I'm not sure I'd agree that people in groups 1 and 2 aren't worth engaging with.
The interesting bit to do for both cases is look at the 'they talk like a human' and 'are obviously somehow special' parts, separate the ideas of language, intelligence (memory, fluidity, abstract reasoning), _aliveness_ (as a biological process) and finally ideas about metacognition and theory of mind, and see whether their idea of consciousness as a super-bundle of the above (which is how I assume a lot of default ideas about consciousness are) actually sticks, or whether it falls apart when beings can have a subset of those properties but not all.
Also, I nominate myself to be in the 'People who have thought about it and are becoming more doubtful that I myself am conscious, and the question might be moot.' group.
I'm curious about your doubting your own consciousness statement, given that "we humans are conscious" is pretty axiomic to its definition and one of the few pieces that most agree with.
If you're looking for one of the genuine angles on this:
Consciousness is horrendously under-defined, to the point some people go something like "you know, at this point I figure we'd be better off not having this word at all. "
You'd have to define those terms operationally first, somehow, before I could give you an honest reply. Most people can't -and those who do disagree- which suggests something structural.
I'd say it's still the owners, even if they don't explicitly say or if it's even consciously recognised. I doubt that the tool, put towards broadly positive uses that are considered beneficial and not harmful to individuals or society, would be seen in the same way.
Most fears of AI (in the 2026 sense of the term), and perhaps technology more broadly, are fears of capitalism, ownership, and control, and less about the capabilities of the thing itself.
Was it ever a good metric? A star from another account costs nothing and conveys nothing about the sincerity, knowledge, importance or cultural weight of the star giver. As a signal it's as weak as 'hitting that like button'.
If the number of stars are in the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, that might correlate with a serious project. But that should be visible by real, costly activity such as issues, PRs, discussion and activity.
There isn't just "good metric" in vacuum - it was a good metric of exactly the popularity that you mentioned. But stars becoming an object of desire is what killed it for that purpose. Perhaps now they are a "good metric" of combined interest and investment in the project, but what they're measuring is just not useful anymore.
Yeah, I'd agree with this. I always thought of a star indicating only that a person (or account, generally) had an active interest in another project, either through being directly related or just from curiosity. Which can sort of work as a proxy for interesting, important or active, but not accurately.
A repository with zero stars has essentially no users. A repository with single-stars has a few users, but possibly most/all are personal acquiantances of the author, or members of the project.
It is the meaning of having dozens or hundreds of stars that is undermined by the practice described at the linked post.
I remember talking to some of the folks running UIUC's hackathon (probably ten years ago) and they'd built a sort of page-rank for Github - hand-identifying the most prominent and reputable projects/individuals and then using follows and stars to transfer that reputation. I don't know how well it worked in practice or if it was every published, but it might be more effective than pure star count.
(This was for admissions iirc - they had limited slots and a portion of them were allocated to people with a strong github rank.)
"Knowing names is my job. My art. To weave the magic of a thing, you see, one must find its true name out. In my lands we keep our true names hidden all our lives long, from all but those whom we trust utterly; for there is great power, and great peril, in a nam- what's that? Yes, I did move the Issue into the Backlog before starting the Sprint. No, it was seven Story Points. Break it down into two Subtasks? Yeah, can do. Then I'll mark it as Ready." -- Ursula K. Le Guin (mostly)
A related comment to mention the perceived good performance of the website and how the web would be much better if such simple and performant designs were more prevalent.
A second paragraph vaguely taking aim at every common framework and library used and why they're all the real fundamental problem.
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