Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
A lesswronger asks are
werationalfic protagonists the baddies? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FuGfR3jL3sw6r8kB4/richard-ngo-s-shortform?commentId=uDuzmfMEvEqpyApLhtldr; rationalfic has a very common trend of the protagonist gaining and using overwhelming power to radically reform the world. This is almost (with a few notable exceptions) portrayed as clearly unambiguously good thing.
My take: Don’t get me wrong, the Wizarding World (for example), as canonically portrayed needs some very strong reforms if not an entire revolution. But rationalfic almost never portrays the slow hard work of building support networks and alliances and developing a materialist theoretical understanding of how to reform society, as opposed to a lone (or small friend group) rationalist hero finding some overwhelming magical or technological advantage they can use to single-handedly take control and use their rationalist intellect to unilaterally fix everything. Part of it is the normal disconnect of fiction to the real world were it is more narrative satisfying (and easier to write) to have a central protagonist the solves the major problems or is at least directly involved with them, and rationalfic involves that protagonist gaining even more agency than they canonically do. The problem is that rationalist take this attitude back into real life, and so end up idolizing mythologized techbro billionaires or venture capitalist or the myth of the lone genius scientist/inventor.
Also, quality sneer in the replies, “rational” teletubbies: https://tomasbjartur.bearblog.dev/rational-teletubbies/
Carl Bergstrom notes a publicity stunt by Anthropic:
“The AI Grad Student”: A Harvard professor describes working with Claude.
Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: “It faked results, hoping I wouldn’t notice.”
But he ends the essay with “Now I’m doing 100% of my research with LLMs”.
Am I losing my mind?
Hang around for the “trust me bro, I saw it on YouTube” guy in the comments.
requiescat in picem, sora
I saw this headline:
Engineer Says It’s Time to Rebuild the Twin Towers With Giant Data Centers, Huge Tech Labs, and Anti-Aircraft Lasers on the Roof
And thought nothing in the body of the article could possibly top the headline. I was wrong:
Now, a long-shot effort seeks to rebuild them in an unlikely locale: Chicago
he’s even gone so far as to get a tribute to the original World Trade Center tattooed on his arm.
fireproof steel I-beams
a dedicated fire department
Journalists know that they don’t have to cover every random crank on the internet right? I suppose it’s my own fault for clicking on it.
I built an open-source connector between MyChart and Claude : /r/healthIT
my jaw is on the fucking floor
House of Saud (publication, not the royals) asks if the Iran war was caused by AI sycophancy.
I’m reminded of the Kremlin reality distortion field that appears to have informed the decision to invade Ukraine.
A) At this point I would be more surprised to learn that AI psychosis wasn’t infecting the upper tiers of the white house tbh. Like, at this point we could get a leak that Hegseth had been developing a literal god complex alongside his LLM mistress and I wouldn’t bat an eye.
B) It seems like a particularly bad sign that this is coming from thr Saudis given that they’ve been a consistent ally that the US has spent a lot of material resources and political capital to support. Ed: not actually an official Saudi government source. When you assume you make an ass of yourself, etc.
DeviantArt decided to make an “AI-powered” “video creator” (roughly a day before Sora got shitcanned), because its not like dA can make things worse by doubling-down on that shit. Special highlight goes to the opening of that announcement, which asks:
What if your art could (quite literally) move?
Have these people ever heard of animation
