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.)
Robert Evans on Ziz and Rationalism:
https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social/post/3ljmhpfdoic2h
https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social/post/3ljmkrpraxk2h
If I had Bluesky access on my phone, I’d be dropping so much lore in that thread. As a public service. And because I am stuck on a slow train.
New ultimate grift dropped, Ilya Sutskever gets $2B in VC funding, promises his company won’t release anything until ASI is achieved internally.
In other news, a piece from Paris Marx came to my attention, titled “We need an international alliance against the US and its tech industry”. Personally gonna point to a specific paragraph which caught my eye:
The only country to effectively challenge [US] dominance is China, in large part because it rejected US assertions about the internet. The Great Firewall, often solely pegged as an act of censorship, was an important economic policy to protect local competitors until they could reach the scale and develop the technical foundations to properly compete with their American peers. In other industries, it’s long been recognized that trade barriers were an important tool — such that a declining United States is now bringing in its own with the view they’re essential to projects its tech companies and other industries.
I will say, it does strike me as telling that Paris was able to present the unofficial mascot of Chinese censorship this way without getting any backlash.
If Paris Marx is the little domino that causes total collapse of US hegemony, I’ll join the patreon at the highest tier forever
New piece from Techdirt: Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)
Strongly recommended reading overall, and strongly recommended you check out Techdirt - they’ve been doing some pretty damn good reporting on the current shitshow we’re living through.
I’ve read Masnick for over 20 years and he’s never learnt to write coherently. At least this one isn’t blaming Europe.
another cameo appearance in the TechTakes universe from George Hotz with this rich vein of sneerable material: The Demoralization is just Beginning
wowee where to even start here? this is basically just another fucking neoreactionary screed. as usual, some of the issues identified in the piece are legitimate concerns:
Wanna each start a business, pass dollars back and forth over and over again, and drive both our revenues super high? Sure, we don’t produce anything, but we have companies with high revenues and we can raise money based on those revenues…
… nothing I saw in Silicon Valley made any sense. I’m not going to go into the personal stories, but I just had an underlying assumption that the goal was growth and value production. It isn’t. It’s self licking ice cream cone scams, and any growth or value is incidental to that.
yet, when it comes to engaging with this issues, the analysis presented is completely detached from reality and void of any evidence of more than a doze seconds of thought. his vision for the future of America is not one that
kicks the can further down the road of poverty, basically embraces socialism, is stagnant, is stale, is a museum
but one that instead
attempt[s] to maintain an empire.
how you may ask?
An empire has to compete on its merits. There’s two simple steps to restore american greatness:
-
Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value. Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China?
-
Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto), and bring major crackdowns to finance to tie it to real world value. Trading is not a job. Passive income is not a thing. Instead, go produce something real and exchange it for gold.
sadly, Hotz isn’t exactly optimistic that the great american empire will be restored, for one simple reason:
[the] people haven’t been demoralized enough yet
an empire has to compete on its merits
-
The genocide understander has logged on! Steven Pinker bluechecks thusly:
Having plotted many graphs on “war” and “genocide” in my two books on violence, I closely tracked the definitions, and it’s utterly clear that the war in Gaza is a war (e.g., the Uppsala Conflict Program, the gold standard, classifies the Gaza conflict as an “internal armed conflict,” i.e., war, not “one-sided violence,” i.e., genocide).
You guys! It’s totes not genocide if it happens during a war!!
Also, “Having plotted many graphs” lolz.
Pinker tries not to be a total caricature of himself challenge: profoundly impossible
specifically this caricature:
incredible, where is this from?
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/08/comic-steven-pinker-certified-grief-counselor
I don’t keep this link on hand, I just google “pinker comic” and find it.
It is from 2018 (also pre Nathans capitalist class consciousness reveal arc iirc) wonder what Pinker actually said during covid.
Early covid (july 2020) interview:
charitable take: he has the good sense to not make any major claims about the pandemic, other than to speculate that it would worsen his go-to metric of “extreme poverty”, which is… fine, i guess.
neutral take: nothing extraordinarily damning other than his usual takes.
uncharitable: this is of course early pandemic, so maybe pinker hasn’t found the angle to sell his normal shit with.
Side note: does pinker ever wonder about why extreme poverty has been reduced? I can’t imagine he thinks it’s anything other than liberal democracy and US foreign interference, when the real answer is like, China, a country that Pinker definitely believes is counter to said liberal democracy and the US, continuing to develop economically. Basically i want to him to squirm as he tries and fails to resolve the cognitive dissonance.
Jewish people fought back in the ghettos, nazis didnt do a genocide! Ghandi, by not fighting back tricked the Brits into doing a genocide.
What a fucked up broken classification.
Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV: “This is genocide! The systematic extermination of all life on Arrakis!”
Pinker emerges from a sietch water basin “Achtually, while using the juice of Sapho I shape rotated many graphs and …”
got a question (brought on by this). anyone here know if zitron’s talked about his history of how he got to where he is atm wrt tech companies?
there’s something that’s often bothered me about some of his commentary. an example I could point to: some of the things that he comments on and “doesn’t seem to get” (and has stated so) are … not quite mysteries of the universe, just some specifics in dysfunction in the industry. but those things one could understand by, y’know, asking around a bit. (so in this example, I dunno if that’s 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 what’s highlighted in thread do leave open the possibility of other nonsense too
I don’t 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 he’s 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 “The first robot lawyer.”
It’s 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 it’s 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 can’t be helping DoNotPay’s 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, I’m not clairvoyant.
It’s clear that he’s 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 Doctorow’s 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 I’ve 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 I’ve been managing to read them all the way through.
roughly this is where my thinking on it is too. and there’s a chance that because of such clients is why he hates this shit now as he does.
the guy’s 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 we’re 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 “AI Companion” after Jun/2023 (after it was added to EZPR’s client list).
It’s entirely possible they simply consulted Ed, and then pivoted away, and Ed doesn’t 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)
It’s an archive, so he can’t really update that.
EZ is a PR person, and definitely has a PR person vibe. I don’t know what that poster’s deal is, and I would not accuse Ed of being an AI bro. That post kind of has “haters gonna hate” vibes
he started writing about this stuff and it struck a chord with people
Ezra Klein is the biggest mark on earth. His newest podcast description starts with:
Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President Trump’s term, they tell me. We’re not ready.
Oh, that’s what the researchers tell you? Cool cool, no need to hedge any further than that, they’re experts after all.
Has Klezra Ein ever used the term “useful idiot”?
To be fair, you have to have a really high IQ to understand why my ouija board writing " A " " S " " S " is not an existential risk. Imo, this shit about AI escaping just doesn’t have the same impact on me after watching Claude’s reasoning model fail to escape from Mt Moon for 60 hours.
Is this water running over the land or water running over the barricade?
To engage with his metaphor, this water is dripping slowly through a purpose dug canal by people that claim they are trying to show the danger of the dikes collapsing but are actually serving as the hype arm for people that claim they can turn a small pond into a hydroelectric power source for an entire nation.
Looking at the details of “safety evaluations”, it always comes down to them directly prompting the LLM and baby-step walking it through the desired outcome with lots of interpretation to show even the faintest traces of rudiments of anything that looks like deception or manipulation or escaping the box. Of course, the doomers will take anything that confirms their existing ideas, so it gets treated as alarming evidence of deception or whatever property they want to anthropomorphize into the LLM to make it seem more threatening.
Do these people realise that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy? Social media posts are in the training data, so the more they write their spicy autocorrect fanfics, the higher the chances that such replies are generated by the slop machine.
i think yud at some point claimed this (preventing the robot devil from developing alignment countermeasures) as a reason his EA bankrolled think tanks don’t really publish any papers, but my brain is too spongy to currently verify, as it was probably just some tweet.
To be fair, you have to have a really high IQ to understand why my ouija board writing " A " " S " " S " is not an existential risk.
Pretty sure this is a sign from digital jesus to do a racism, lest the basilisk eats my tarnished soul.
New piece from Brian Merchant, focusing on Musk’s double-tapping of 18F. In lieu of going deep into the article, here’s my personal sidenote:
I’ve touched on this before, but I fully expect that the coming years will deal a massive blow to tech’s public image, expecting them to be viewed as “incompetent fools at best and unrepentant fascists at worst” - and with the wanton carnage DOGE is causing (and indirectly crediting to AI), I expect Musk’s governmental antics will deal plenty of damage on its own.
18F’s demise in particular will probably also deal a blow on its own - 18F was “a diverse team staffed by people of color and LGBTQ workers, and publicly pushed for humane and inclusive policies”, as Merchant put it, and its demise will likely be seen as another sign of tech revealing its nature as a Nazi bar.
