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.
Tangentially related. In 1878, some asshole exhumed 25 human skulls from an abandoned cemetery in far Northern Sweden and took them to Helsinki, where he and his buddies measured them to “prove” that people from the region were less advanced.
Now the skulls are finally being re-interred thanks to pressure from the local community.
Here’s a background on the cemetery and the skull-snatching (in Swedish):
https://kulturmiljonorrbotten.com/2023/09/29/akamella-odekyrkogard/
OT: since we’ve occasionally featured a music thread and such, any interest in a music sub? it could be pair well with this, the awful pub.
the awful pub sub[0], if you will
this thought brought to you by prior threads as well as this that I’m listening to in late-afternoon 26C weather
[0] you know I had to, I couldn’t not
I would definitely make lots of extremely boring posts about old bands in a music sub. Hmmm, maybe it would be a bad idea…
On the topic of music, also linked here before is https://youtube.com/@Tantacrul
He doesn’t mention genAI, but his video essays attack many of the common arguments, even the more awful anti-AI ones. I particularly like his demonstration in which the listener predicts what follows a chord, or melodic, sequence and subverting the expectation leads to more interesting music; Next-token predictors are completely orthogonal to this characteristic.
For the not awful music: https://wangleline.bandcamp.com/album/disaster-field A pretty good idm album.
In other news, someone caught a former NFT artist using AI. Not shocked in the slightest an NFT grifter jumped on the AI train.
Witnessed an AI doomer freaking out over a16z trying to deep-six SB1047.
Seems like the “AI doom” criti-hype is starting to become a bit of an albatross around the industry’s neck.
https://digitaldemocracy.calmatters.org/bills/ca_202320240sb1047
Have a AI regulation committee and also give the committee their own hardware so that they can use that hardware to regulate the other hardware. Maybe.
They shriek, endlessly, about their outgroups being cults while blocking anybody who disagrees with them (the actual cultiest thing you can do)
blocking anybody who disagrees with them (the actual cultiest thing you can do)
(the actual cultiest thing you can do)
the texture of a blade of grass is slightly rough. slightly ragged. impossible to describe to someone who has never experienced it
Latest from Cyberstuck: Just see for yourself. I… I have no words.
Update: I may have been bamboozled by computer imagery. Someone call Captain Disillusion.
Oh god it’s real? I saw pictures and there was a lot of “it’s AI” claims which I kind of hoped were true.
Not if it is based on that famously bad drawing of musk. Anyway, the way the face seems to look at you constantly and then subtlety doesn’t and the weird glossy moistness of the statue makes me think it is AI.
