Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
In other news, https://creative.ai/ was put up for purchase because the original owner considers AI’s reputation a lost cause.
(In other other news, its my 24th birthday.)
🎂
Happy birthday. I thought you were 40 years old!
xcancel link, and it’s a fairly interesting set of posts too (with exactly the type of dumbass hustle culture replies one would expect from Twitter, with people essentially demanding first dibs on the domain)
(In other other news, its my 24th birthday.)
happy birthday!
Artists using GenAI tools are among the most hardworking and innovative creators I’ve encountered.
oh sweet fuck, dude, it’s not our fault everyone you hang out with has the innovativeness and work ethic of a concrete slab
Arguably a literal concrete slab does more hard work by holding up structures etc than a GenAI influencer
brutalists want to know your location
Happy birthday!
Happy birthday!
Today in finding statistical association in text data is not the same as reading
Your name appeared in a lot of articles about terrible crimes. You know who else’s name appears in those articles?
HN shocked and appalled that a “founder” cannot make billions running a largely unmoderated social network without facing a few consequences:
but if he’s just being held accountable for running a service where others did nefarious things, then this should be a chilling effect for all founders.
ok. chill them
deep freeze the mofos
lol, lmao even.
This is going to hit some crypto scammers pretty hard, innit?
Even Moot knew you couldn’t do this. Congrats on being slower on the uptake than 4chan HN.
outrage that the arrest order was issued while Durov was in the air, so he couldn’t evade justice (this is unconfirmed)
Clearly arrest warrants should be made like hide-and-seek where the seeker has to count to 100 days before arresting the hider and publish “ready or not here I come!” to their social media account.
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YouTube rolled out a new dogshit AI feature and it near-immediately accused someone of being the meme behind the slaughter:
“Hey you said I maybe killed 5 children with murder drones on a mountain could you maybe not?”
“sorry to hear you’re not liking it! it’s currently not possible to opt out since this is just an experiment. but if you get a response that you feel is unhelpful or irrelevant, you can let us know by submitting feedback via these steps: https://goo.gle/3ySHg00”
Oh gosh that’s such a corporate response.
Only realized that you didn’t make this up when I got to the link
it’s absolutely fucked that the grammar and tone of Google’s response is so casual, and the proposed non-solution is so worthless, the whole post looks like parody — I was convinced @[email protected] must have been paraphrasing til I saw the screenshot of the original post and found out it was just a straight copy and paste
sorry you didn’t like that we implied you’re a child murderer. no takesie-backsies though! fill out this form we won’t read if you’re really sure you didn’t like our fun experiment!
I wonder if giving responses so fucking ridiculous they look like a joke is a tactic on Google’s part to make complaints about the shit they’re doing look ridiculous and overdramatic by association
Browsing over the account what really gets to me is the consistent lack of capitalization except where trademarks are involved.
Google is the United HealthCare of technology companies.
The giant bust of Elon Musk towed by a CyberTruck is real after all! https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/large-sculpture-elon-musk-towed-cybertruck-brownsville-texas-elonrwa-nft-1234715157/
The original video I linked to looked possibly CG, because it was short and looked like the uncanny gaze of giant Elon Musk was staring directly into the camera the whole time; but turns out it is real. I’m so “happy”.
And surprising exactly no one, it’s an advert for an NFT.
I was wrong, Manmade horrors…
was recently trying to explain to someone how The Games is the best Olympics memory I have
maybe also that time the diver hit his head on the platform
request for admin input on how best to run a bracket without spamming up our microforum
that’s a good question! I’ll probably have to brainstorm this with @[email protected] later today. in the meantime, is there any precedent for how to do it on Mastodon? we might be able to adopt whatever they do — or maybe at the very least, if there’s a good way to do it there, we could link to a Mastodon thread for the bracket and keep discussion on here.
nothing springs to mind. mastodon has polls, of a sort, if a bit weird in activitypub. here’s the lemmy bug.
i would say just make a thread here to fill with crap, see what happens
I mean, in the worst case, we find out if these database backups are worth a damn? but realistically, we see so much spam from activitypub already that it should be hard to make things fall over*
- unless you know which parts to push on, then it’s instant
it should be hard to make things fall over unless you know which parts to push on, then it’s instant
the IKEA model of software security
J, K. Rowling, skull enthusiast:
Khelif, who went on to win Olympic gold despite the harassment, reportedly filed a lawsuit alleging cyberbullying against Rowling (Elon Musk is also named in the suit). Shortly after the lawsuit became public on August 13, Rowling went silent on X, leading to speculation from many onlookers that she had pushed her transphobic narrative too far. On August 23, though, she again appeared on the platform, spreading more false and misleading commentary on Khelif. Her first post was a quote from a transphobic hit piece against Khelif by Colin Wright, the former managing editor of the far-right website Quillette.
lol, poor helpless joanne just can’t help but run headlong into the wall
saw something drift by that she’d also deleted a bunch of tweets in the quiet time, so her coming out swinging is doubly funny
I mean, does she actually write books anymore? Or is she a full time TERF now? Because that’s a direct conflict between what’s in her legal best interest and in her professional best interest.
one would think so, but as of a month or two ago she’s announced another book
@froztbyte @techtakes Speaking as a working writer: she’s a hobbyist writer. At this point she’s so rich she could spend £100K/week of her capital and still be a multimillionaire when she dies aged 100+. A novel typically takes a year to write and even JKR is unlikely to make significantly more than £100K from a book (unless it gets filmed). So she keeps writing for ego/self-esteem but not from necessity (to stop writing would leave a hole in her life).
Why not both? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Blood
Some media outlets regarded the male villain who dresses as a woman in order to kill women as transphobic, given the author’s past comments on transgender people.
Her professional interest would be to shut the fuck up and just live in her castle, forever rich beyond measure. She could never write another thing in her life and she’d never run out of money anyway.
Problematic developer with AI crush realizes she’s just dust under the wheels of progress
You know those polls that say fewer than 20% of Americans trust AI scientists? It shouldn’t be the case, because no group is doing more right now to elevate the universe to a higher state of complexity. You know who the public does trust? Open source developers.
Justine, LOL indeed.
Problematic developer with AI crush
I thought this was gonna go in a completely different direction.
Setting: romantic sunset beach, without a crowd in sight. There is no sound but that of a gentle breeze, waves lapping at the shore, and seagulls in the distance. Ryan turns to his girlfriend Tiffany. He gets down on his knees, the sand muddying his pants. Tiffany clasps her hands over her mouth in disbelief. Ryan says: “Tiffany you are the light of my life. You have made me a better man. I can’t see me living with anyone else but you. Will… will you marry m-- bzzt. Thank you for using Virtua-Boyfriend, unfortunately we ran out of VC money so are shutting down.”.
In classic Rationalist fashion, she noticed something she didn’t like, hypothesized a cause with no real evidence, and then proceeded to rant about the implications of that unproven hypothesis.
My suspicion, on the other hand, is that because Claude is just reproducing statistical patterns from its training data is simply reflecting the fact that she is referred to as a Nazi coder far more often than she is as some kind of open-source luminary. Unless her github metadata signs everything “Justine T the open-source developer” then that association isn’t reflected in the patterns extrapolated from the training data.
You know those polls that say fewer than 20% of Americans trust AI scientists?
No, but I’d say its a good sign we’re getting close to an AI winter
This is the girl who went off the rails and started posting about neoreaction, right?
correct
elevate the universe to a higher state of complexity
girl my life already too complex, ain’t no one need elevation to an even higher state of complexity
can we maybe do a lower one?
ProblematicNazi developeryeah I’ve found out a lot more since I posted that comment…
only a month and a bit sooner and she could have answered my question herself lol
Etsy: an artistic one-stop chop shop where slop pops up like catch crops - and that quick shot’s no hatchet-job, so keep it from pops 'fore it leaves him in a strop:
(Full disclosure: the opportunity for some quickfire rhymes may have played a role in birthing this sneer.)
noice
What can I say - I saw solid ammo for some machine-gun flow, and gave it a good throw.
(Special thanks to Rhymezone - I wouldn’t have pulled off this rhythmic magdump without it)
rhythmic magdump
Instant band name
I wonder how soon we’re going to hit the “we have team $foo building that internally since we can’t use $serviceX for that (externally hosted has security issues)” phase of corporate fafo
why am I thinking of this? oh, no reason. just pondering the cyclic nature of history I guess you could say.
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OT: whats the best way to explain rationalism et all to complete normal people with no connection to tech?
Techish (I would use the word techbro here, but that needs an explantion even) people who want to make their fictional science fiction utopia real, but got so scared of their own science fiction ideas going wrong and killing everybody they started a cult around rationality, sort of a Vulcans fan club. They have a pattern where they think they and their methods are smarter and better than actual experts.
When trying to do their own research with an open mind, but they left their minds so open that all kinds of sexists and racists crawled in. Who are welcomed as long as they are verbose enough.
Their minds are open to all ideas, so long as the idea is a closed form solution that looks edgy.
Yes, there is a certain yearning for ‘secret forbidden’ knowledge and contrarianism, but I tried to keep it short and simple. Almost never do they find a solution in anything in the left side of politics.
Yeah that’s totally fair, I just was tailgating the sneer I guess.
Almost never do they find a solution in anything in the left side of politics.
That’s a good point, and I think it speaks well to their savior complex. They want above all to push the guilt and discomfort of social issues away so they don’t have to live in the discomfort of reality. Dogma does this, and it really doesn’t matter if you have the veneer of science or the mythology.
SV Scientology, they can’t land you a leading role in a summer blockbuster but they sure as hell can put you in the running for AI policy related positions of influence or for the board of a company run by one of their more successful groomings. Their current most popular product is court philosophers for the worst kind of aspiring technofeudalist billionaire.
If this gets them interested you’ll eventually get your chance to do a deep dive to any details of cosmist lore you find relevant.
It’s a little bit like a tiny version of the Mormons if Joseph Smith had read the collected works of Isaac Asimov instead of the Bible and also his name was Yud.
Or to go with less of a sneer, the Rationalist/TESCREAL/Californian Ideology is a loose grouping of fringe beliefs rooted in old-school science/tech fetishism with a lot of science fiction overlays and libertarian/reactionary politics that effectively define “let ultrawealthy tech capitalists do whatever they want” as the only reasonable choice and make it a moral imperative.
Actually the Mormon thing might work given its a priest I’m talking with. Thank you!
ah, he’d understand people then? Heavy on the slipping into cultishness then
She’s like the vicar of dibley so this is really quite funny when you think about it.
I tried to think of a smaller cult that’s still pretty well-known or influential but kept coming up with Heaven’s Gate or the Branch Davidians.
Scientology would seem like the obvious one, then.
Peoples Temple?
I was trying to think of one that didn’t end in a mass murder/suicide/conflagration-of-violence though.
There are a couple 19th century ones that fit and didn’t go lethal. The New Motive Power guys would be the best match imo.
the problem of my life. I have literally found it easier to explain Scientology than Roko’s basilisk.
It can’t be that stupid. You must be explaining it wrong.
Weirdly and widely applicable, as always
Personally I might try explaining some of the foundational stuff before going into the big R. Scientism, utilitarianism would be my starting points.
I first read this comment before having coffee and thought that “R. Scientism” was a joke about Asimov’s robot novels.
can’t unsee
I knew R. Scientism. I went to high school with his son. He was a real piece of shit
Longer than I’d intend, but the way I describe it is probably as
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A mystical Harry Potter based sex cult deeply embedded in the techbro scene. They want what many cults want: to commune with God, achieve immortality or enlightenment, and obtain power in the current world, but they dress it in the trappings of science and computer programming.
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Do to demographic features, their desire to be clever, and a certain contrarian attitude, they will often seek to rationalise harmful social practices, which leads them to support anti-feminist and race realist positions with shocking frequency.
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Because of their close connections to the tech scene, along with the personal relationship the cult founder had with Peter Thiel, and the fact that the cult has been indoctrinating kids since the aughts, they are shockingly influential in the AI scene.
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As most cults, they claim to want to teach people to think correctly (rationally), but they actually value the community of being in a cult (and the potential social networking and financial benefits) over thinking rationally.
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In terms of style, they like long works with unclear arguments, being clever or witty over being right, and strongly signalling their rationality (sometimes even using good tools), but not allowing that to interfere with the core features of being a cultist.
(1-3) are what I’d consider core. (4-5) are what I’d add if the person seems interested. If they seem really interested, I’d also discuss other connections (e.g. to Effective Altruism, the Future of Humanity Institute, George Mason University, Future Perfect, neoreaction), their ideology in more specific terms (e.g. the Sequences, Roko’s Basilisk), and associated members (e.g. EY, SSC, Aella, SBF).
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decentralized cult which worships the concept of rational thinking as superior to evidence. has lots of little rituals which are supposed to invoke rational thinking. uses AI in the place of angels and demons. no core holy texts, but the closest things are a sequence of blog posts and a harry potter fanfic. very influential in silicon valley, very intermingled with various explicitly fascist groups
Not a sneer, but a deeply cursed dream from a friend:
Hey, that’s the epic battle fantasy guy. I loved his games back in the flash days.
ABSOLUTELY CURSED
It would be pretty funny for someone to be so awful that they get haunted by an Atheist. I mean, it’s unlikely, but if it were possible then this would do it.