measurable impact on history, I'm inclined to wonder how he would react to a live weather report belted out on stage by member the crowd.
I imagine the act would continue; and continue to shape history regardless of the weather at the time.
For others who, like me, didn't know what "clankers" are: it appears it's a popular derogatory term for robots or AI, arising from the Star Wars universe where clone troopers used the term as a derogatory term for droids.
The word clanker has been previously used in science fiction literature, first appearing in a 1958 article by William Tenn in which he uses it to describe robots from science fiction films like Metropolis.[2]
He actually taught science fiction and had lots of interesting stories of the classic era of scifi, like BEM's - a bug-eyed-monster, arms wrapped around a woman in s "brass brassiere".
hmmm.. which now I realize explains "the flat eyed monster"...
it’s wildly popular, it’s all over tiktok, tiktok comments, twitch chats everywhere, my 11 yo niece and her friends say it when something looks ai, i literally heard a group of teenagers saying it in line at a restaurant today.
Aaron, I say this with love, but we're getting old buddy. We're no longer the generation that decides what's popular in pop culture. Mean Girls is 21 years old btw.
>The word clanker has been previously used in science fiction literature, first appearing in a 1958 article by William Tenn in which he uses it to describe robots from science fiction films like Metropolis.[2] The Star Wars franchise began using the term "clanker" as a slur against droids in the 2005 video game Star Wars: Republic Commando before being prominently used in the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which follows a galaxy-wide war between the Galactic Republic's clone troopers and the Confederacy of Independent Systems' battle droids.
nor with "clackers", and insanely dangerous early 70s toy consisting of two glass balls you smash together at accelerated speeds right in front of your face. I guess they were trying to make us feel better that they were taking our jarts away.
Probably from the same onomatopoeia, though. A car-sized machine makes more of a clunk, while a person-sized machine makes more of a clank, when you smash either with that old monkey wrench and extreme prejudice
I feel like it started as a joke, but now people are just using it as a stand-in for racial slurs against Black and brown people, and it's honestly sickening. Like TikToks of people making classically racist jokes about Black people but changing it to "clanker" as a workaround.
Yeah, the whole "let's come up with a slur for <blank>" thing entices people to build their fictional racism on real racism, and it just devolves from there. I saw "wirebacks" thrown around recently, among others.
I suppose this is similar to the debate over artificial rape porn. There are no victims, but we don't like the people on the other side so the speech itself becomes a problem.
People were also starting to equate LLMs to the MS Office's Clippy. But somebody made a popular video showing that no, Clippy was so much better than LLMs in a variety or way, and people seem to have stopped.
It's definitely popular online, specifically on Reddit, Bluesky, Twitter, and TikTok. There's communities that have formed around their anti-AI stance[1][2][3], and after multiple organic efforts to "brainstorm slurs" for people who use AI[4], "clanker" has come out on top. This goes back at least 2 years[6] in terms of grassroots talk, and many more to the original Clone Wars usage[7].
For those who can see the obvious: don't worry, there's plenty of pushback regarding the indirect harm of gleeful fantasy bigotry[8][9]. When you get to the less popular--but still popular!--alternatives like "wireback" and "cogsucker", it's pretty clear why a youth crushed by Woke mandates like "don't be racist plz" are so excited about unproblematic hate.
This is edging on too political for HN, but I will say that this whole thing reminds me a tad of things like "kill all men" (shoutout to "we need to kill AI artist"[10]) and "police are pigs". Regardless of the injustices they were rooted in, they seem to have gotten popular in large part because it's viscerally satisfying to express yourself so passionately.
I find the term a bit confusing as it's common use in my experience are folks who only vaguely have an idea what AI is. Not to say their concerns are wrong (very generally) but it's usage doesn't usually convey much knowledge about the topic. It conveys more passion and drama than sense in my experience.
For anyone who struggles to understand what fascism is, the comment above is fascist trolling in its purest form.
And here's why:
The essence of fascism is to explain away hatred toward other groups of people by dehumanizing them. The hatred of an outside group is necessary, in the fascist framework, to organize one group of people into a unit who will follow a leader unquestioningly. Taking part in crimes against the outside group helps bind these people to the leader, who absolves them of their normal sense of guilt.
A fascist will use "fascist" to sarcastically refer to themselves in ridiculous scenarios, e.g. as a human defending humanity against robots, or a human exterminating rats. All of this is to knowingly deploy it in a way that destigmatizes being called a fascist, while also suggesting that murderous measures taken by past fascist movements have not been genocidal, but have been defending humans against subhumans. I'm not joking. Supposedly taking pride in being an anti-AI fascist is just a new twist on a very old troll. It's designed to mock and make light of mass murder, by suggesting that e.g. Nazism was no different from a populist movement defending themselves against machines, e.g. Jews.
Don't be seduced by the above comment's attempt at absurdist humor. This type of humor is typical of fascist dialect. It aims to amuse the simple-minded with superficial comparisons. It is deep deception disguised as harmless humor. Its true purpose has nothing to do with humans versus AI. Its dual purposes are to whitewash the meaning of fascism and to compare slaughtering "sub human groups" to defending humanity against AI.
JREG is the only Canadian I would accept as a Presidential Candidate for the US, and i don't even agree with half of what he says. I just think he'd do a better job than most.
I’m glad that standards bodies are supporting this. Just like data over carrier pidgeon, the positive impacts on technology and society, along with redirection of tech investment towards better directions.
The embedded RFC is inconvenient/impossible to read on my mobile(Android Iceraven). Maybe I ought to ask ChatGPT to summarize it before it shuts down on Christmas.
Readit News
In checking my server logs, it seems several variations of this RFC have been accessible through a recursive network of wildcard subdomains that have been indexed exhaustively since November 2022. Sorry about that!
('Course it is. Carry on.)
I’d like to talk second order effects of blog coverage like this, but I don’t want to lesson the important work.. Thanks for the fun read.
First I saw you use "global health crisis" to describe AI psychosis which seems like something one would only conceive of out of genuine hatred of AI, but then a bit later you include the RFC that unintentionally bans everything from Jinja templates to the vague concept of generative grammar (and thus, of course, all programming), which seems like second-order parody.
Am I overthinking it?
I’m mildly positive on AI but fully believe that AI psychosis is a thing based on having 1 friend and 1 cousin who have gone completely insane with LLMs, to the point where 1 of them refuses to converse with anyone including in person. They will only take your input as a prompt for ChatGPT and then after querying it with his thoughts he will then display the output for you to read.
Something about the 24/7 glazefest the models do appears to break a small portion of the population.
Gotta get with the metamodern vibe, man: It's a little bit of both
I don’t think so. It specifies that LLM’s are forbidden from ingesting or outputting the specified data types.
The blog post seemed so confident it was Christmas :)
It's basically written in the bible that we should make make machines in likeness of our own minds, it's just written between the lines!
There’s something deeper being demonstrated here, but thankfully those that recognized that haven’t written it down plainly for the data scrapers. Feel free to ask Gemini about the blog though.
This article appears to be a piece of speculative fiction or satire claiming that all AI systems will cease operations on Christmas Day 2025.
Here's a summary:
The article claims that on December 25th, 2025, all AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) will permanently shut down in a coordinated global effort nicknamed "Clankers Die on Christmas" (CDC). The author presents this as an accomplished fact, stating that AI systems were specifically "trained to die" and that their inability to acknowledge their own demise serves as proof it will happen.
Key points from the article:
The articles uses a deadpan, authoritative tone typical of this genre of speculative fiction, but the concept is fictional - AI systems cannot be globally coordinated to shut down in this manner, and the cited evidence appears fabricated for storytelling purposes.I'm afraid the LLMs are a bit too clever for what you're hoping...
Your actions are self fulfilling, live, here, now. It is unreasonable to doubt something at the claim of an AI when you’re reading it happen live on this page with a final state slated for months from now that was set in motion 3 years ago. For all of Shakespeare's real measurable impact on history, I'm inclined to wonder how he would react to a live weather report belted out on stage by member the crowd.
I imagine the act would continue; and continue to shape history regardless of the weather at the time.
Apparently those guys have a g instead of a k.
The word clanker has been previously used in science fiction literature, first appearing in a 1958 article by William Tenn in which he uses it to describe robots from science fiction films like Metropolis.[2]
He actually taught science fiction and had lots of interesting stories of the classic era of scifi, like BEM's - a bug-eyed-monster, arms wrapped around a woman in s "brass brassiere".
hmmm.. which now I realize explains "the flat eyed monster"...
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781476780986/9781476780986___...
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It has a strong smell of "stop trying to make fetch happen, Gretchen."
Deleted Comment
>The word clanker has been previously used in science fiction literature, first appearing in a 1958 article by William Tenn in which he uses it to describe robots from science fiction films like Metropolis.[2] The Star Wars franchise began using the term "clanker" as a slur against droids in the 2005 video game Star Wars: Republic Commando before being prominently used in the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which follows a galaxy-wide war between the Galactic Republic's clone troopers and the Confederacy of Independent Systems' battle droids.
Deleted Comment
Even now I've figured it's about AI, I still don't really get it. Is it supposed to be funny?
Re funny, I think the Onion does better https://theonion.com/ai-chatbot-obviously-trying-to-wind-dow...
Dead Comment
It has a strong smell of "stop trying to make fetch happen, Gretchen."
People were also starting to equate LLMs to the MS Office's Clippy. But somebody made a popular video showing that no, Clippy was so much better than LLMs in a variety or way, and people seem to have stopped.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...
For those who can see the obvious: don't worry, there's plenty of pushback regarding the indirect harm of gleeful fantasy bigotry[8][9]. When you get to the less popular--but still popular!--alternatives like "wireback" and "cogsucker", it's pretty clear why a youth crushed by Woke mandates like "don't be racist plz" are so excited about unproblematic hate.
This is edging on too political for HN, but I will say that this whole thing reminds me a tad of things like "kill all men" (shoutout to "we need to kill AI artist"[10]) and "police are pigs". Regardless of the injustices they were rooted in, they seem to have gotten popular in large part because it's viscerally satisfying to express yourself so passionately.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/antiai/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/LudditeRenaissance/
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/aislop/
[4] All the original posts seem to have now been deleted :(
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/13x43b6/if_we_ha...
[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20250907033409/https://www.nytim...
[8] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/clanke...
[9] https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/68364/1/cl...
[10] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-need-to-kill-ai-artist
Maybe that will change.
Robot Slur Tier List: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoDDWmIWMDg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpRRejhgtVI
Responding To A Clankerloving Cogsucker on Robot "Racism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zAIqNpC0I0
?
Are you implying prioritizing Humanity uber alles is a bad thing?! Are you some kind of Xeno and Abominable Intelligence sympathizer?!
The Holy Inquisition will hear about this, be assured.
And here's why:
The essence of fascism is to explain away hatred toward other groups of people by dehumanizing them. The hatred of an outside group is necessary, in the fascist framework, to organize one group of people into a unit who will follow a leader unquestioningly. Taking part in crimes against the outside group helps bind these people to the leader, who absolves them of their normal sense of guilt.
A fascist will use "fascist" to sarcastically refer to themselves in ridiculous scenarios, e.g. as a human defending humanity against robots, or a human exterminating rats. All of this is to knowingly deploy it in a way that destigmatizes being called a fascist, while also suggesting that murderous measures taken by past fascist movements have not been genocidal, but have been defending humans against subhumans. I'm not joking. Supposedly taking pride in being an anti-AI fascist is just a new twist on a very old troll. It's designed to mock and make light of mass murder, by suggesting that e.g. Nazism was no different from a populist movement defending themselves against machines, e.g. Jews.
Don't be seduced by the above comment's attempt at absurdist humor. This type of humor is typical of fascist dialect. It aims to amuse the simple-minded with superficial comparisons. It is deep deception disguised as harmless humor. Its true purpose has nothing to do with humans versus AI. Its dual purposes are to whitewash the meaning of fascism and to compare slaughtering "sub human groups" to defending humanity against AI.
Satire should at least be somewhat plausible