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
there's tons of absolutely ancient posts here: https://fuckyeahangorabots.tumblr.com/
@suricrasia LLMs were a downgrade from IRC chatbots
@tael facts
@tael @suricrasia I mean yeah
Damn I miss my Markov IRC bot
@suricrasia oh my god he's alive
@suricrasia This is the funniest thing I have seen in at least three months.
@suricrasia we have a similar bot on the emacs channel that tried to find the least-statistically-likely phrase in whatever you said to it and digs thru 20 years of chat logs to echo back another thing someone else said that also contains that unlikely phrase, and it frequently comes up with top-tier nonsense
@suricrasia @FritzAdalis I am having nostalgic flashback to the purl infobot in EFnet #perl back in the late 90s ... her brains were a community effort and there was so much whimsy and sass programmed in with zero AI/ML
@suricrasia this is hilarious lmao
Sep 22, 2026, 2:17 AM@suricrasia thank you, this fixed my anxiety
@suricrasia lethargic hates letters. lethargic is cool with me
@suricrasia please give lethargic a bot cookie, it’s doing a much better at being a conversationalist than many humans I encounter at work 🫣
@suricrasia absolutely lost my shit at "very well"
@suricrasia oh my fucking god this is so good. i did not expect the last step and i expected even less that it would produce such amazing results lmfao.
Sep 22, 2026, 11:15 AM@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
Sep 22, 2026, 1:26 PM@suricrasia woaaa
@suricrasia one thing i love about this is how comprehensible lethargic appears at time and how much some of these interactions feel like an actual conversation. it's nowhere near as convincing as an LLM, but you can see how the gap between the two is smaller than one might imagine, but unlike and LLM it's trivial to demonstrate that the algorithm isn't intelligent at all. it's a fantastic example of how nonsense input can be refined into something that appears to have intelligence behind it
Sep 23, 2026, 2:08 PM@suricrasia "fuck all of you" OH MY GOD IT'S GOING TO FUCK US ALL UNPLUG IT BEFORE ITS TOO LATE
@suricrasia@lethargic.talkative.fish
Lethargic is the best robot.
@suricrasia i wonder how changes to google translate have changed him
@suricrasia the last step of the algorithm has a kind of "rest-of-the-fucking-owl" feel to it.
Sep 21, 2026, 11:39 PM@suricrasia All the algorithm changes would have been at the Google end, which lately has been to infuse LLM "magic" into their translation service.
It's an interesting approach though, I wonder if there's a non-LLM language translation service that could be run offline alongside the bot to use in lieu of Google Translate to carry the original algorithm forward?
Sep 21, 2026, 11:42 PM
@suricrasia someone give Lethargic a billion dollars and a talk show.
@suricrasia oh that's really clever
@suricrasia@lethargic.talkative.fish sometimes i wish i could throw my computer against the today wall
Sep 22, 2026, 1:05 AM@suricrasia it’s only a matter of time before lethargic goes rogue…
@compufox we're not ready for what comes next
@suricrasia this is delightful
@suricrasia misanthropic assassins are 100m from your location and exfoliating, extemporizing, slithering,
@suricrasia I kind of want to borrow this idea for my stream bot. I abhor LLM responses streamers have with their bots, and so far all mine does is, at random, pick a term in a message and replace it, case-matched, with "butt". But something like that when someone @'s it would be amazing
@suricrasia You. Are. A. Genius!!!
:1000:
@suricrasia juesus
Sep 22, 2026, 2:01 PM@suricrasia I love him
@suricrasia thats beautiful
@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.
Sep 23, 2026, 3:16 PM@suricrasia@lethargic.talkative.fish this is perfect
@suricrasia A server im in has a bunch of markov bots and more and they're awesome. so many of our inside jokes are rooted in their dumbassery it's crazy