let me tell you about my robot son. his name is lethargic. he's an IRC chatbot I wrote in 2011 and has been through IRC, skype, and is now on discord (in private servers with friends.) the algorithm has been unchanged since the beginning.

here's some quotes

@suricrasia LLMs were a downgrade from IRC chatbots

@tael facts

@suricrasia i wonder how changes to google translate have changed him

there's tons of absolutely ancient posts here: https://fuckyeahangorabots.tumblr.com/

@suricrasia it’s only a matter of time before lethargic goes rogue…

@compufox we're not ready for what comes next

@suricrasia wait so your instance subdomain is a nod to this bot in particular? that is so cool

@navi yes it is because lethargic runs on the same vps as my gotosocial instance

@suricrasia Have you ever added to Lethargic's pool of source messages?

@rockario never the main dataset, but I have added other datasets that it sometimes pulls from. e.g. a big list of recipe titles or a list of fake games contributed by the chat users. lethargic is much more complicated than just this algorithm, the algorithm is only the fundamental idea to how the responses get generated.

@suricrasia In antiquity, people would accomplish something similar to this algorithm using a hapless oracle and massive quantities of hallucinogenic gas.

@suricrasia Artificial intelligence is once again putting actual human beings out of a job.

@suricrasia this is perfect

@catalina strangely over time I've had to increase the number of language round-trips, because google translate got better at mapping nonsense in one language to nonsense in another.