Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
This display of a man hoping AI reclaims the awe in technology he once felt as a 17 year-old:
Sam Altman is the snake oil salesman who might restore Silicon Valley to its former glory https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2024/06/25/opinion-ai-altman-silicon-valley-revival/
I’ve had this open in a background tab, reading it in pieces as time allows, and I only just noticed one of it exhibits one of the things I like noticing about various publishers’ system fucking up: a lurking page title before a post-publish edit
the page title as it is in my browser right now: Opinion | AI boom led by antihero Altman is reviving Valley dreams. the page title as it displays in the content area: Opinion \n Sam Altman is the snake oil salesman who might restore Silicon Valley to its former glory.
the url slug also seems to be mostly the former - most of these renames on various publishing platforms seem to do that (keep the original slug instead of a rewrite+redirect)
can’t make direct guesses as to the exact reason why this one was updated whenever it was, but I expect public perception/reception might’ve been part of that?
it is also something that’s been of passive interest to me over some years: things as published often shift underfoot, and the time at which someone reads something then shares on and then someone else reads … there might be quite a substantive difference in the contents of such things at the times. this ranges from the benign (inserting late-received comments, errata, etc), to a complete contextual/content rework. I’ve often thought that there’s a possibly for a really interesting part project there…
unironically saying “the sharing economy” in the year of our lord 2024 is… certainly a choice
also
God knows we old-timers tried to be cynical about ChatGPT, pedantically insisting that AI was actually just machine learning and that Altman’s new toy was nothing but cheap mimicry. But the rest of the world knew better
idk dude I’ve talked to the rest of the world about this and most of them actually seem to dislike this technology, it seems like maybe you didn’t actually try very hard to be cynical
Its former* superfund glory.
*Oh wait https://mastodon.social/@ashleygjovik/112668309100333232/
