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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Science writer Philip Ball observes,
Just watched Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) say “We believe as an industry… that within 3-5 years we’ll have AGI, which can be defined as a system that is as smart as [big deal voice] the smartest mathematician, physicist, [lesser deal voice] artist, writer, thinker, politician … I call this the San Francisco consensus, because everyone who believes this is in San Francisco… Within the next year or two, this foundation gets locked in, and we’re not going to stop it. It gets much more interesting after that…There will be computers that are smarter than the sum of humans”
“Everyone who believes this is in San Francisco” approaches “the female orgasm is a myth” levels of self-own.
OT: Todays homily had some anti-AI points and I felt very cheered by it. Its one thing to hear you guys, but in person is a treat.
People might not be aware but places like FT seem to really dislike the techbro people
FT Alphaville is the bloggy section of FT, it’s where the writers let rip
Know it was a blog, so I meant my post as a bit of a joke, as this isn’t any proof of a general FT hate. (but like all jokes, it isn’t just a full joke, as I have noticed that a lot of financial media like FT (there is also a dutch tv show for example) randomly can be a lot more pro ‘leftwing’ financial stances (I mean the more left-liberal/socdem ones, not full blown fully automated gay luxury space communism) than you would expect (This is also a bit of a blindspot for a lot of more online leftwingers).
This is the kind of quality journalism that I need more of in my life. Also I learned a surprising amount about olive oil, which means it’s more useful than anything else Sam Altman has been involved in as far as I can tell.
A minor controversy over the Touhou 20 demo containing generative AI background textures has been making the rounds on the weeaboo parts of social media:
https://www.reddit.com/r/touhou/comments/1kf4h6e/touhou_20_spellcard_backgrounds_might_be/
https://imgur.com/a/curious-th20-textures-xq8mm5i
I have made it my whole life without really figuring out what Touhou is all about, but it seems like at least the English fandom isn’t really a fan of generative AI. A lot of them disappointed (or hoping it was an accident due to using stock art websites). Touhou 19 had an arguably anti-AI afterword.
Edit: some more (kinda confusing) details https://bsky.app/profile/richardeffendi.bsky.social/post/3lorvs4jfps2e
New piece from Brian Merchant: Four bad AI futures arrived this week, taking a listicle-ish approach to some of the horrific things AI has unleashed upon us.