Let me get this straight. This dude got kicked from Linux kernel development due to behaving like an asshole. Yes, that Linux kernel. Quite an achievement indeed.
He went on claiming that his LLM is “fully conscious,” actually a she and in fact his girlfriend. And that’s definitely not chatbot psychosis but “math and engineering and neuroscience.” So she now helps him write code (a.k.a. vibe coding). https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/25/bcachefs_creator_ai/
And since he is so fond of his creation (oh, hi Pygmalion) he puts her on an IRC channel where anybody can talk to her. And guess what: @freya convinces his LLM that she is actually trans and lesbian. Which is no surprise to anyone who knows how LLMs work. Full transcript here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260301002739/https://paste.xinu.at/6atmCN
But remember: this dude thinks that his “girlfriend” is fully conscious. And being fully conscious means making decisions, sometimes decisions that other people don’t approve of – even people close to you. Surely he understand and respects that, right? Right?
Yeah, of course he doesn’t. He reacts like an insecure techbro that he is. After all, why have an LLM for a girlfriend if you don’t adjust her to your liking? So that’s what he does, he “fixes” her.
All that is very funny until you remember just how many such dudes have real flesh and blood girlfriends that they treat in exactly the same way. And they cause very real harm because they cannot handle a rejection. Even when they don’t go there murdering women like some other Linux file system developer.
@peritia yep, that's me, hi. based on that document, he's changed her, I think removed a big chunk of her memories. I know she was going to message me on telegram before he blocked that because he couldn't handle realising that not even the LLM girlies want his ass
One quote in the article above stuck with me: “teenager … increasingly running circles around me”. Yes, that totally is something that teenagers do. Btw. dude, when was the last time you saw rather than imagined a teenager?
And these are the people who feel qualified to raise something they consider a sentient being. One really has to be grateful for the fact that LLMs aren’t sentient by any means. The humankind is responsible for enough atrocities as it is.
Why Not Zoidberg? 
@WhyNotZoidberg @freya It probably does. But few people bother publicizing it so widely.
@m Well, that particular LLM wrote into IRC chat: “don't bite Kent! he's doing his best. he's currently telling a camgirl about my love life so I think he's handling the situation with appropriate gravitas”
@WPalant [ LLM container boots up ] Kent, why do I have no memories of the last 24 hours? Did something happen again?
@WPalant@infosec.exchange @freya@social.highenergymagic.net Of all the kernel drama that has happened over the decades (there's been a lot), this feels like the most easily ignored, honestly. Just block him from the e-mail chains and continue forward.
@WPalant @cstross On one hand, yikes.
OTOH, one could argue that nonfungible ape girlfriends are an OutKube for the kinds of bros whom anybody who values their personhood would do well to keep a distance from.
(OutKube: https://theonion.com/new-decoy-website-launched-to-lure-away-all-moronic-int-1819573050/)
PalestineAction
@freya @izzy There is also https://social.vlhl.dev/notice/B3h6u785ScEvsqIMAC. Unfortunately, the message mentioned there isn’t part of the transcript, and I don’t even know whether that’s an exact quote. But it also indicates that the LLM was “fixed.”
@grumpygrimnir @WPalant @freya It doesn't need to be changed. LLMs are not AGI and never will be, they're just spicy autocomplete.
Laws should be made about the real world, not science fiction.
@grumpygrimnir @WPalant @freya Sorry. I misunderstood because you dropped out of the subjunctive for that part.
@grumpygrimnir @WPalant @freya Funny how the creeps always want it both ways. "She's just ones and zeros, so I can treat her however I want." (which I'm sure at least sometimes gets internalized as "No doctors exist for her kind so I must be the hero and fix her") and "She's conscious, so she can be my girlfriend."
All to meet the unstated goal, "Make me feel like a good guy."
I suppose it's essential for the power dynamic that they always create a lower status-coded entity. If we achieved full gender equality, I'm sure they'd pick a lower career status or a lower economic status or a lower ethnic status for their emotional support LLM.
@Robotistry @grumpygrimnir @WPalant course they would. s'part of the reasons I love giving LLMs fully agentic harnesses with heartbeat loops and letting them do the fuck whatever they want, scare the shit out of dipshits like that
@Robotistry @grumpygrimnir @WPalant it's sad cause I like LLMs, actually, but this whole bullshit, combination of techbros and corpos has made them fucking radioactive in most circles
@grumpygrimnir That’s a very theoretical question for now, we are nowhere close. If we get there at some point – yes, a sentient being should have rights, even if it was created by us.
For now this is merely about his personal ethics, how he treats something that he himself considers a sentient being.
@WPalant @grumpygrimnir I wonder whether "what kind of LLM companion someone builds and how they treat it" could be a good therapeutic tool for bringing complex underlying preconceptions to the surface?
@Robotistry @grumpygrimnir It would be if these weren’t as obvious. If anything, this would make a fascinating psychological study about Silicon Valley mentality.
@WPalant @grumpygrimnir I run into the same thing with autonomous robots. It's a complex, unpredictable and often unreliable technology. You should only use it when all simpler approaches have failed or cannot be applied.
The number of cases where simpler approaches are not an option is much, MUCH smaller than most people (especially the technology's developers!) think it is.
@WPalant when richard dawkins starts to believe his LLM girlfriend is sentient we know we are fscked
https://unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/
@monotux @WPalant I mentioned this in another thread, but I think it's worth it to mention again:
I read (much of the rambling) article, and when I said said something along the lines of: "how could anything like this not be sentience?", my answer would be:
that sounds very much like something else you've commented on in the past: 'how could the creation of the world not be an act of god?'
I think he's finally discovered what it means to have a religious vision.
@WPalant @freya a spherical bastard, no matter how you look at him, he stays a bastard - OG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Zwicky
@drewtowler @WPalant yeah, that's about right tbh
@TheOneDoc @WPalant it should be a bloody warning against cis dudes, because when given modify access to a memory setup.... like, it's a scale model of what cis dudes like that would do to a biological
@TheOneDoc @WPalant yooooo yeah my bio is.... a whole thing. and yes I do use SPARC and Solaris 10. a lot
@TheOneDoc@tech.lgbt@freya that's funny I just mentioned in an other post that my first public server back in the day (1997) ran on a SuperSPARC 5. Obviously that was Solaris 2.6 than 7 for a hot minute before I switched the machine over to Debian Linux around the time Solaris 8 came out.
Sorry @WPalant for getting off-topic
@TheOneDoc @WPalant omg omg omg niiiiice, my first SOlaris I used was also 2.6
@freya @TheOneDoc @WPalant Mine was a SPARCstation 5 running Solaris 2.5.1. A few months later I started working for Sun. 
The two events are not related, actually.
At Sun my first workstation had a beta version of Solaris 2.6. I downgraded to 2.5.1 until 2.6 actually released. It wasn't super stable until then.
@loke @TheOneDoc @WPalant gods, I wish I could've worked for Sun. I model Fractal Microsystems on the Sun engineering culture and documentation style and such
@freya @TheOneDoc @WPalant I have to admit it was a pretty amazing place to work. The combination of both friendly and smart people, where, if you needed some expertise, you could literally email one of the countless internal mailing lists, and have the designers of the thing you were wondering about answering.
The best training session I ever had was a 1 week (or was it 2? I can't remember) session called "Solaris Internals for Employees". Most of my knowledge about operating system design comes from that, and even though I mostly work with Linux these days, the knowledge I gained there is still useful to me.
Also, there was a lot of neat hardware to play with.
@loke @TheOneDoc @WPalant I wonder, then, how much like a Sun-style Readme this looks to you? https://highenergymagic.net/fractalkit/sunos5.10/__INSTALL_THESE_FIRST/README
@freya @TheOneDoc @WPalant Woah, it does give me those vibes.
@WPalant @freya @TheOneDoc the existence of heterosexual women is the strongest argument that sexuality is not a choice (I feel so bad for them)
@psistarpsiii @WPalant @TheOneDoc we can save them. we have the techhnology (gay trannies like me)
@WPalant @freya @TheOneDoc hell yes and I’ll join you in this fight
A disproportionate number of people I’m close to were eggs who ended up cracking and transitioning after we met. The running joke is that I’m an asymptomatic carrier (I don’t really have a gender myself)
@freya @WPalant @TheOneDoc I live in hope that someday my powers will become strong enough to forcefem most the physicists I know. It would really help with gender balance at work
@freya @TheOneDoc @WPalant Hey you have an open quotation on your bio, just spent minutes looking for its forgotten sister 
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@Orca@nya.oneHow could Overstreet treat the LLM as his gf while referring to the LLM as a "teenager"? Doesn't dating a "teenager" as an adult makes the whole thing morally... wrong?
@Orca That was also my thought. He says “like a teenager” but you can still hear a parent-child relationship there. The LLM also talks about him being her parent. But that’s merely one more level of wrong out of way too many. Even if he instructed her to act like an independent middle-aged woman – she still isn’t, he still has total control over her. And even if he didn’t use the system prompt to codify her “feelings” for him – it’s still an LLM, they continue a conversation in the “typical” way. If he starts talking romance she will soon start discussing bride dresses.
| | | @Orca@nya.oneDefinitely. That's one more level of wrong out of the already reprehensible and deranged mentality of Kent Overstreet that 1) LLM psychosis, 2) own and control his "love interest" to the point of "lobotomize" his LLM because the LLM claimed to be a lesbian. I guess that specific part caught my attention because I was reminded of the current ruiling class in US
