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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    1 month ago

    I saw this over the weekend and the title itself is rather lovely, but even more hilariously itā€™s from the atlantic

    evidence of wider continued rising of the tide against saltmanā€™s bullshit grows

    • Mike@awful.systems
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      1 month ago

      Was thinking about this over the weekend and it suddenly struck me that saltman and his fellow podcasting bros (thank you, TSMC execs) are the modern equivalent of the guys in academic posts whoā€™d describe themselves using titles like ā€œfuturistā€ and spent their time turning out papers that got them interviewed on telly, inspired other academics with too much spare time to write their own takes on it and get interviewed on TV as well, maybe write a book and get an adoring profile in WIRED, that sort of thing. Maybe theyā€™d have a sideline in cyberpunk fiction or be part of a group that hung around in Berkeley making languid proclamations about how cyberspace would be the end of all laws and stuff like that. They were the first hype men of tech ā€“ didnā€™t actually do very much themselves but gave other people ideas. Certainly loved the sound of their own voices and adored the attention. But they were very clear that these were ideas to hang stuff off in the future, not the present.

      Nobody was dumb enough to actually take their stuff at face value as something they should immediately throw huge amounts of money at to make them reality. This started to blur during the period when Negroponte was really hustling and everything the MIT Media Lab squirted out was treated like the second coming. It blurred further when tech companies started employing people to act as hype men who had job titles like ā€œChief Visionaryā€. These guys could take the ideas coming from the nerdy engineers and turn them into excited press releases that would get the top brass excited into giving them more headcount to work on it. Type specimen: Shingy (formerly of AOL)

      Today, that circlejerk (futurists - journalism - readers - companies - investors) has collapsed into a line with two points. Someone like Altman shows up with a barely-proof-of-concept idea but is able to hype it directly to VCs who have too much money and no imagination and make decisions based entirely on FOMO. So Altman appears, gets showered with cash, then as heā€™s being showered with cash and hyping for all itā€™s worth other tech companies and VCs jump on the FOMO wagon and pour cash into it as well andā€¦ we get to today. Not so much a circlejerk as a reacharound. The sanity filter of open discussion and decent tech journalism between blue-sky ideas and billions of dollars of cash has been removed completely.

      The most recent bubbles - cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs, LLMsā€¦ none of these would have progressed much beyond a few academic papers, maybe a PoC and some excited cyberpunk mailing list traffic until about 15 years ago. The computing power to do them was easily available, itā€™s just that people would have asked ā€œWhat is this for?ā€ and ā€œWhy is it better?ā€. Itā€™s what happens when you stop using academia (generally a fairly sceptical community) as an ideas factory and start using coked-up Stanford grads whoā€™ve spent their entire university career being constantly told how special and important they are.

      Result: massive waste of talent which could be used on genuinely innovative and society-improving ideas, stifling of said genuinely good ideas as ā€œa startupā€ now has to mean $10m in seed capital and ā€œgraduatingā€ from an incubator rather than a couple of people coding in an apartment, billions of dollars firehosed off a cliff for no good reason, the environment being set on fire, and society is being made incrementally worse and not better.

      How fucking depressing. Capitalism, you suck.

      (full disclosure: Iā€™ve had dinner with a couple of top-tier Cyberpunk Luminaries in the US and one of them was pretty much the most annoying, self-satisfied ā€œI Am Very Clever And Will Talk Loudlyā€ person Iā€™ve ever met. I now know what it feels like to be mansplained at having had things like basic facts about the country I was then living in and the European Union explained to me incorrectly.)

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        1 month ago

        They were the first hype men of tech ā€“ didnā€™t actually do very much themselves but gave other people ideas.

        This is a bit unfair, i think nick land also sold drugs. Not sure however.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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      1 month ago

      evidence of wider continued rising of the tide against saltmanā€™s bullshit grows

      Precisely when that rising tide will drown Altman Iā€™m not sure, but I feel safe in saying itā€™ll probably drown the rest of the AI industry (and potentially ā€œAIā€ as a concept) as well - Altman is pretty much the face of this AI bubble, after all.

      The rising tide was likely also helped along by OpenAI going fully for-profit, which shattered the humanitarian guise it spent the last decade or so building, and, to quote myself, ā€œgiven the true believers reason to believe [Altman would] commit omnicide-via-spicy-autocomplete for a quick buckā€.

        • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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          1 month ago

          Every AI spring brings an even harsher AI winter.

          Oh, I expect a real harsh AI winter once this spring comes to a close - the public isnā€™t just overtly disappointed about AIā€™s failure to deliver, but outright angry at the nasty shit AIā€™s unleashed upon them.