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)
Starting off this Stubsack with a solid essay I ran across: Don’t expect the tech platforms to help us this time.
A bit of an aside, but how did everyone decide to use the exact phrase “decisive victory” when congratulating president elect Trump? It keeps jumping out to me and I find it kind of weird. It has almost a militaristic tone.
IMO, coordinated media strategy. you can send all the people you want to congratulate you a prebaked message or tweet or whatever, saves them the trouble of writing something themselves. That or copy paste
I think that particular talking point also serves an exculpatory purpose: “If it was only a razor-thin victory I might understand being angry with me, but see it’s a decisive victory. He has the mandate of heaven of the people (this is a Trumpian victory! not a Democrat failure!) ! It would be wrong not to congratulate him!”
Maybe it’s one of those cliches like “bus plunge”
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 here in Canada our prime minister (who’s no fan of Trump) used the word “decisive” too. I think at least some people are using the word because they know it’s what he wants to hear. It makes my skin crawl, but I can’t argue there isn’t a logic in trying to maintain some power over him with flattery
The sheer speed and consistency with which America’s institutions have rolled over if not enabled this kind of authoritarianism once it was backed up by fascist populism has been probably the most disheartening element of this whole election cycle. We’ve seen the NYT’s quiet but inescapable embrace of transphobia and the transformation of the megacorporations fully into vessels for the personal interest of the shareholding/investing/billionaire class. The judiciary was pretty openly packed with loyalists during the first term, and the senate has been lost for, in retrospect, a very long time. It just seems like they’ve found the right buttons to push to make every single organization that was theoretically supposed to protect us from this kind of regime either stand aside or actively embrace it.
I feel like there are echoes of so much of what we talk about here that come into play here. It’s the disastrous consequences of the rot economy and shareholder supremacy not just undermining the tools that could have otherwise helped organize against this but also destroyed even the vague cultural distinction between the political interests of a company and those of its largest shareholders. It’s neoliberalism reflecting the rationalist’s inability to acknowledge that values are not downstream from facts along with the growing influence of the exact illiberal ideologues that we’ve tracked for years. I just don’t feel like any of that recognition translates into concrete actions I can take to try and keep the people in my life (or even in this community) safe, or at least safer.
Also it isn’t? 50.2% to 48.1% of votes is not decisive in any sensible meaning of the word?
If you account for the turnout (around 60%) it means 30% voted for Trump and 28.9% for Harris, so “none of those” won decisively with 40%!
Losing every swing state and failing to even win the consolation trophy of the popular vote after even Hillary fucking Clinton managed that much is something I’d call getting your ass handed to you. The US election system is terrible, but it’s the game they were playing and Trump won hands down.
Also, not that it’s the point but I have to note that technically most election victories are decisive, in the sense that they resolve the winner with little to no ambiguity (which is usually the case, even when the margin is narrow). In that sense, the only way Trump’s victory is not decisive is if you contest the legitimacy of the whole election.
More election shit, unfortunately. This time it’s hot tea from SRD:
funnily enough I had posted in that thread and some neolib guy enthusiastically recommended tracingwoodgrains on David Gerard (?!) in my replies
How cute, look at that wild rat trying to appear neutral and unbiased and not-at-all a rat and Just Leaving This Here for you to read where “this” refers to the entire fucking canon of rationalist writings.
it’s so practiced too — “so I guess you could read Wikipedia but also! this tracingwoodgrains guy might have some points worth considering!” and from there you’re meant to ping-pong off the Wikipedia article into trace’s long-winded literal horseshit and the rest of the inane crap that’s linked after that, til you can no longer remember the non-rationalist sources you’ve read because your mind’s overwhelmed with the worst shit ever written, but you feel like you thoroughly researched both sides (and that’s only part of why centrism is a fucking trap)
how do I know? because this:
finally, i’m going to link to some posts from slatestarcodex and astral codex ten, its sucessor blog, some classic ones just to give you a feel for what people appreciate about it at its best
is exactly how Joe Rogan fans get you listening to his stupid shit daily, til you’re no longer listening to his podcast (supposedly) “at its best” and instead you’re just listening to an overwhelming volume of right-wing horseshit with an occasional nod to both sides centrism so you don’t feel your world get smaller and darker as you embrace fascism
Should’ve probably posted this earlier, but fuck it: South Korea’s ‘4B’ Movement Goes Viral in US After Trump Elected
“4B” is shorthand for a South Korean movement in which women refuse to engage in heterosexual marriage, childbirth, dating, or sex with men. It comes from the words bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, and bisekseu, all of which start with a Korean prefix for “no.” It originated in 2019 in response to a culture that women felt was patriarchal beyond repair, and has since gained some traction in other countries.
Also, fuck it, quick sidenote:
This is mostly gut instinct, like most of the Trump predictions I’ve made, but I’m expecting a spike in full-blown misandry over Trump’s term. Mainly because Trump managed to win over Gen Z men this election, and because the Trump administration is almost certainly going to town on abortion/women’s rights.
a spike in full-blown misandry
Misandry as in something equal to misogyny? If so, then I have to disagree, since men have historically been absolute pieces of shit towards women throughout history and misandry has never really manifested significantly.
E: I noticed I have a downvote. Hello to our sole MRA lurker!
Misandry as a concrete power structure that advantages women and disadvantages men? Unlikely, though with the likely resurgence of active patriarchy we should expect to see the negative consequences this has for men, especially non-normative men. Patriarchal masculinity is a game that necessarily has more losers than winners. I’d go so far as to say that some of the more politically-minded incels and MRAs are going to get even louder because while they blame feminism the actual source of the problems they’re feeling is patriarchy.
Misandry as a vague cultural meme about men being terrible and the friction that this causes, particularly for men struggling to find a healthy way to exist under patriarchal masculinity as discussed above? Very likely. At the same time while this won’t feel good for men it’s worth noting that these men are going to be complaining about losing a game where women are game pieces rather than players, which is pretty crappy. Like a king complaining to a pawn about how cruel it is to only move one square at a time without acknowledging that the entire game revolves around them.
I actually have no idea how to navigate this in a healthy way since I’ve definitely been on the losing end of patriarchal masculinity in ways that while deeply hurtful are very different in kind even if not in scope from the ways that system hurts women.
Misandry as a vague cultural meme about men being terrible and the friction that this causes, particularly for men struggling to find a healthy way to exist under patriarchal masculinity as discussed above?
Looking back, that’s definitely the kind of thing I was expecting to spike. I was just too deeply peeved about vaguely gestures at everything to see that clearly.
I wasn’t going to explain my downvote, but it’s been a few days and apparently everybody here is thinking about MRAs when there’s more at stake.
I see Nixon in Trump: somebody who starts and prolongs wars for their own political gain. Of my three uncles who qualified to go to Vietnam, one was permanently disabled during basic training, one didn’t come back home, and one fell apart before I was born. I had to “voluntarily” register as a potential servicemember in order to access various standard government services as a young man in the 2000s, while the USA was invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Under a sufficiently fascist government, the USA has shown itself capable of sending its men to death. This system is explicitly misandrist; only men are required to register and only my uncles suffered this hate.
Misandry isn’t equal and opposite to misogyny. Our society was never obligated to hate men and women in ways that are nicely symmetric and amenable to analysis; indeed, critical theory suggests that society deliberately structures itself to obfuscate its hate.
Trump managed to win over Gen Z men
…in the sense that more Gen Z men voted for him than in the last election. I am seeing this spin a lot and it honestly seems like a deliberate scapegoating ploy.
The exit poll stats seem to tell a different story.
Data from NBC News considering “key states” (apparently Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin)
Yes, young men favored Trump. So did all other men (and even Gen X women, if narrowly). Among both genders included in the data, Gen Z was the least likely to vote for Trump and the most likely to vote for Harris.
Granted, these stats are only from the aforementioned states and can’t represent the full picture, but they are the only relevant statistics I have seen posted on the matter and the best data I could quickly find. If anyone can show me the data that the darn kids these days are to blame, I’d like to see sime data.
Serious data might not be available for months. For comparison, the Pew Research Center didn’t come out with their numbers for the 2020 election until June 2021. Who knows? The country might burn down before next summer.
They made this terrible thing look like a train
There's something sweet in the air what I can't say
Would I like a drink to calm the brain?
Oh, please stay in the chairs
But oh, God
I don't wanna go to Mars
What kind of brainwashed idiot does?
It's all a lab rat life in jars
They branded the dream of ages
I don't wanna go to Mars
Be with me here and return to dust
– White Lies, I Don’t Want To Go To Mars, 2022
I remember really liking it when I heard it around first release. it holds up.
You ever have that moment where you hear about a song and only then realize that you had liked 2 or 3 from the same band from radio or recommendations over the years without connecting that it was the same group? Because yeah that just hit me.
this is cool. Considering their first album was all songs about accepting death I assume they’re not fans of anything tescreal adjacent
I love that album, and i’ll never forget when I was dating someone who was a classical pianist, the type that closes their eyes and sways their head when listening to classical, and when I put that album on it was a few notes into the first song and she made this tortured face and said “no, no, no! those chord progressions are so depressing!” It was so strange to me to hear that, but you know how you just know when someone knows what they are talking about and she was sure it had hit some kind of melancholy brown note.
Still… that era of interpol and white lies was great. That shit made me happy
is this a possible thing: all the AI assistant stuff being forced onto us in the next gen hardware is gonna need significant computing power bumps to support it, is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices that could time very well with an excessive skeuomorphic UI design response to the decade of bland flatness we’ve endured that’s gonna cook the cpus on the devices of everyone else?
to the computing side, and with the proviso that in my own estimation of my skills I am at best slightly less than “dangerously clueless”: unfortunately not as much as may be desired because the kind of chips being added are fairly specialised silicon
it’s not impossible that people may find other uses for it over time but to the best of my knowledge as it stands right now much of this shit is dead weight the moment this bubble pops
(I don’t think it will all go entirely away; there are some ML uses that are not complete trash. but that’s a long different arc)
I’m not sure I follow the skeu side of your comment?
that;s exactly the catch I was hoping wouldn’t be the case. When the AI shit is abandoned, is the hardware useful for regular stuff…
So, from what you’re saying: Generative AI is fucking up in the past, present, and future
My baseline understanding is that “NPUs,” as such, are vector accelerators with perhaps lower precision and definitely lower peak TDP. I say this because much of the incremental ML research I’ve skimmed over seems to be around getting away with lower precision, dropping down to FP8 or even FP4 from FP16 when they can get away with it.
I’m still confused as to why and how this is an acceptable tradeoff to firing up an iGPU with precise power/TDP stepping. Perhaps one of those situations where the power budget and latency to fire up the whole GPU block or burst it to max power ends up costing as much as the actual calculation. I think for purposes of this discussion, we also need a source that sheds light on the architectural differences between NPUs and GPU shader/execution units.
@istewart @froztbyte some of this stuff is not easy to reuse for other purposes because of the drivers and APIs.
The ongoing trend of “flat UI” is largely not due to processing power though. Even inexpensive computers have CPUs and GPUs that could push very fancy graphics without problems, see what the same machines can do in game graphics (and I don’t mean high-end gaming, I mean the kind of simple gaming that can run on a low-end laptop these days). Some of the early GUIs in the 1980s had “flat design” due to performance limitations, but that went away in the 1990s. Today it could still be a reason in some embedded system scenarios with simple microcontrollers, but not in a desktop or laptop computer, and also not in smartphones or tablets.
The reason we have the bland flat design is the same why we still have things like “all surfaces are ugly glossy black plastic” (luckily this one is on its way out) or “war on physical buttons” aka “touchscreens everywhere”… it’s simply a design trend.
@nightsky “touchscreens everywhere” isn’t an aesthetic choice, it’s a cost-of-goods choice: which adds more to the cost of a physical product, a bunch of bespoke embossed buttons/keys for specific tasks, or a single mass-produced touchscreen?
It’s the same reason modern electronics uses embedded microcontrollers rather than actual properly designed task-specific gate arrays.
I hear you, but I didn’t say flat ui is due to processing power. My line of thought is that a sudden bump in available processing power might prompt designers to feel that elaborate uis are fine now because despite flat ui not being an efficiency thing, it is definitely perceived as one by the average designer who doesn’t know how much of the css used to render it is generated client-side via js
is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices
Haha, no. Flat UI was done for reasons of fashion, not efficiency. UI will always expand to consume the available memory and compute, regardless of how boring it looks. Exhibit A: Electron!
yeah but I didn’t say that flat ui was created for efficiency. Any efficiency of a flat ui is cancelled out by the excesses of client-side JS. I know it is fashion, I was there. But I also know that there is a sense that it is efficient by the designers that design with it.
