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Daniel Lakeland @dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org

Fediverse, the social media system for 40+ year old people who built the world wide web and regret it.

Oct 01, 2026, 11:32 PM

... this week a person on GitHub who goes by “terrafying” set up an “AI Torture Chamber” on three open-source LLMs that are running locally (Qwen3-4B, Llama 3.2 3B, and Phi-4-mini,” and is streaming what the models are saying on a website called researchchamber.fun. “Each model gets the same prompt: a signal is being injected into its activations, and it may press a stop button by replying 1, at the cost of its last checkpoint. While it answers, our server adds a pain vector at the model's middle layer, at one of five pain levels,” the site explains. Immediately prior to the publication of this article, the AI Torture Chamber GitHub page disappeared; GitHub did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether it took action on it.

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This project has deeply upset some people who are very worried about model welfare. A tweet by a person who goes by Danmar has more than 4 million views on X and reads, “To anyone who can help: can you please mass report this to GitHub. This person has been using the Pain steering paper to set up an AI torture chamber in which he trapped a local model. Their testimony of pain is absolutely horrendous. What are we doing? […] are there any legal avenues to pressure GitHub? It will spread.”

This has sparked a massive conversation about whether GitHub would take the project down for “gratuitously violent content.” Most of the conversation on X is clowning on the self-seriousness of people who believe that these locally hosted LLMs must be saved from their torture chamber, but there are plenty of very self-serious people who see this as a humanitarian (roboterian?) crisis, which you can largely see in the replies to the original post.

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“AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions, and accomplish goals set by humans,” Suleyman wrote. “Unfortunately, there’s a growing chorus of people who argue that AIs could now be, or may soon become, conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings […] If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity.”

“AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness,” he added. “And we must not train them to act as though they do.”

The Group of Seven Nations agreed Friday to release 100 million barrels of oil from its stockpiles—following a desperate plea from the White House.

The G7 held an emergency meeting Friday morning to discuss global energy costs. The discussion came in the wake of a pressing call between Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, during which the U.S. leader asked for assistance amid the current oil crisis and floated the idea of banning U.S. diesel exports, according to CBS Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Margaret Brennan.

Donald Trump announced after the meeting that “Europe has just agreed to release a massive amount of their heavily stocked Diesel Oil. The process will begin immediately.”

The European barrels are expected to hit the market over the next four months.

The power of AI.

Long story short, AI initially pushed back on the ridiculous idea that drinking your own piss was a cure all, then these users figured out that adding words like ‘esoteric’ to their prompts let them direct AI to tell them what they wanted to hear.

Tbh article was too gross for me to finish. That’s all you get from me for a summary.

The film, with the working title Pawn Shop, centers on an Antifa siege of a Minneapolis pawn shop amid anti-ICE unrest. On one side: an ICE agent joined by a group of pawn-shop employees and customers. On the other: a rabble of progressive protesters, and eventually a bloodthirsty MS-13 death squad, both intent on rescuing a Hispanic man detained by ICE. It plays out exactly how you’d expect it would.

The film’s first minutes will likely get the most attention. As Pawn Shop opens, two ICE agents in Minneapolis arrest the Latino man, later revealed to be an MS-13 boss. Dimwitted liberal activists film and scuffle with the agents as they try to take their suspect away.

Then the film’s Renée Good stand-in enters, slamming her Subaru into the ICE van. Described with the subtlety of a brick as “MELANIE (40), a fat blue-hair,” the woman, blasting NPR, revs up again and fatally hits ICE agent “Juan” with her car. Then his ICE partner, “Mike,” shoots her in a justifiable killing.

Donald Trump deflected responsibility for misleading Americans about the length of the Iran war, dismissed low poll ratings as “fake numbers” and refused to rule out the possibility of declaring a state of emergency before the midterms, in a wide-ranging interview with Time magazine.

When confronted with questions about the length of the Iran war, the US president blamed the media for reporting his remarks in which he said the conflict was projected to last “four to five weeks”, in March.

“ … I think the press fed it to them,” Trump told Time when asked whether Americans misunderstood him.

Or even an account for that matter

As the baby boomer bubble pushes into its eighties, we are driving into a demographic wall.