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)
hmm, I meant to link that when I saw it, guess I forgot. whoops :D
but yeah, entirely unsurprising from the guy who literally started by harvesting a pile of data and then building a commercial service off it. facebook and parentco should be ended, his assets taken for public good
fix the year! we’re back in the present! out of the time traveling cybertruck!
Tried to get out, door cut my leg off. Now I have to go back to the future to get it reattached.
I saw this over the weekend and the title itself is rather lovely, but even more hilariously it’s from the atlantic
evidence of wider continued rising of the tide against saltman’s bullshit grows
Was thinking about this over the weekend and it suddenly struck me that saltman and his fellow podcasting bros (thank you, TSMC execs) are the modern equivalent of the guys in academic posts who’d describe themselves using titles like “futurist” and spent their time turning out papers that got them interviewed on telly, inspired other academics with too much spare time to write their own takes on it and get interviewed on TV as well, maybe write a book and get an adoring profile in WIRED, that sort of thing. Maybe they’d have a sideline in cyberpunk fiction or be part of a group that hung around in Berkeley making languid proclamations about how cyberspace would be the end of all laws and stuff like that. They were the first hype men of tech – didn’t actually do very much themselves but gave other people ideas. Certainly loved the sound of their own voices and adored the attention. But they were very clear that these were ideas to hang stuff off in the future, not the present.
Nobody was dumb enough to actually take their stuff at face value as something they should immediately throw huge amounts of money at to make them reality. This started to blur during the period when Negroponte was really hustling and everything the MIT Media Lab squirted out was treated like the second coming. It blurred further when tech companies started employing people to act as hype men who had job titles like “Chief Visionary”. These guys could take the ideas coming from the nerdy engineers and turn them into excited press releases that would get the top brass excited into giving them more headcount to work on it. Type specimen: Shingy (formerly of AOL)
Today, that circlejerk (futurists - journalism - readers - companies - investors) has collapsed into a line with two points. Someone like Altman shows up with a barely-proof-of-concept idea but is able to hype it directly to VCs who have too much money and no imagination and make decisions based entirely on FOMO. So Altman appears, gets showered with cash, then as he’s being showered with cash and hyping for all it’s worth other tech companies and VCs jump on the FOMO wagon and pour cash into it as well and… we get to today. Not so much a circlejerk as a reacharound. The sanity filter of open discussion and decent tech journalism between blue-sky ideas and billions of dollars of cash has been removed completely.
The most recent bubbles - cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs, LLMs… none of these would have progressed much beyond a few academic papers, maybe a PoC and some excited cyberpunk mailing list traffic until about 15 years ago. The computing power to do them was easily available, it’s just that people would have asked “What is this for?” and “Why is it better?”. It’s what happens when you stop using academia (generally a fairly sceptical community) as an ideas factory and start using coked-up Stanford grads who’ve spent their entire university career being constantly told how special and important they are.
Result: massive waste of talent which could be used on genuinely innovative and society-improving ideas, stifling of said genuinely good ideas as “a startup” now has to mean $10m in seed capital and “graduating” from an incubator rather than a couple of people coding in an apartment, billions of dollars firehosed off a cliff for no good reason, the environment being set on fire, and society is being made incrementally worse and not better.
How fucking depressing. Capitalism, you suck.
(full disclosure: I’ve had dinner with a couple of top-tier Cyberpunk Luminaries in the US and one of them was pretty much the most annoying, self-satisfied “I Am Very Clever And Will Talk Loudly” person I’ve ever met. I now know what it feels like to be mansplained at having had things like basic facts about the country I was then living in and the European Union explained to me incorrectly.)
evidence of wider continued rising of the tide against saltman’s bullshit grows
Precisely when that rising tide will drown Altman I’m not sure, but I feel safe in saying it’ll probably drown the rest of the AI industry (and potentially “AI” as a concept) as well - Altman is pretty much the face of this AI bubble, after all.
The rising tide was likely also helped along by OpenAI going fully for-profit, which shattered the humanitarian guise it spent the last decade or so building, and, to quote myself, “given the true believers reason to believe [Altman would] commit omnicide-via-spicy-autocomplete for a quick buck”.
Proton continuing to do pointlessly stupid and self-destructive things:
https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/113257047424000919
They’re basically admitting they didn’t pay an influencer to spread misinformation about public wifi in order to sell VPN products, they just stole her likeness, used her photo, and attributed completely made up quote to her.
But it was a joke guys! We did a satire! I’m totally certain I know what satire is!
The logical conclusion of normalizing “Social Media Manager” as a role in companies is that as they get better at their jobs and become more believable, the average corporate communication will trend towards 13-year old edgy shitposter. God I feel old.
I really think that Naomi Klein pointing out the brand being the product created a wave of tech entrepreneurs who reacted by making the user experience the product and now we’re seeing how bad they are at the most basic brand maintenance.
speaking of the Godot engine, here’s a layered sneer from the Cruelty Squad developer (via Mastodon):
image description
a post from Consumer Softproducts, the studio behind Cruelty Squad:
weve read the room and have now successfully removed AI from cruelty squad. each enemy is now controlled in almost real time by an employee in a low labor cost country
and also speaking of Godot — does anyone doing game dev right now have a good source for placeholder assets? I just finished all the introductory tutorials for the engine and now I want to flex what I’ve learned a bit
Itch and Kenney have good ones:
https://itch.io/game-assets/free
https://kenney.nl/assets (all CC0)
Synty also has a nice placeholder pack for $7. The post-it notes are kind of adorable:
https://syntystore.com/products/polygon-prototype-pack
I don’t think most of these are made for Godot, so you may have to mess around with import settings or set up tilesets/materials yourself
nice! it seems like Kenney’s a pretty popular choice for this kind of thing. I’m kinda tempted to grab their Asset Forge tool to quickly bang out some lo-fi semi-custom models, but I don’t know how its workflow looks for animations and materials. in the worst case, maybe it’ll save me from half of the spiral learning curve that is Blender?
the synty pack looks really good! at a glance it seems like their assets come rigged for Unity — maybe there’s a converter that’ll allow me to convert that rigging into the format Godot’s animation system wants