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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
fuckin. when did Mozilla’s twitter feed turn into wall to fucking wall AI spam https://x.com/mozilla
Oh, and I just saw this: https://mastodon.social/@stevetex/113162099798398758
they’re really speedrunning this downslide, huh
fucking Mozilla really is going all in on this whole “you can’t trust AI, except when we and our business partners do it” openwashing thing completely unaware of how it looks, huh? like, they’ve pushed AI so hard and violated so much community trust in the process that I can’t imagine this is doing anything but costing them their remaining donors.
who is the investor who pushed Mozilla this hard? where the fuck is this coming from?
all their hiring is AI too
haven’t really had the headspace to dig into this but one of my hypotheticals about how this could come to pass is “not enough counter-friction left”. foundations of the guess are: years of ill-advised products, constant killing of worthwhile projects, creep of bayfucker mentality. that shape of thing
I recall seeing people ringing alarm bells about moz ceo pay like 3~4y ago
not that the above guess eliminates the thing you’re pointing to, mind you. I agree that this drive has to be coming from somewhere. my stuff was more coming at it from the “why has this suddenly accelerated so much” angle
Via Timnit Gebru’s mastodon, I just learned that Emily Bender (both of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots fame) has a podcast: “Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.” Looking forward to checking it out tomorrow at the gym!
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes
Summary: Artificial Intelligence has too much hype. In this podcast, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation. They’re joined by special guests and talk about everything, from machine consciousness to science fiction, to political economy to art made by machines.
I literally just sat down with coffee to check if the new stubsack needs to be made
brava
there’s a Trade Secret I could tell you! (the cross-post or view source buttons, with appropriate mini trimming)
Screwing up the night sky: not just for SpaceX anymore! Texas Startup Keeps Launching These Obnoxiously Large Satellites—and the Worst Is Yet to Come.
Thursday’s launch saw the first commercial satellites in orbit, and AST SpaceMobile wants to build a constellation of more than 100 satellites. On its own, one satellite is bright enough to mess with observations of the cosmos.
BlueWalker 3 appeared as bright as two of the ten brightest stars in the night sky, Procyon and Achernar, through the lenses of different telescopes, according to a Nature study published in October 2023.
I get why 5G in remote areas would be neat. But surely there are other (more expensive?) ways to achieve similar-ish safety / rescue / navigation / rural broadband sorts results without cluttering the sky or being all hyper-capitalistic about it. Not at all my area though.
Behind the Bastards is starting a series about Yarvin today. Always appreciate it when they wander into our bailiwick!
Also means we’re likely to have a better jumping on point to explain these people to those who aren’t already here. Hope he does one on Yud and friends in the not too distant future.
They did do one on Yud, it’s hard to find and has an annoying amount of side chatter but it’s a pretty solid breakdown of the dude.
The episode is mentioned here: https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/rationalist-harry-potter-and-the
But I can no longer find it on YouTube.
Their episode on Rudolph Steiner was great when explaining to the grandparents why we had to pull our kids out of a Waldorf kindergarten asap. Funny how so many things fall into the trap of “It can’t be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong.”
Also, big L for me on due diligence. I thought outdoor classrooms would be good for our fellow ADHD enjoyer; nope.
They did come up in the Tech Bros Have Built a Cult Around AI episode.