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 so 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, and happy 4th July in advance.)
A couple of bits of nice ai news recently, for anyone who hasn’t come across them already:
Bosses Horrified as “AI Native” College Graduates Hit the Workplace
I can’t help thinking that, funny as this is, the people who are really going to the be worst off here are a bunch of new grads with a load of debt and an education that has made them less able to do anything at all. They’re not all going to be grifters, after all.
Meta's Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected
This is brilliant. They’re making so many mistakes they’re actually having to admit it. It’s amazing how incompetent zuckerberg is… late to every fad he’s tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there.
I’m sure there was a third thing, but I found it yesterday when the site appeared to be down (at least for me) and now I can’t remember it or spot it in my million open tabs.
So not only are STEM graduates (mainly compsci grads) struggling to get jobs as it is, employers are explicitly passing them over for """useless""" humanities degrees instead. I'm not sure whether to laugh at the irony of the situation, or crash out at the fact my own compsci/cybersec degrees may have become a liability.
I’m hoping my own qualifications sufficiently predate the llm era that I’d be safe from that particular filter, so I’ll only have to worry about being too old and/or too expensive.
Your qualifications predate the LLM rot by fucking ages, and your position against them is crystal clear. Given both of those, bypassing that filter should be easy enough.
I'm thinking about going back to school and seeking a manufacturing job because even though I have been doing software professionally for 22 years, the entire industry is fucked by short term thinking and ignoring consequences.
He is the voxday of the billionaire tech bros.
(Voxday is a whitenat far right alt right figure who also does that with every alt right culture war topic. He makes the plausible deniable, undeniable. For example he claimed he was big in the alt right movement and just went out and said 'we want the 14 words').
I’m more familiar with vox day than I’d really like. He hasn’t pivoted from the culture war stuff that he’s known for, but he has branched out into ai music and video these days.
The main thing I knew him for is his failed attempt to hijack the Hugo Awards back in 2015.
(There's a r/HobbyDrama post about the whole debacle, which I recommend checking out)
That is actually an example of what im talking about, he didnt create the sad puppies, he latched on to it and created the rabid puppies. See the weird latching on behavior.
@rook I am immensely proud that some years ago I made a list VD blogged of "ten SF publishing people whose chromed skulls I want as desk ornaments".
It's good to be hated by the *worst* people. And it's totes on brand for him to be filling his empty mind with AI slop.
Not sure if you are aware of the work of the youtuber hbomberguy, but he had a video on some manosphere guys where said 'what is it with these people and skulls' when he noticed that david auroni always had his pet skull in each shot.
Top-tier resume material
Vox Day, the living embodiment of Dashiell Hammett's line, "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter".
HA, and people thought the whole 'AI generation is the tool of fascism' was a joke.
Whilst I try and remember, there’s this older post by blackle mori , a joke about doing undercover data harvesting work for llm companies by pretending to be a teacher and scanning children’s schoolwork.
Which was then followed in the real world by Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI (paywall) because satire is impossible now, I guess? I can’t find out if the plan ever came to anything, though.
It is because they have basically run out of ideas to try, or the ability to see the difference between good and bad ideas in the gold rush. You saw the same with cryptocurrencies, where every joke you made was already a shitcoin somewhere.
Move fast and break things taken as a religious decree.