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)
Two of the major donors pushing to recall the mayor of Oakland, CA are cryptocurrency “executives.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/billionaires-oakland-mayor-sheng-thao-recall
Over the summer, Jesse Pollak, a cryptocurrency investor and executive at Coinbase, launched Abundant Oakland, an advocacy organization that funds “moderate” candidates running in Oakland races. The organization is explicitly linked to similarly named entities in San Francisco and Santa Monica.
Abundant Oakland has a related political action committee, Vibrant Oakland, which, campaign filings show, has received donations from Pollak ($115,000), the Oakland police officers association ($50,000), cryptocurrency executive Konstantin Richter ($60,000), the northern California carpenters regional council ($150,000) and a Pac controlled by Piedmont landlord Chris Moore ($100,000).
Brian Merchant put out a “complete guide to luddite horror films”, which focuses on horror films which directly critique tech in one way or another.
On a personal note, I suspect “luddite horror” (alternatively called “techno-horror”) is probably gonna blow up in popularity pretty soon - between boiling resentment against tech in general, and the impending burst of the AI bubble, I suspect audiences are gonna be hungry as hell for that kinda stuff.
Additionally, I suspect AI as a whole (and likely its supporters) will find itself becoming a pop-culture punchline much the same way NFTs/crypto did. Beyond getting pushed into everyone’s faces whether they liked it or not, public embarrassments like Google’s glue pizza debacle and ChatGPT’s fake cases have already given comedians plenty of material to use, whilst the ongoing slop-nami turned “AI” as a term into a pretty scathing pejorative within the context of creative arts.
I’m just sad Hardware wasn’t mentioned. (Btw, for anybody who needs content warnings, that movie has a big one for the voyeur janitor).
I was just about to ask after Threads.
Cursed .gov link:
TL;DR: Our main characters have bilked a very credulous US State Department. 100 Million tax dollars will now be converted into entropy. There will also be committees.
—What kind of gambling do you usually have here?
—Oh, we got both kinds. We got day trading and betting.
Amazon has a similar cult-y thing going on with its ✨leadership principles✨, but this seems worse.
Didn’t corporations used to use landmark and shit like that?
I feel like Ed is underselling the degree to which this is just how businesses work now. The emphasis on growth mindset is particularly gross because of how it sells the CEOs book, but it’s not unique in trying to find a feel-good vibes-based way to evaluate performance rather than relying on strict metrics that give management less power over their direct reports.
Of course he’s also written at length about the overall problem that this feeds into (organizations run by people with no idea how to make the business do what it does but who can make the number go up for shareholders) but the most unique part of this is the AI integration, which is legitimately horrifying and I feel like the debunk of growth mindset takes some of the sting away.
Has ESR always been antigay or is the latest ‘gays=pedo” spiel new?
New for him, I’d wager, but I think ESR is treading a well-worn path: i.e. a huge weirdo gets himself in trouble but then finds favor with terrible people, and ultimately suffers from audience capture.
ESR went like this after 9/11
@dgerard @o7___o7 He was weird and creepy before that (see his attempts to make the Jargon File say that everyone in hackerdom was just like him), but yeah, hoo boy. Him and the LGF guy were prominent cheerleaders for Dick Cheney’s wilder fever dreams back in the day. The LGF guy got better, ESR didn’t.
@m @dgerard @o7___o7 @techtakes Back in 2007 I was a guest of honour at Penguicon. ESR was there and we got talking. As of 2007 he was all-in on all the insane “Eurabia” conspiracy theories and islamophobia. If you’d taken his word salad and substituted “jews” for “muslims” Julius Streicher would have hired him as a columnist in a split second. (That’s when I added ESR to my list of “people I will not share a platform with”.)
He was somewhat less cray-cray in 2003.
In the very late 90s - so only a year or two after the Good Friday Agreement - he gave a talk in Dublin. The only part I remember was when he went off on his tangent about access to guns being an essential component of a free society and then stood there wondering why he was suddenly being heckled.
I think that might be new levels of shithead for him. E: it was not new for him http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26
Bonus content : https://xcancel.com/esrtweet/status/1852466515519341014#m ‘im not a racist, im an empericist’
Racism is insane; it fixates on superficial characteristics like skin color rather than important ones like IQ and time preference.
I’m sorry, “time preference”? Is this piece of shit referring to Colored People’s Time as a scientific concept or am I missing something?
This is such a cursed tweet ughhhhh
I think that is a reference to the ‘eat 1 cookie now or wait, and get 2 cookies’ childrens thing. Racists refer to it often. (This also means the black eat the 1 cookie kids can’t build empires bla bla bla).
(when I search for the term on youtube, it instantly gave me a video linking it to cultural degeneracy for example. Really annoying you can’t block channels properly. Also the mises institute has a video on it)
Oh cool it’s even worse then!
(This particular study, if there even is a real study, is infuriating because what it’s really measuring is how much you trust a figure of authority to keep their promise. I wonder why black kids would have issues with this!)
Poor hungry kids also more likely to want to eat now than later. Big shocks, clearly this must mean the poor are deficient in some genetic way.
Study finds greedy white children would rather have two fictitious cookies than one real one they can eat.
One weird trick explains venture capital!
racism is insane
…ok…
introducing racism 2
Oh I see
The plot of Seveneves, but worse.
referring to Colored People’s Time
to the what now? What cursed horror beyond my comprehension am I going to learn today?
“Black people are late sometimes” but in a racist way instead of a “Repent, Harlequin” kind of way.
White people are late sometimes too…?
It goes back to the old “steppin fetchit” racist charicature of the lazy black man, usually either enslaved or formerly enslaved depending on when we’re talking.
I recommend looking it up. I believe it’s a term that has been reclaimed by Black people. Obama referenced it as CPT (in response to some other event) in his 2016 WHC dinner speech.
I hope at least CPT does not have daylight’s savings
My enshittification story*: Instagram has been suggesting people for me to follow. It markets them to me by saying “friend X follows this person!” But friend X does not follow this person. Friend X has no tenable connection to this person. Why are you bullshitting me, Zuck? Is the autoplag outflow drain hooked up to Insta?
*orig JP title: 僕のエンシット化ストーリー
LinkedIn cold-emailed me this morning to suggest that I follow Vivek Ramaswamy, who lists his job title as “Founder at Vivek Ramaswamy”
he’s a self-made man, apparently
Gonna change my name to Goldman Sachs and style myself as my own founder.
Vivek “I gave birth to myself” Ramaswamy
Your family wants to see you post on threads bullshit is laughable
Your family wants to see you
Doubt
facebook pulled that shit for many years too, along with the “created” notifications
alllll for the engagement farming, desperate to keep those eyeball KPIs on track
Oh it was for the KPIs? All is forgiven then. /s
right? if only you knew it was for Sacred Advertising Revenue and Good Statistics, you wouldn’t have embarrassed yourself so in public! alas, the dangers of the modern internet
The AI lawsuit’s going to discovery - I expect things are about to heat up massively for the AI industry:
Go home Coursera, you’re drunk.
Want to get even better results with GenAI? The new Google Prompting Essentials course will teach you 5 easy steps to write effective prompts for consistent, useful results.
Note: I had to highlight the text because the email’s text was white-on-white.
Thanks, Google. You know, I used to be pretty good at getting consistent, useful results from your search engine, but the improvements you’ve made to it since the make me feel like I really might need a fucking prompt engineering course to find things on the internet these days. By which I mean something that’ll help you promptly engineer the internet back into a form where search engines work correctly.
Going outside awful’s wheelhouse for a bit:
Logan Paul doxed and harassed a random employee for posting a sign saying Lunchly was recalled
You want my take, the employee in question (who also got a GoFundMe) should sue Logan for defamation - solid case aside, I wanna see that blonde fucker get humbled for once.
I hated seeing that guy just wanting to live his life dragged into weird net drama and pushed under the bus by his company. And wow look at how collected and reasonable he was compared to anyone else in the story.
All Mr. Paul had to do was shut the hell up for once and the world’d still be talking about his moldy cheese bread instead of about his moldy cheese bread and how he bullies and doxes retail workers.
All Fred Meyer had to do is be like “whoops looks like the product recall procedure at that store was vague recollections, we’ll get a policy in place”.
The sole silver lining of this situation is that Logan’s deplorable behaviour probably scared at least a few shops away from stocking Lunchly - not just because of the risk you end up selling some mold-ridden garbage (most likely to kids), but because you risk Logan starting a harassment campaign against you or your store.
Is there a group that more consistently makes category errors than computer scientists? Can we mandate Philosophy 101 as a pre-req to shitting out research papers?
Edit: maybe I need to take a break from Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.
Chat-GPT-TFSD-21guns can have a little anthropomorphism, as a treat.
- Sam Altman, probably
Quick update - Brian Merchant’s list of “luddite horror” films ended up getting picked up by Fast Company:
To repeat a previous point of mine, it seems pretty safe to assume “luddite horror” is gonna become a bit of a trend. To make a specific (if unrelated) prediction, I imagine we’re gonna see AI systems and/or their supporters become pretty popular villains in the future - the AI bubble’s produces plenty of resentment towards AI specifically and tech more generally, and the public’s gonna find plenty of catharsis in watching them go down.
Personally, I’d love to the the Luddites get rehabilitated as a result of the Great Bullshit Collapse. They were just regular folks fighting for dignity in work, and it’s tragic how successful the bastards have been at erasing them from history.
Judging by some stray articles from WIRED and The Atlantic, Merchant’s likely done plenty to rehabilitate the Luddites’ image.
I suspect Silicon Valley’s godawful reputation and widespread hatred of AI have likely helped as well - “machinery harmful to commonality” may be an unfamiliar concept to Joe Public, but “AI is ruining the Internet/taking your job/scamming your parents” is very fucking tangible to them.
Pulling out a previous post of mine, the NFT craze likely helped indirectly, by killing technological determinism’s hold on the public and badly wounding Silicon Valley’s public image.
Of those two, technological determinism’s death was probably the more important one - that idea’s demise meant the public was willing to entertain that new tech developments from Silicon Valley could be killed in their crib, that they wouldn’t inevitably become a part of public life, for worse or (potentially) for better.
nfts damaged public image of crypto beyond recovery, fine. tech in general, i’m not so sure
I’d say they did do some damage to tech’s wider image by becoming a pop-culture punchline and a mark of shame rolled into one.
Incidents like Seth Green’s Ape getting kidnapped, the public exploitation of George Floyd’s death and the legendary dumpster fire that was The Red Ape Family, plus the onslaught of dogshit NFT art and the nonstop scams and deception within the NFT/crypto sphere all led NFTs to become widely and rightfully panned, with NFTs getting unflatteringly compared to beanie babies and NFT profile pics getting either right-click saved to mock their supposed “ownership” or blocked on sight, depending on how people generally felt.
my point is that these incidents were mostly mentally filed to “crypto” and were not generalized to wider tech industry
It is refreshing to see the general trend of people laughing when promptbros try to paint themselves as the Wright Brothers Reborn, isn’t it?
Jingna Zhang found an AI corp saying the quiet part out loud:
In a previous post of mine, I noted how the public generally feels that the jobs people want to do (mainly creative jobs) are the ones being chiefly threatened by AI, with the dangerous, boring and generally garbage jobs being left relatively untouched.
Looking at this, I suspect the public views anyone working on/boosting AI as someone who knows full well their actions are threatening people’s livelihoods/dream jobs, and is actively, willingly and intentionally threatening them, either out of jealousy for those who took the time to develop the skills, or out of simple capitalist greed.
I thought the Raytheon ads for tanks and knife missiles in the Huntsville, AL airport were bad, but this takes the whole goddamn cake, and two scoops of ice cream with it.
You don’t get it, this is a likely bribe
Help me out, the coffee isn’t working today and I still don’t get it. How does bribery fit in?
Ads are used to influence customers, right, but how many people on train station are about to buy a fighter jet or a tank? (Maybe it’s a part of recruitment strategy) If they wanted to influence DoD or elected representatives then there are more direct options
Instead, remember that ads are paid for, and nobody needs to know how much, and that money probably is much less tightly controlled
yep, and alongside: go-nowhere hype-du-jour businesses are a remarkably good vehicle for pushing money from A->B for many of these people
? that’s raytheon, a large company with multiple state customers that delivers what it says in spec, not anduril
I don’t mean just raytheon/MICshit but also the broader use of the technique by extraction-grifters
Ah, thankyou for bearing with me, I see what you mean.
I just assumed there must be a large military office nearby and they were targeting the procurement personnel who do the actual contract and tender work, plus maybe the manufacturer headquarters is nearby and this is part of one of the more revolting symptoms of a highly militarized capitalist culture. I didn’t get quite as far as drawing the connection to targeting politicians and staffers who likely can’t put a meeting with missile sales reps on their publicly documented calendars, but that makes a lot of sense.
there’s another thing in american context specifically: generally keeping defense manufacturers in state is a popular decision among voters (both parties) because it brings DoD contracts (lots of money) and well paid both blue and white collar jobs. this in turn influences back procurement decisions (a bit) (hey, my state has a factory of this junk obsolete since it was on drawing board (like A10), can you put some money in it? closing that factory would lose me an election)
My sense growing up in Huntsville was that the airport ads for defense contractors were kind of like, e.g., Exxon sponsoring a pavilion at EPCOT. The intent wasn’t to push any specific consumer towards buying any specific product, but to pump out a positive image for the company generally.
And a lot of those contractors’ people fly through Huntsville on business. (For those not in the know: The airport is just down the highway from Redstone Arsenal, which is where we brought all them Nazis we recruited to help us beat the Commies to the Moon. The only reason Huntsville exists as more than a sleepy/dying cotton mill town is the space program and missile warfare.) There may well be deals along the lines of “advertise here and your people get the cushy lounge”.
yikes, good call! I couldn’t get past the Borderlands 2 vibes, but you’re right.
it’s like generalized manufacturing consent
Ah, Huntsville. Where the downtown convention hall is the Werner von Braun Center.
🎶 the man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience 🎶
Raytheon can at least claim they’re helping kill terrorists or some shit like that, Artisan’s just going out and saying “We ruin good people’s lives for money, and we can help you do that too”
Right? At least it the knife missile does what it says on the tin.
Apologies in advance for the Rick and Morty reference, but Artisan seems to be roughly congruent to “Simple Rick” candy bars.
The (poorly executed) distillation of the life’s work of actually talented and interesting people, sold as a direct replacement, to fill a void that the customer doesn’t even know exists.
Grift tech that claims to do awful shit that ruins everyone’s lives, but really just makes Stanford grads sit around pretending to invent something while funneling VC money directly in their bloodstreams.
You’d think these would overflow the evil scale and end up back into being ethical but really they’re just doing the same thing as the non-vaporware evil companies with just some extra steps.
Look who are in the news again, has it been six months again?
Stephanie Kirchgaessner is the deputy head of investigations for Guardian US, based in Washington DC
Hannah Devlin is the Guardian’s science correspondent, having previously been science editor of the Times. She has a PhD in biomedical imaging from the University of Oxford.
so is it that both these fuckers are ideologically bankrupt, or are they willing complicit ghouls?
Yes
