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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • BigMuffN69@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    12 hours ago

    A nice long essay by Freddie deBoer for our holiday week: the release of GPT-5; I wholly recommend reading the whole thing!

    https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-rage-of-the-ai-guy

    Choice snippet to whet your appetites:

    “With all of this, I’m only asking you to observe the world around you and report back on whether revolutionary change has in fact happened. I understand, we are still very early in the history of LLMs. Maybe they’ll actually change the world, the way they’re projected to. But, look, within a quarter-century of the automobile becoming available as a mass consumer technology, its adoption had utterly changed the lived environment of the United States. You only had to walk outside to see the changes they had wrought. So too with electrification: if you went to the top of a hill overlooking a town at night pre-electrification, then went again after that town electrified, you’d see the immensity of that change with your own two eyes. Compare the maternal death rate in 1800 with the maternal death rate in 2000 and you will see what epoch-changing technological advance looks like. Consider how slowly the news of King William IV’s death spread throughout the world in 1837 and then look at how quickly the news of his successor Queen Victoria’s death spread in 1901, to see truly remarkable change via technology. AI chatbots and shitty clickbait videos choking the social internet do not rate in that context, I’m sorry. I will be impressed with the changes wrought by the supposed AI era when you can show me those changes rather than telling me that they’re going to happen. Show me. Show me!”

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      9 hours ago

      Scandals like that of Builder.ai - which should have their own code word, IAJI (It’s Actually Just Indians) - become more and more common[…]

      This is just a strictly worse version of David’s AGI (A Guy in India) sneer.

      It’s history; sometimes stuff just doesn’t happen. And precisely because saying so is less fun than the alternative, some of us have to.

      Freddy is clearly gesturing at a critique of a kind of Whig history here, and I fully agree but think his overall implications (at least so far) are off-base. He seems to be arguing that AI-based technological processes are not inevitable and that the political, economic, and social worlds are not actually required by physical necessity to follow the course predicted by its modern prophets of doom. But I think the appropriate followup to this understanding of history is that things, broadly speaking, don’t just happen. History is experienced in the active voice, not the passive, and people doing things now is what can shape the kind of future we get. In as much as the Internet was coopted by capitalism and turned into its present form, that should be understood as a consequence of decisions people made at the time. We can understand the reasons for those decisions and why they didn’t choose differently to carry us down alternate paths, but that should not deny their agency, lest we lose sight of our own.

        • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          6 hours ago

          According to wikipedia he’s a eugenics enjoyer. Another W for nominative determinism I guess.

          • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
            1·
            2 hours ago

            Explains his gushing over Scott in the intro.

            I still think he makes a lot of good points in that promptfondlers are losing their shit because people aren’t buyin the swill they’re selling.

            In a similar vein, check out this comment on LW.

            [on “starting an independent org to research/verify the claims of embryo selection companies”] I see how it “feels” worth doing, but I don’t think that intuition survives analysis.

            Very few realistic timelines now include the next generation contributing to solving alignment. If we get it wrong, the next generation’s capabilities are irrelevant, and if we get it right, they’re still probably irrelevant. I feel like these sorts of projects imply not believing in ASI. This is standard for most of the world, but I am puzzled how LessWrong regulars could still coherently hold that view.

            https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hhbibJGt2aQqKJLb7/shortform-1?commentId=25HfwcGxC3Gxy9sHi

            So belieiving in the inevitable coming of the robot god is dogma on LW now. This is a cult.