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.
Palantir’s public relations team explains how it helped America win the Global War on Terror
Not a sneer but a question: Do we have any good idea on what the actual cost of running AI video generators are? They’re among the worst internet polluters out there, in my opinion, and I’d love it if they’re too expensive to use post-bubble but I’m worried they’re cheaper than you’d think.
I know like half the facts I would need to estimate it… if you know the GPU vRAM required for the video generation, and how long it takes, then assuming no latency, you could get a ballpark number looking at nVida GPU specs on power usage. For instance, if a short clip of video generation needs 90 GB VRAM, then maybe they are using an RTX 6000 Pro… https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/products/workstations/professional-desktop-gpus/ , take the amount of time it takes in off hours which shouldn’t have a queue time… and you can guessestimate a number of Watt hours? Like if it takes 20 minutes to generate, then at 300-600 watts of power usage that would be 100-200 watt hours. I can find an estimate of $.33 per kWh (https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/san-francisco-county/san-francisco/ ), so it would only be costing $.03 to $.06.
IDK how much GPU-time you actually need though, I’m just wildly guessing. Like if they use many server grade GPUs in parallel, that would multiply the cost up even if it only takes them minutes per video generation.
This does leave out the constant cost (per video generated) of training the model itself right. Which pro genAI people would say you only have to do once, but we know everything online gets scraped repeatedly now so there will be constant retraining. (I am mixing video with text here so, lot of big unknowns).
If they got a lot of usage out of a model this constant cost would contribute little to the cost of each model in the long run… but considering they currently replace/retrain models every 6 months to 1 year, yeah this cost should be factored in as well.
Also, training compute grows quadratically with model size, because its is a multiple of training data (which grows linearly with model size) and the model size.
Well that’s certainly depressing. Having to come to terms with living post-gen AI even after the bubble bursts isn’t going to be easy.
Keep in mind I was wildly guessing with a lot of numbers… like I’m sure 90 GB vRAM is enough for decent quality pictures generated in minutes, but I think you need a lot more compute to generate video at a reasonable speed? I wouldn’t be surprised if my estimate is off by a few orders of magnitude. $.30 is probably enough that people can’t spam lazily generated images, and a true cost of $3.00 would keep it in the range of people that genuinely want/need the slop… but yeah I don’t think it is all going cleanly away once the bubble pops or fizzles.
The beautiful process of dialectics has taken place on the butterfly site, and we have reached a breakthrough in moral philosophy. Only a few more questions remain before we can finally declare ethics a solved problem. The most important among them is, when an omnipotent and omnibenevolent basilisk simulates Roko Mijic getting kicked in a nuts eternally by a girl with blue hair and piercings, would the girl be barefoot or wearing heavy, steel-toed boots? Which kind of footwear of lack thereof would optimize the utility generated?
The last conundrum of our time: of course steel capped work boots would hurt more but barefoot would allow faster (and therefore more) kicks.
You have not taken the lessons of the philosopher Piccolo to mind. You should wear even heavier boots in your day to day. Why do you think goths wear those huge heavy boots? For looks?
And thus I was enlightened
Her kick’s so fast the call it the “quad laser”
continuing from the last weeks thread https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/the-high-costs-and-thin-margins-threatening-ai-coding-startups/
You know stuff is bad if the margins aren’t “low” or “razor-thin” but “very negative”.
The entire business idea is dumb. Yes we will pay retail for access to models run by companies also offering the same products that we do, but we’ll make up for it in volume?
New article from the New York Times reporting on an influx of compsci graduates struggling to find jobs (ostensibly caused by AI automation). Found a real money shot about a quarter of the way through:
Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent.
You want my take, I expect this article’s gonna blow a major hole in STEM’s public image - being a path to a high-paying job was one of STEM’s major selling points (especially compared to the “useless” art/humanities degrees), and this new article not only undermines that selling point, but argues for flipping it on its head.
Well, what’s next, and how much work is it? I didn’t want to be a computing professional. I trained as a jazz pianist. At some point we ought to focus on the real problem: not STEM, not humanities, but business schools and MBA programs.
Well, what’s next, and how much work is it?
I’m not particularly sure myself. By my guess, I don’t expect one specific profession to be “what’s next”, but a wide variety of professions becoming highly lucrative, primarily those which can exploit the fallout of the AI bubble to their benefit. Giving some predictions:
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Therapists and psychiatrists should find plenty of demand, as mental health crisis and cases of AI psychosis provide them a steady stream of clients.
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Those in writing related jobs (e.g. copywriters) can likely squeeze hefty premiums from clients with AI-written work that needs fixing.
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Programmers may find themselves a job tearing down the mountains of technical debt introduced by vibe-coding, and can probably crowbar a premium out of desperate clients as well. (This one’s probably gonna be limited to senior coders, though - juniors are likely getting the shaft on this front)
As for which degrees will come into high demand, I expect it will be mainly humanities degrees that benefit - either directly through netting you a profession that can exploit the AI fallout, or indirectly through showing you have skills that an LLM can’t imitate.
I didn’t want to be a computing professional. I trained as a jazz pianist
Nice. You could probably earn some cash doing that on the side.
At some point we ought to focus on the real problem: not STEM, not humanities, but business schools and MBA programs.
You’re goddamn right.
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Quick update: I’ve checked the response on Bluesky, and it seems the general response is of schadenfreude at STEM’s expense. From the replies, I’ve found:
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Humanities graduates directly mocking STEM (Fig. 1,Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4, Fig. 5)
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Mockery of the long-running “learn to code” mantra (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4 Fig. 5, Fig. 6)
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Claims that STEM automated themselves out of a job by creating AI (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3)
Plus one user mocking STEM in general as “[choosing] fascism and “billions must die”” out of greed, and another approving of others’ dunks on STEM over past degree-related grievances.
You want my take on this dunkfest, this suggests STEM’s been hit with a double-whammy here - not only has STEM lost the status their “high-paying” reputation gave them, but that reputation (plus a lotta built-up grievances from mockery of the humanities) has crippled STEM’s ability to garner sympathy for their current predicament.
The whole joining of the fascist side by a lot of the higher ups of the tech world, combined with the long-standing debate bro both sides free speech libertarianism (but mostly for neonazis, payment services do go after sex work and lgbt content) also did not help the rep of STEM, even if those decisions are made by STEM curious people and not actually STEM people. billionaires want you to know they could have done physics - Angela Collier
You’re dead right on that.
Part of me suspects STEM in general (primarily tech, the other disciplines look well-protected from the fallout) will have to deal with cleaning off the stench of Eau de Fash after the dust settles, with tech in particular viewed as unequipped to resist fascism at best and out-and-proud fascists at worst.
As an aging dev, we kind of do deserve some of this flak lol. Funny thing is, I went into SD because my first STEM degree made me as unemployable as a humanities major (a B.S. in physics is good for not much).
I hate the fact that now someone might look at me and surmise that I do something related to blockchain or AI, I feel almost like I need a sticker, like those “I bought it before we knew Elon was crazy” they put on Teslas
“I learnt to code before this stupid bubble”
stolen from cohost but i appreciate the succinctness of “capitalism make computer bad”
you say STEM, but you seem to mean almost exclusively computer touchers, already mentioned biologists or variety of engineers won’t likely have these problems (i’m not gonna be excessively smug about this because my field will destroy you physically while still being STEM and not particularly glorious)
also it’s not a complete jobocalypse, there’s still 93% employed fresh CS grads, they might have comparatively shittier jobs, but it’s not a disaster (unless picture is actually much bleaker in that that unemployment is, say, concentrated in last 2 years of graduates, but still even in this case it’s maybe 10%, 12% tops for the worst affected). unless you mean their unlimited libertarian flavoured greed coming through it, then yeah, it’s pretty funny
even then, there’s gonna be a funny rebound when these all genai companies implode, partially maybe not in top earner countries, but places like eastern europe or india will fill that openai-sized crater pretty handily, if that mythical outsourcing to ai happened in the first place, that is
On one hand, this is another case of capitalism working as intended. You have the ruling class dangling the carrot of the promise of social mobility via job. Just gotta turn the crank of the orphan grinder for 4 years or so, until there’s enough orphan paste to grease the next grinding machine. But it’s ok, because your experience in crank will let you climb the ladder to the next, higher paying, higher prestige crank of the machine. Then one day, they decide to turn on the motor.
On the other hand? There is no other hand, they chopped it off because you didn’t turn the crank fast enough when you had the chance.
To extend that analogy a bit, the dunkfest I noted suggests that a portion of the public views STEM as perfectly okay with the orphan grinder’s existence at best, and proud of having orphan blood on their hands at worst.
As for the motorised orphan grinder you mention, it looks to me like the public viewed its construction as STEM voting for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party (with predictable consequences).
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Except biology isn’t being hit as badly and that’s also STEM. I wouldn’t be surprised if other life sciences have also done better, at least until Trump started fucking with the grant system.
It’s specifically computer-touchers who are in the toilet.
deleted by creator
Thomasaurus has given their thoughts on using AI, in a journal entry called “I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid)”. Unsurprisingly, the whole thing is one long sneer, with a damning indictment of its effectiveness at the end:
If I lose my job due to AI, it will be because I used it so much it made me lazy and stupid to the point where another human has to replace me and I become unemployable.
I shouldn’t invest time in AI. I should invest more time studying new things that interest me. That’s probably the only way to keep doing this job and, you know, be safe.
Check out this sneer on the EA subreddit
“I’m employed, can someone explain what either of these mean?”
“i’m employed, what does it mean?” is common on r/shitposting when some obscure online/weeb thing surfaces. probably in a dozen of other places also
Im only on the normal parts of reddit, so had no idea.
We’re at the point of 100xers giving themselves broken sleep schedules so they can spend tokens optimally.
Inevitably, Anthropic will increase their subscription costs or further restrict usage limits. It feels like they’re giving compute away for free at this point. So when the investor bux start to run dry, I will be ready.
This has to be satire, but oh my god.
Im old enough to recall the polyphasic sleep fad. And how that wrecked people if they ever messed up. (Iirc also turns out very bad implications for long term health).
My velocity has increased 10x and I’m shipping features like a cracked ninja now, which is great because my B2B SaaS is still in stealth mode.
Yeah it’s satire, but effective satire means you can never really tell…
I’m sorry in advance for posting this meme.
So… apparently Peter Thiel has taken to co-opting fundamentalist Christian terminology to go after Effective Altruism? At least it seems that way from this EA post (warning, I took psychic damage just skimming the lunacy). As far as I can tell, he’s merely co-opting the terminology, Thiel’s blather doesn’t have any connection to any variant of Christian eschatology (whether mainstream or fundamentalist or even obscure wacky fundamentalist), but of course, the majority of the EAs don’t recognize that, or the fact that he is probably targeting them for their (kind of weak to be honest) attempts at getting AI regulated at all, and instead they charitably try to steelman him and figure out if he was a legitimate point. …I wish they could put a tenth of this effort into understanding leftist thought.
Some of the comments are… okay actually, at least by EA standards, but there are still plenty of people willing to defend Thiel
One comment notes some confusion:
I’m still confused about the overall shape of what Thiel believes.
He’s concerned about the antichrist opposing Jesus during Armageddon. But afaik standard theology says that Jesus will win for certain. And revelation says the world will be in disarray and moral decay when the Second Coming happens.
If chaos is inevitable and necessary for Jesus’ return, why is expanding the pre-apocalyptic era with growth/prosperity so important to him?
Yeah, its because he is simply borrowing Christian Fundamentalists Eschatological terminology… possibly to try to turn the Christofascists against EA?
I’m dubious Thiel is actually an ally to anyone worried about permanent dictatorship. He has connections to openly anti-democratic neoreactionaries like Curtis Yarvin, he quotes Nazi lawyer and democracy critic Carl Schmitt on how moments of greatness in politics are when you see your enemy as an enemy, and one of the most famous things he ever said is “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”. Rather I think he is using “totalitarian” to refer to any situation where the government is less economically libertarian than he would like, or “woke” ideas are popular amongst elite tastemakers, even if the polity this is all occurring in is clearly a liberal democracy, not a totalitarian state.
Note this commenter still uses non-confrontational language (“I’m dubious”) even when directly calling Thiel out.
The top comment, though, is just like the main post, extending charitability to complete technofascist insanity. (Warning for psychic damage)
Nice post! I am a pretty close follower of the Thiel Cinematic Universe (ie his various interviews, essays, etc)
I think Thiel is also personally quite motivated (understandably) by wanting to avoid death. This obviously relates to a kind of accelerationist take on AI that sets him against EA, but again, there’s a deeper philosophical difference here. Classic Yudkowsky essays (and a memorable Bostrom short story, video adaptation here) share this strident anti-death, pro-medical-progress attitude (cryonics, etc), as do some philanthropists like Vitalik Buterin. But these days, you don’t hear so much about “FDA delenda est” or anti-aging research from effective altruism. Perhaps there are valid reasons for this (low tractability, perhaps). But some of the arguments given by EAs against aging’s importance are a little weak, IMO (more on this later) – in Thiel’s view, maybe suspiciously weak. This is a weird thing to say, but I think to Thiel, EA looks like a fundamentally statist / fascist ideology, insofar as it is seeking to place the state in a position of central importance, with human individuality / agency / consciousness pushed aside.
As for my personal take on Thiel’s views – I’m often disappointed at the sloppiness (blunt-ness? or low-decoupling-ness?) of his criticisms, which attack the EA for having a problematic “vibe” and political alignment, but without digging into any specific technical points of disagreement. But I do think some of his higher-level, vibe-based critiques have a point.
tl,dr; Thiel now sees the Christofascists as a more durable grifting base than the EAs, and is looking to change lanes while the temporary coalitions of maximalist Trumpism offer him the opportunity.
I repeat my suspicion that Thiel is not any more sober than Musk, he’s just getting sloppier about keeping it out of the public eye.
I think a big difference between Thiel and Musk, is that Thiel views himself as an “intellectual” and derives prestige “intellectualism”. I don’t believe for a minute he’s genuinely christian, but his wankery about end-of-times eschatology of armageddon = big-left-government, is a a bit too confused to be purely cynical, I think sniffing his own farts feeds his ego.
Of course a man who would promote open doping olympics isn’t sober.
Yeah, its because he is simply borrowing Christian Fundamentalists Eschatological terminology… possibly to try to turn the Christofascists against EA?
Yep, the usefulness of EA is over, they are next on the chopping block. I’d imagine a similar thing will happen to redscare/moldbug if they ever speak out against him.
E: And why would a rich guy be against a “we are trying to convince rich guys to spend their money differently” organization. Esp a ‘libertarian’ “I get to do what I want or else” one.
And why would a rich guy be against a “we are trying to convince rich guys to spend their money differently” organization.
Well when they are just passively trying to convince the rich guys, they can use the organization to launder reputation or boost ideologies they are in favor of. When the organization actually tries to get regulations passed, even ineffectually, well, that is a threat to the likes of Thiel.
That was what I meant, I was being a bit sarcastic there.
It always struck me as hilarious that the EA/LW crowd could ever affect policy in any way. They’re cosplaying as activists, have no ideas about how to move the public image needle other than weird movie ideas and hope, and are literally marinated in SV technolibertarianism which sees government regulation as Evil.
There’s a mini-freakout over OpenAI deciding to keep GPT-4o active, despite it being more “sycophantic” than GPT-5 (and thus more likely to convince people to do Bad Things) but there’s also the queasy realization that if sycophantic LLMs is what brings in the bucks, nothing is gonna stop LLM companies from offering them. And there’s no way these people can stop it, because they’ve made the deal that LLM companies are gonna be the ones realizing that AI is gonna kill everyone and that’s never gonna happen.
They’re cosplaying as activists, have no ideas about how to move the public image needle other than weird movie ideas and hope, and are literally marinated in SV technolibertarianism which sees government regulation as Evil.
It is kind of sad. They are missing the ideological pieces that would let them carry out activism effectually so instead they’ve gotten used as a free source of crit-hype in the LLM bubble. …except not that sad because they would ignore real AI dangers in favor of their sci-fi scenarios, so I don’t feel too bad for them.
Brian Merchant’s article about that lighthaven gathering really struck me.
The men who EAs think will end the earth were in the building with them, and rather than organize to throw them out a window (or even to just make them mildly uncomfortable), the bayes knowers all gormlessly moped around their twee boutique hotel and cried around some whiteboards.
Absolute hellish brainworms
Yeah that article was one of the things I had mind. It’s the peak of centrist liberalism where EAs and lesswrongers can think these people are literally going to cause mankind’s extinction (or worse) and they can’t even bring themselves to be rude to them. OTOH, if they actually acted coherently on their nominal doomer beliefs, they would be carrying out terrorism on a far greater scale than the Zizians, so maybe it is for the best they are ideologically incapable of direct action.
The ideological version of Mr Burns’s diseases getting in each other’s way
Ooh, do you have a link to share?
Wild, thank you!
Using the term “Antichrist” as a shorthand for “global stable totalitarianism” is A Choice.
I think Leathery Pete might have read too much Left Behind.
Thiel is a true believer in Jesus and God. He was raised evangelical. The quirky eschatologist that you’re looking for is René Girard, who he personally met at some point. For more details, check out the Behind the Bastards on him.
Edit: I wrote this before clicking on the LW post. This is a decent summary of Girard’s claims as well as how they influence Thiel. I’m quoting West here in order to sneer at Thiel:
Unfortunately (?), Christian society does not let us sacrifice random scapegoats, so we are trapped in an ever-escalating cycle, with only poor substitutes like “cancelling celebrities on Twitter” to release pressure. Girard doesn’t know what to do about this.
Thiel knows what to do about this. After all, he funded Bollea v. Gawker. Instead of letting journalists cancel celebrities, why not cancel journalists instead? Then there’s no longer any journalists to do any cancellation! Similarly, Thiel is confirmed to be a source of funding for Eric Weinstein and believed to fund Sabine Hossenfelder. Instead of letting scientists cancel religious beliefs, why not cancel scientists instead? By directing money through folks with existing social legitimacy, Thiel applies mimesis: pretend to be legitimate and you can shift what is legitimate.
In this context, Thiel fears the spectre of AGI because it can’t be influenced by his normal approach to power, which is to hide anything that can be hidden and outspend everybody else talking in the open. After all, if AGI is truly to unify humanity, it must unify our moralities and cultures into a single uniformly-acceptable code of conduct. But the only acceptable unification for Thiel is the holistic catholic apostolic one-and-only forever-and-ever church of Jesus, and if AGI is against that then AGI is against Jesus himself.
Thiel is a true believer in Jesus and God. He was raised evangelical.
Being gay must really complicate things for him.
Is there any more solid evidence of Hossenfelder taking Thielbux, or is this just a guess based on the orbit she moves in: appearing on Michael Shermer’s podcast years after the news broke that he was a sex pest, blurbing the new book edited by sex pest Lawrence Krauss, etc.
There’s no solid evidence. (You can put away the attorney, Mr. Thiel.) Experts in the field, in a recent series of interviews with Dave Farina, generally agree that somebody must be funding Hossenfelder. Right now she’s associated with the Center for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU Munich; her biography there is pretty funny:
Sabine’s current research interest focuses on the role of locality and finetuning in theory development. Locality has been widely considered a lost cause in the foundations of quantum mechanics. A basically unexplored way to maintain locality, however, is the idea of superdeterminism, which has more recently also been re-considered under the name “contextuality”. Superdeterminism is widely believed to be finetuned. One of Sabine’s current research topics is to explore whether this belief is justified. The other main avenue she is pursuing is how superdeterminism can be experimentally tested.
For those not in physics: this is crank shit. To the extent that MCMP funds her at all, they are explicitly pursuing superdeterminism, which is unfalsifiable, unverifiable, doesn’t accord with the web of science, and generally fails to be a serious line of inquiry. Now, does MCMP have enough cash to pay her to make Youtube videos and go on podcasts? We don’t know. So it’s hard to say whether she has funding beyond that.
Oh, wow, that biography is hilariously bad. Contexuality is not the same thing as superdeterminism. And locality is not “a lost cause”. Plenty of people throw around the term quantum nonlocality, but in the smaller population of those who take foundations seriously, many will say that quantum mechanics is local. Most but not all proponents of Copenhagen-ish interpretations say something like, “The moral of Bell’s theorem is that nature needs a non-(local hidden variable) theory. We keep locality and drop the hidden variables. In other words, quantum physics is a local non-(hidden variable) theory.” The Everettians of various flavors also tend to hold onto locality, or try to, while not always agreeing with each other on how to do that. It’s probably only among the Bohmians that you’ll find people insisting that quantum physics means nature is intrinsically nonlocal.
The quirky eschatologist that you’re looking for is René Girard, who he personally met at some point. For more details, check out the Behind the Bastards on him.
Thanks for the references. The quirky theology was so outside the range of even the weirder Fundamentalist Christian stuff I didn’t recognize it as such. (And didn’t trust the EA summary because they try so hard to charitably make sense of Thiel).
In this context, Thiel fears the spectre of AGI because it can’t be influenced by his normal approach to power, which is to hide anything that can be hidden and outspend everybody else talking in the open.
Except the EAs are, on net, opposed to the creation of AGI (albeit they are ineffectual in their opposition). So going after the EAs doesn’t make sense if Thiel is genuinely opposed to inventing AGI faster. So I still think Thiel is just going after the EA’s because he’s libertarian and EA has shifted in the direction of trying to get more government regulation. (As opposed to a coherent theological goal beyond libertarianism). I’ll check out the BtB podcast and see if it changes my mind as to his exact flavor of insanity.
This was discussed last week but I looked at the comments and noticed someone in the comments getting slammed for… checks notes… noting that Eliezer wasn’t clear on what research paper he was actually responding to (multiple other comments are kind of confused, because they assume he means one paper then other comments correct them that he obviously meant another). The commenter of course edits to back-peddle.
If you do not understand what the Psychopomp is talking about, that is on you not him dear commenter.
Clicking through and fumbling around led me to the time Yud wanted HPMoR to win the Hugo for Best Novel. Oh, and also the time that he bet against the LHC finding the Higgs boson, because
I don’t think the modern field of physics has its act sufficiently together to predict that a hitherto undetected quantum field is responsible for mass.
If you do not understand what the Psychopomp is talking about, that is on you not him dear commenter.
I’m still thinking about the article about the NRx party from last week and just how classless (who pours champagne wrong?) and sad it showed them to be, while still being obsessed with their image. Such a sad bunch, their ideas have reached the higher ups of American power and still they obsess about how a journalist (who is dating one of them (he is into the ‘we live in a simulation’, break up with him, you are in danger)) might write something bad about them. (See also how many of these sad sacks got fired/blackballed for just having no internal filter (dressing up gay people as the KKK really?)). The creme de la creme of intellectual thought and they talk and act like a bunch of 4channers. (Yarvin must know this, his shit about how billionaires act must be a bit of projection). I’m talking about this piece: https://archive.ph/gm3Za Sorry to repost it, I just had a ‘layer 2 well done’ reminder and cringed again, fucking larpers (No shade to people who actually larp, seems fun, just cringe to do it irl).
Tante fires off about web search:
There used to be this deal between Google (and other search engines) and the Web: You get to index our stuff, show ads next to them but you link our work. AI Overview and Perplexity and all these systems cancel that deal.
And maybe - for a while - search will also need to die a bit? Make the whole web uncrawlable. Refuse any bots. As an act of resistance to the tech sector as a whole.
On a personal sidenote, part of me suspects webrings and web directories will see a boost in popularity in the coming years - with web search in the shitter and AI crawlers being a major threat, they’re likely your safest and most reliable method of bringing human traffic to your personal site/blog.
Ozy Brennan tries to explain why “rationalism” spawns so many cults.
One of the reasons they give is “a dangerous sense of grandiosity”.
the actual process of saving the world is not very glamorous. It involves filling out paperwork, making small tweaks to code, running A/B tests on Twitter posts.
Yep, you heard it right. Shitposting and inconsequential code are the proper way to save the world.
Overall more interesting than I expected. On the Leverage Research cult:
Routine tasks, such as deciding whose turn it was to pick up the groceries, required working around other people’s beliefs in demons, magic, and other paranormal phenomena. Eventually these beliefs collided with preexisting social conflict, and Leverage broke apart into factions that fought with each other internally through occult rituals.
They sure don’t make rationalism like they used to.
JFC
Agency and taking ideas seriously aren’t bad. Rationalists came to correct views about the COVID-19 pandemic while many others were saying masks didn’t work and only hypochondriacs worried about covid; rationalists were some of the first people to warn about the threat of artificial intelligence.
First off, anyone not entirely into MAGA/Qanon agreed that masks probably helped more than hurt. Saying rats were outliers is ludicrous.
Second, rats don’t take real threats of GenAI seriously - infosphere pollution, surveillance, autopropaganda - they just care about the magical future Sky Robot.
Unfortunately, in the spring of 2020, the CDC was discouraging people from wearing masks, and was saying masking would do more harm than good:
U.S. health authorities had discouraged healthy Americans from wearing facial coverings for weeks, saying they were likely to do more harm than good in the fight against the coronavirus — but now, as researchers have learned more about how the highly contagious virus spreads, officials have changed their recommendations.
U.S. health authorities have long maintained that face masks should be reserved only for medical professionals and patients suffering from COVID-19, the deadly disease caused by the coronavirus. The CDC had based this recommendation on the fact that such coverings offer little protection for wearers, and the need to conserve the country’s alarmingly sparse supplies of personal protective equipment.
I pretty clearly remember the mainstream media and various liberal talking heads telling people not to mask up back then - mostly because the US was completely unprepared for a pandemic, and they thought they had to discourage people from buying masks to make sure hospitals would have enough.
Meanwhile, the right-wing prepper types were breaking out the N95 masks they’d stockpiled for a pandemic, warning each other COVID was much more contagious and lethal than the government wanted to admit, passing around conspiracy theories about millions of deaths in China covered up by the CCP, and patting themselves on the back for stockpiling masks before the government took them off the shelf.
Then some analyst told Trump that letting COVID spread unchecked would hurt blue states worse than red states, so he had Fox News start anti-masking talking points, and all those conservative foot soldiers put away their masks and became super spreaders for Jesus.
But yeah. During that period from like January to March 2020, the political division around COVID was basically the opposite of what it became, and I can easily believe some “rationalists” were calling bullshit on the CDC suddenly telling people not to buy masks.
Meanwhile, the right-wing prepper types were breaking out the N95 masks they’d stockpiled for a pandemic
This included Scott ssc btw. Who also claimed that stopping smoking helped against cov. Not that he had any proof (the medical science at the time even falsely (it came out later) claimed smoking helped agains covid). But only the CDC gets judged, not the ingroup.
And other Scott blamed people who sneer for making covid worse. (While at sneerclub we were going, take this seriously and wear a mask).
So annoying Rationalists are trying to spin this into a win for themselves. (They also were not early, their warnings matched the warnings of the WHO, looked into the timelines last time this was talked about).
That’s how I remember it too. Also the context about conserving N95 masks always feels like it gets lost. Like, predictably so and I think there’s definitely room to criticize the CDC’s messaging and handling there, but the actual facts here aren’t as absurd as the current fight would imply. The argument was:
- With the small droplet size, most basic fabric masks offer very limited protection, if any.
- The masks that are effective, like N95 masks, are only available in very limited quantities.
- If everyone panic-buys N95 the way they did toilet paper it will mean that the people who are least able to avoid exposure i.e. doctors and medical frontliners are at best going to wildly overpay and at worst won’t be able to keep supplied.
- Therefore, most people shouldn’t worry about masking at this stage, and focus on other measures like social distancing and staying the fuck home.
I think later research cast some doubt on point 1, but 2-4 are still pretty solid given the circumstances that we (collectively) found ourselves in.
But doctor, I am L7 twitter manager Pagliacci
oldskool OSI appmanager is oldskool
(…sorry)
I’m gonna need this one explained, boss
(in networking it’s common terminology to refer to “Lx” by numerical reference, and broadly understood to be in reference to this)
Aaaaa gotcha. It’s probably obvious but in my case I meant L7 manager as in “level 7 manager”, a high tier managerial position at twitter, probably. I don’t know what exact tiering system twitter uses but I know other companies might use “Lx” to designate a level.
I figured, but I couldn’t just let a terrible pun slip me by!
“The common people pray for anime memes, healthy vtubers, and a wikipedia article that never ends,” Ser Jorah told her. “It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of tweets, so long as they are left in peace.” He gave a shrug. "They never are.”
- George R. R. Martin
Mastodon post linking to the least shocking Ars lede I have seen in a bit. Apparently “reasoning” and “chain of thought” functionality might have been entirely marketing fluff? :shocked pikachu:
Wait, but if they lied about that… what else do they lie about?
