glittle2

Location: Berkeley, CA (SF Bay Area) Remote: Yes (Bay Area on-site fine) Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Generalist. Lately LLM agents in production (Claude), TypeScript/Node, Python. Before that: real-time sync (CRDTs), graphics and physics, crowdsourcing research. Résumé/CV: https://glittle.org/resume.html Email: [email protected]

MIT CS PhD (HCI / human computation; I built TurKit, a toolkit for programming crowd workers). In 2026 I was on a small team running Claude agents in production at a home-services marketplace (sales and customer-service chats). I worked on the plumbing around them: how agent sessions start and reset, caching to cut cost, evaluating and regression-testing agent behavior, and a tool that turns bug reports into vetted tickets.

Before that: 8 years independent (CRDT sync and Braid, a draft proposal at the IETF to add sync to HTTP; CTO of an end-to-end-encrypted collaboration startup), labor scientist at oDesk (now Upwork), and game developer (graphics, physics).

Looking for: senior/Staff engineering, AI or not; I'm happy on most any hard software problem. Full-time, contract or part-time. Available now.

fair enough, will do!

I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasoning.

I agree that "consciousness is not computation", if we convert that to "qualia is not computation", as the author seems to do. I agree because I don't think qualia -- like what red looks like to me -- can be communicated, whereas all computation seems communicable by writing out the Turing Machine. Maybe someone will convince me otherwise by describing redness.

However, the "triviality argument" seems pretty poor to me:

> 1. To say that a physical system is a computer requires an external observer to map the physical states of that system onto the abstract states of a Turing machine.

Does it? If nobody maps the states of AlphaZero to abstract states, will it fail at chess?

> 2. Consciousness does not require an external observer to exist.

I agree that my consciousness is not dependent on other people's consciousness, but I have no reason to be sure my consciousness is not external to my brain. If we're in a simulation, then it seems like my consciousness is external to my brain.

> 3. Therefore, consciousness cannot be reduced to computation.

Again, I agree, but not because of 1. and 2.

To me, consciouness/qualia seems like a mysterious other-worldly phenomena that observes interesting computations, but doesn't affect them.. like God running a universe simulation, and then looking at one of the creatures in it, and basically making up "what it's like" to be that creature, by filling in some gaps which are not dictated by the simulation, like what redness is like.

In conclusion: I think computers can definitely be conscious, but at the same time, I think consciounsess/qualia is weird, and is not computation.