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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
got a question (brought on by this). anyone here know if zitronās talked about his history of how he got to where he is atm wrt tech companies?
thereās something thatās often bothered me about some of his commentary. an example I could point to: some of the things that he comments on and ādoesnāt seem to getā (and has stated so) are ā¦ not quite mysteries of the universe, just some specifics in dysfunction in the industry. but those things one could understand by, yāknow, asking around a bit. (so in this example, I dunno if thatās on him not engaging far/deeply enough in research, or just me being too-fucking-aware of broken industry bullshit. hard to get a read on it)
but things like whatās highlighted in thread do leave open the possibility of other nonsense too
I donāt think him having previously done undefined PR work for companies that include alleged AI startups is the smoking gun that mastopost is presenting it as.
Going through a Zitron long form article and leaving with the impression that heās playing favorites between AI companies seems like a major failure of reading comprehension.
According to the archived website, he did do PR for DoNotPay, which is advertised as āThe first robot lawyer.ā
Itās certainly possible though that at the time he thought there was more potential for this sort of AI than there actually was, though that could also mean that his flip is relatively recent.
Or maybe itās something else.
What else though, is he being secretly funded by the cabal to make convolutional neural networks great again?
That he found his niche and is trying to make the most of it seems by far the most parsimonious explanation, and the heaps of manure he unloads on the LLM both business and practices weekly surely canāt be helping DoNotPayās bottom line.
Thing is, that by December 2023, the time of the archive, there was already a scandal with someone using ChatGPT to do the work of discovery. While he might have stopped doing PR work for DoNotPay by that time, he was willing to advertise the fact that he did do such PR work for such a company. It shows either a lack of due diligence in researching his clients, or maybe it was just a paycheque for him. Perhaps he thought he knew more than what he actually did. Or maybe there was something else, Iām not clairvoyant.
Itās clear that heās pivoted from that viewpoint, but it does make me curious what happened between then and now that caused him to become skeptical.
Before focusing on AI he was going off about what he called the rot economy, which also had legs and seemed to be in line with Doctorowās enshitification concept. Applying the same purity standard to that would mean we should be suspicious if he ever worked with a listed company at all.
Still I get how his writing may feel inauthentic to some, personally I get preacher vibes from him and he often does a cyclical repetition of his points as the article progresses which to me sometimes came off as arguing via browbeating, and also Iāve had just about enough of reading performatively angry internet writers.
Still, he must be getting better or at least coming up with more interesting material, since lately Iāve been managing to read them all the way through.
The lesswrong-tier post lengths arenāt helping to get all the way through them
roughly this is where my thinking on it is too. and thereās a chance that because of such clients is why he hates this shit now as he does.
the guyās quite obviously a great orator and engaging writer, evidenced by the popularity of his writing. and this is another part of why this comes to mind for me - applying a bit of critical view, just to check. while weāre at the point of building new relationships, new critiques, new platforms, figuring out all these new options to deal with sweeping hand motion all this other garbage, wisest to try make the most of it now
Notably DoNotPay seems to be run-of-the mill script automation, rather than LLM-based (though they might be trying that), and only started branding themselves as an āAI Companionā after Jun/2023 (after it was added to EZPRās client list).
Itās entirely possible they simply consulted Ed, and then pivoted away, and Ed doesnāt update his client list that carefully.
(Happens all the time to my translator parents, where they list prior work, only to discover that clients add terrible terrible edits to their translations)
Itās an archive, so he canāt really update that.
Itās still in the client list as of today.
EZ is a PR person, and definitely has a PR person vibe. I donāt know what that posterās deal is, and I would not accuse Ed of being an AI bro. That post kind of has āhaters gonna hateā vibes
he started writing about this stuff and it struck a chord with people