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)
I signed up for the Urbit newsletter many moons ago when I was a little internet child. Now, it’s a pretty decent source of sneers. This month’s contains: “The First Wartime Address with Curtis Yarvin”. In classic Moldbug fashion, it’s Two Hours and Forty Fucking Five minutes long. I’m not going to watch the whole thing, but I’ll try to mine the transcript for sneers.
26:23 –
Simplicity in them you know it runs on a virtual machine who specification Nock [which] fits on a T-shirt and uh you know the goal of the system is to basically take this kind of fundamental mathematical simplicity of Nock and maintain that simplicity all the way to user space so we create something that’s simple and easy to use that’s not a small amount of of work
Holy fucking shit, does this guy really think building your entire software stack on brainfuck makes even a little bit of sense at all?
30:17 – a diatribe about how social media can only get worse and how Facebook was better than myspace because its original users were at the top of the social hierarchy. Obviously, this bodes well for urbit because all of you spending 3 hours of your valuable time listening to this wartime address? You’re the cream of the crop.
~2:00:00 – here he addresses concerns about his political leanings, caricaturing the concern as “oh Yarvin wants to make this a monarchy” and responding by saying “nuh uh, urbit is decentralized.” Absent from all this is any meaningful analysis of how decentralized systems (such as the internet itself) eventually tend to centralized systems under certain incentive structures. Completely devoid of substance.
Is he inscrutable/obscurantist on purpose, or is it because he never had a proper humanities education nor an editor?
It has been suggested, either on this site or by people who pop up here a lot, that the idiosyncratic (eg. Fucking Weird) design of hoon and nock was a deliberate attempt to build something akin to cult mysteries, where not just anyone could grasp it and the initiates had powers that the ignorant outsiders would not, etc etc.
Unfortunately, whilst he’s clearly not stupid, Yarvin isn’t nearly as clever as he thinks he is, and has ended up producing a load of unwieldy cryptic nonsense that no one can work with. I expect this applies to other things he does, too.
Behind the Bastards is starting a series about Yarvin today. Always appreciate it when they wander into our bailiwick!
Also means we’re likely to have a better jumping on point to explain these people to those who aren’t already here. Hope he does one on Yud and friends in the not too distant future.
Their episode on Rudolph Steiner was great when explaining to the grandparents why we had to pull our kids out of a Waldorf kindergarten asap. Funny how so many things fall into the trap of “It can’t be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong.”
Also, big L for me on due diligence. I thought outdoor classrooms would be good for our fellow ADHD enjoyer; nope.
They did come up in the Tech Bros Have Built a Cult Around AI episode.
They did do one on Yud, it’s hard to find and has an annoying amount of side chatter but it’s a pretty solid breakdown of the dude.
The episode is mentioned here: https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/rationalist-harry-potter-and-the
But I can no longer find it on YouTube.
I mentioned Severed Heads here as a good band several months ago and was wanting to recommend their album Living Museum, the tapes for their final US tour in 2019, as a good entry point. Anyway, it’s up on YouTube. A pleasant hour’s boppy industrial pop.
I still need to listen to this (I got way too into making backups of various systems, as one does) but severed heads has been such a big part of my FLAC rotation ever since you first mentioned them
(my bad)
it’s like a software fidget toy. also I found out how to make the mistake that makes a backup take 5 hours instead of 1.5 minutes (fortunately locally, not on our deployment)
Borked link. Possibly unthrottled invidious version
I prefer less pop and bop in my industrial, but I am glad to see anybody else still enjoying this with the word industrial in it.
perhaps Earbitten is more suitable
(now an explosive new reissue)
back in the tapeloop and hitting things days
Yeah, that works for me. I’ll check out some more of them. Thanks!
so mozilla decided to take the piss while begging for $10 donations:
We know $10 USD may not seem like enough to reclaim the internet and take on irresponsible tech companies. But the truth is that as you read this email, hundreds of Mozilla supporters worldwide are making donations. And when each one of us contributes what we can, all those donations add up fast.
With the rise of AI and continued threats to online privacy, the stakes of our movement have never been higher. And supporters like you are the reason why Mozilla is in a strong position to take on these challenges and transform the future of the internet.
the rise of AI you say! wow that sounds awful, it’s so good Mozilla isn’t very recently notorious for pushing that exact thing on their users without their consent alongside other privacy-violating changes. what a responsible tech company!
upside of this: they’ll get told why they’re not getting many of those $10 donations
downside of that (rejection): that could be exactly what one of the ghouls-in-chief there need to push some or other bullshit
the ability of Mozilla’s executives and PMs to ignore public outcry is incredible, but not exactly unexpected from a thoroughly corrupt non-profit
could revitalise the ivory trade by mining these towers
(/s, about the trade bit)
We know $10 USD may not seem like enough to reclaim the internet with the browser we barely maintain and take on irresponsible tech companies that pay us vast sums of money. But the truth is that as you read this email, hundreds of Mozilla supporters worldwide haven’t realized we’re a charity racket dressed up as a browser who will spend all your money on AI and questionable browser plugins. And when each one of us contributes what we can, we can waste the money all the faster!
With the rise of AI (you’re welcome, by the way, for the MDN AI assistant) and continued threats to online privacy like question like integrating a Mr. Robot Ad into firefox without proper code review, the stakes of our movement have never been higher. And
markssupporters like you are the reason why Mozilla is in such a strong position to take on these challenges and transform the future of the internet in any way we know how – except by improving our browser of course that would be silly.(I’m feeling extra cynical today)
is this what gaslighting is?
Gaslighting? What are you talking about? There’s no such thing as gaslighting. Maybe you’re going crazy
Paul Krugman and Francis Fukuyama and Daniel Dennett and Steve Pinker were in a “human biodiversity discussion group” with Steve Sailer and Ron Unz in 1999, because of course they were
I look forward to the ‘but we often disagreed’ non-apologies. With absolute lack of self reflection on how this helped push Sailer/Unz into the positions they are now. If we even get that.
Pinker: looking through my photo album where I’m with people like Krauss and Epstein, shaking my head the whole time so the people on the bus know I disagree with them
Also John McCarthy and Ray fucking Blanchard
Mr AGP? Wow.
I’m mildly surprised at Krugman, since I never got a particularly racist vibe from him. (This is 100% an invitation to be corrected.) Annoyed that 1) I recognise so many names and 2) so many of the people involved are still influential.
Interested in why Johnathan Marks is there though. He’s been pretty anti-scientific racism if memory serves. I think he’s even complained about how white supremacists stole the term human biodiversity. Now, I’m curious about the deep history of this group. Marks published his book in 1995 and this is a list from 1999, so was the transformation of the term into a racist euphemism already complete by then? Or is this discussion group more towards the beginning.
Similarly, curious how out some of these people were at the time. E.g. I know that Harpending was seen as a pretty respectable anthropologist up until recently, despite his virulent racism. But I’ve never been able to figure out how much his earlier racism was covert vs. how much 1970s anthropology accepted racism vs. how much this reflects his personal connections with key people in the early field of hunter-gatherer studies.
Oh also, super amused that Pinker and MacDonald are in the group at the same time, since I’m pretty sure Pinker denounced MacDonald for anti-Semitism in quite harsh language (which I haven’t seen mirrored when it comes to anti-black racism). MacDonald’s another weird one. He defended Irving when Irving was trying to silence Lipstadt, but in Evan’s account, while he disagrees with MacDonald, he doesn’t emphasise that MacDonald is a raging anti-Semite and white supremacist. So, once again, interested in how covert vs. overt MacDonald was at the time.
Yeah, Krugman appearing on the roster surprised me too. While I haven’t pored over everything he’s blogged and microblogged, he hasn’t sent up red flags that I recall. E.g., here he is in 2009:
Oh, Kay. Greg Mankiw looks at a graph showing that children of high-income families do better on tests, and suggests that it’s largely about inherited talent: smart people make lots of money, and also have smart kids.
But, you know, there’s lots of evidence that there’s more to it than that. For example: students with low test scores from high-income families are slightly more likely to finish college than students with high test scores from low-income families.
It’s comforting to think that we live in a meritocracy. But we don’t.
There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about.
So it’s comical, in a way, to see [Paul] Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.
I suppose it’s possible that he was invited to an e-mail list in the late '90s and never bothered to unsubscribe, or something like that.
I thought that Sailer had coined the term in the early 2000s, but evidently that’s not correct
The Wikipedia article on the Human Biodiversity Institute cites the term human biodiversity as becoming a euphemism for racism sometime in the late 90s and Marks’ book is from 1995, so there was apparently a pretty quick turnover. Which makes me wonder if hijacking or if independent invention. The article has a lot of sources, so I might mine them to see if there’s a detailed timeline.
Who could have predicted that liberalism would lead into scientific racism and then everything else that follows (mostly fascism)???
Surely “scientific” is giving them far too much credit? I recall previously sneering at some quotes about skull sizes, including something like women keep bonking their heads?
I believe the term is not so much meant to convey properties of science upon them as to describe the particular strain of racist shitbaggery (which dresses itself in appears-science, much like what happens in/with scientism)
Oh, definitely. For clarity my intention was to riff off them and increase levels of disrespect towards racists. In hindsight, the question format doesn’t quite convey that.
Timnit Gebru on Twitter:
We received feedback from a grant application that included “While your impact metrics & thoughtful approach to addressing systemic issues in AI are impressive, some reviewers noted the inherent risks of navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players,”
navigating this space without alignment with larger corporate players
stares into middle distance, hollow laugh
No need for xcancel, Gebru is on actually social media: https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/113160285088058319
Orange site on pager bombs in Lebanon:
If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
It immediately reminded me of Stuxnet, which also from a technical perspective was quite interesting.
technical aspect seems to be for now that israeli secret services intercepted and sabotaged thousands of pagers to be distributed for hezbollah operatives, then blew them up all at once. it does look like small, reportedly less than 20g each explosive charge, but orange site accepted truth is that it was haxxorz blowing up lithium batteries. israelis already did exactly this thing but with phone in targeted assassination, and actual volume of such bomb would be tiny (about 10ml)
what we are best at here at HN
It’s always bootlicking with this crowd jfc
“best at”, they say? I shall have to update my priors
If HN is best at technical discussion that just means they’re even worse at everything else!
They suck at technical explanations too, unless it’s a Wikipedia link.
My joke didn’t land apparently but I did not mean to imply they were particularly good at technical explanations. Adjusted the working a smidge.
What are the chances that–somewhere deep in the bowels of Clearwater, FL–some poor soul has been ordered to develop an AI replicant of L. Ron Hubbard?
There is a substantial corpus.
the only worthwhile use of LLMs: endlessly prompting the L Ron Hubbard chatbot with Battlefield Earth reviews as a form of acausal torture
look at me i am the basilisk now
How would you audit a computer? Would they add USB-C ports to the cans?
cat /dev/thetans > ~/genius.txt
pours a bag of powdered mdma all over the computer “look at it! it’s drenched in e! PURGE!”
Doesn’t have his body tethans so would be a different person or something.
They’ve had enough problems with the guy who claimed to be the reincarnation of LRH.
I reckon Miscavige wouldn’t want a robo-LRH as it could challenge his power within the organization.
fuckin. when did Mozilla’s twitter feed turn into wall to fucking wall AI spam https://x.com/mozilla
fucking Mozilla really is going all in on this whole “you can’t trust AI, except when we and our business partners do it” openwashing thing completely unaware of how it looks, huh? like, they’ve pushed AI so hard and violated so much community trust in the process that I can’t imagine this is doing anything but costing them their remaining donors.
who is the investor who pushed Mozilla this hard? where the fuck is this coming from?
all their hiring is AI too
haven’t really had the headspace to dig into this but one of my hypotheticals about how this could come to pass is “not enough counter-friction left”. foundations of the guess are: years of ill-advised products, constant killing of worthwhile projects, creep of bayfucker mentality. that shape of thing
I recall seeing people ringing alarm bells about moz ceo pay like 3~4y ago
not that the above guess eliminates the thing you’re pointing to, mind you. I agree that this drive has to be coming from somewhere. my stuff was more coming at it from the “why has this suddenly accelerated so much” angle
I recall seeing people ringing alarm bells about moz ceo pay like 3~4y ago
remember when bringing up Mozilla’s financials would get you yelled at by people who needed to see them as a paragon of open source in spite of all evidence to the contrary?
my personal theory for why it’s accelerating so much is, their board might be doing a Sears[1]. they’re inventing ways to make Mozilla bankrupt because there’s profit in it, and that profit window might be closing rapidly with the antitrust actions against Google coming up. this is all based on vibes though, I’m the polar opposite of an accountant
[1] see also, doing a Red Lobster. no, endless shrimp isn’t why they’re going bankrupt, why in fuck would it be, of course it’s capitalists
For some reason, the news of Red Lobster’s bankruptcy seems like a long time ago. I would have sworn that I read this story about it before the solar eclipse.
Of course, the actual reasons Red Lobster is circling the drain are more complicated than a runaway shrimp promotion. Business Insider’s Emily Stewart explained the long pattern of bad financial decisions that spelled doom for the restaurant—the worst of all being the divestment of Red Lobster’s property holdings in order to rent them back on punitive leases, adding massive overhead. (As Ray Kroc knows, you’re in the real estate business!) But after talking to many Red Lobster employees over the past month—some of whom were laid off without any notice last week—what I can say with confidence is that the Endless Shrimp deal was hell on earth for the servers, cooks, and bussers who’ve been keeping Red Lobster afloat. They told me the deal was a fitting capstone to an iconic if deeply mediocre chain that’s been drifting out to sea for some time. […] “You had groups coming in expecting to feed their whole family with one order of endless shrimp,” Josie said. “I would get screamed at.” She already had her share of Cheddar Bay Biscuit battle stories, but the shrimp was something else: “It tops any customer service experience I’ve had. Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.”
Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.
I dated someone who worked at Red Lobster, and that absolutely checks out. the number of people who’d come in hoping to grift free shit and take it out on the servers when they didn’t get it (or would try and get someone fired so they could get free shit, depending on the night) was astounding
remember when bringing up Mozilla’s financials would get you yelled at by people who needed to see them as a paragon of open source in spite of all evidence to the contrary?
yup. absolutely nuts shit. I know there’s often a lament to lack of nuance in contemporary internet but god damn if there isn’t also a massive shortage of critical thinking skills and the ability to engage with criticism well
Oh, and I just saw this: https://mastodon.social/@stevetex/113162099798398758
they’re really speedrunning this downslide, huh
Just discovered Patrick Boyle’s channel. Deadpan sneer perfection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jhTnk3TCtc
edit: tried to post invidious link but didn’t seem to work
his delivery regarding the content is absolute perfection
The only invidious instance that works this week is nadeko:
Pulling out a pretty solid Tweet @ai_shame showed me:
To pull out a point I’ve been hammering since Baldur Bjarnason talked about AI’s public image, I fully anticipate tech’s reputation cratering once the AI bubble bursts. Precisely how the public will view the tech industry at large in the aftermath I don’t know, but I’d put good money on them being broadly hostile to it.
If you’re against unrestricted genAI then you’re also transphobic
What. Wait has anyone claimed this? Because that’s absurd.
Dunno but why not, after Nanowrimo claimed that opposing “AI” means you’re classist and ableist. Why not also make objecting be sexist, racist etc. I’m going to be ahead of the curve by predicting that being against ChatGPT will also be a red flag that you’re a narcissistic sociopath manipulator because uhh because abused women need ChatGPT to communicate with their toxic exes /s
Considering how much the AI hype feels like the cryptocurrency hype, during which every joke you made had already been seriously used to make a coin and been pumped and dumped already, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
Oh, I wonder if they are referring to this shit, where somone came to r/lgbt fishing for compliments for the picture they’d asked Clippy for, and were completely clowned on by the entire community, which then led to another subreddit full of promptfans claiming that artists are transphobic because they didn’t like a generated image which had a trans flag in it.
It warms the cockles of my heart that all across the web people find AI as annoying as I do.
remembering the NFT grifter who loudly asserted that if you weren’t into NFTs then you must be a transphobe
(it was Fucking Thorne)
fondly remembering replying to these types of people with screenshots from the wikipedia page on affinity fraud. they really hated that
I suspect it’ll land somewhere above “halitosis” but below “wearing black socks with crocs”
Some killjoys pour cold water over everyone’s favorite dental biohack, and HN is not happy
Absolutely unhinged. Are these people from the As-Seen-On-TV dimension where it’s common for folks burn their house down every time they try to fry an egg?
Sometimes you read an article and you think “this article doesn’t want me to do X, but all its arguments against X are utterly terrible. If that’s the best they could find, X is probably alright.”
that thread is an unholy combination of two of my least favorite types of guys: techbros willfully misunderstanding research they disagree with, and homeopaths
I’d think ‘we don’t know the side effects, it prob doesn’t work, and they are trying to sidestep the FDA’ would be good arguments against it. Esp after in the US Thalidomide (yes very much a dead horse), (mostly) wasn’t a problem because the FDA stopped it.
Anyway, it seems like the full scale FDA project stranded due to not enough volunteers, so I suggest the HN people mad about this help out. Hey, it might turn out to actually work.
this article doesn’t want me to drink a shitload of colloidal silver, but all its arguments against drinking colloidal silver (it doesn’t do anything for your health, it might turn you blue, it tastes like ass) are utterly terrible. If that’s the best they could find, drinking a shitload of colloidal silver is probably alright.
What a terrible argument. Anything that involves messing around with your teeth needs to have good reasons to do it, rather than just good arguments against doing it.
From the comments: “Putting my conspiracy theory hat on, the dental hygiene industry in the US is for-profit, like the pharmaceutical, and would rather sell you a treatment than a cure.”
Have these people ever BEEN to the dentist? While I know that certain dental procedures (tooth straightening in kids, whitening, etc) are way overused in the US no dentist worth their salt will allow a check-up to go by without a stern lecture on preventing future trouble. And if they don’t do that then the hygienist most certainly will…
Here in Sweden the hygienist is definitely the Bad Cop in this scenario. I got sternly talked to by someone fresh out of school, so I don’t doubt there’s a retired Master Sergeant on the staff of the college they go to…
We could also just fluoridate the water supply, which also massively reduces cavities.
I literally just sat down with coffee to check if the new stubsack needs to be made
brava
I almost made it but couldn’t be arsed to replicate the explanation text
there’s a Trade Secret I could tell you! (the cross-post or view source buttons, with appropriate mini trimming)
Minor personal annoyance is the lack of link back to the previous thread. But still thanks for the hard / quick work yall.wow guess I missed the link. ;)
EVE Online creator CCP announces a new game with BLOCKCHAIN and it’s not going well:
Apparently they got investment from A16Z:
I admit, in my haste, I read that link as Marc Andreessen openly announcing they’re investing in the Chinese Communist Party, which is slightly funnier than the reality of yet another crypto game.
it’s even funnier than that (albeit also super depressing, in some ways)
primer: hilmar (the head honcho at ccp) has been “crypto = bae” for going on 5~6y now (that I’m aware of, maybe longer), to the point that there are pictures of the guy at chain confs from around then, and mentions of people talking with him in The Private Backrooms at said chain confs. it’s been his darling and he has wanted very, very hard to put it into tq (the main game server). see this for example (and fwiw, warning: eve reddit)
in-fill: there also appears to be quite a bit of cart before the horse element in how the company operates - they will frequently first work on something, then when it starts getting near release they’ll send out some surveys that almost without fail have some extremely loaded questions in them. an example would be that instead of asking players what they generally think of xyz feature/intended mechanic/etc, the survey will instead garden path answers along, attempting to manufacture consent/compliance.
and, last little detail: keep in mind this is a game where people will min-max the everloving shit out of something, and where a fair number of people out there are willing to trade actual time to making in-game money with which to fund their gametime (“plexing”). people who would be willing to engage with some really ridiculous abstract/effortful shit for whatever gains they could, just because they could.
so with that said, during 2021/2022 (in the middle of the NFT tsunami of shit) the first big round of “we want to add NFTs to tq” came about. and there were a fair amount of indications that ccp had already sunk quite a bunch of devtime on it, and were getting ready to roll it out. the pitch was, uh, “not well received” would be putting it extremely lightly. it was panned so fucking extremely, they had to put out this newsblog which included the remarkably tortured phrase “Not For Tranquility”
which is the early strand of what leads us to this particular little “gem”. it’s hard to get specific details because they’re fairly tight-lipped about internal processes and shit, so the following is definitely heavily conjecture. hilmar didn’t want to break up with his bae, and kept pushing trying to keep this alive, somehow. whether the drive for this is also tied up with the Pearl Abyss acquisition some years prior is unclear (but Black Desert Online players all cried wolf when PA bought CCP, and said to expect increasing financial fuckery). what does appear to be the case is that a number of developers (possibly the pro-NFT among them) got sequestered off to the Special Project that became this thing, along with the a16z money a while back. the general feeling in the eve:o community is still largely “get fucked”, and this project is likely to be double-stillborn (on account of dead kriptoes and an unwanted game/product)
I look forward in earnest to see just how dead it is on arrival
[0] - it took less than 2mo from the “would you like to play a fps in the eve universe? what would you want in it? what do you normally do in eve? what would you do in an eve-universe fps? why would you want your eve …” survey going out to the announcement “hey surprise! we have an fps!”[1]
[1] - again. they’ve failed a few times, with multiples out. ccp product leadership real bad.
Man this company has had some really interesting ideas and then the execution always falters.
I was still subscribed when the first eve-fps crossover they attempted. it seemed great and then for whatever reason a console exclusive with a subscription fee ontop. They didnt get the numbers they were planning for and the whole thing just died on the vine.
They’ve had some neat tech here and there and the whole experience is great for building out your psychopathy but i lost interest after the Greed Is Good phase of CCCP games started.
was that the one that targeted the near-eol console?
In 3 years they will release their NFT game.
Via Timnit Gebru’s mastodon, I just learned that Emily Bender (both of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots fame) has a podcast: “Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.” Looking forward to checking it out tomorrow at the gym!
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes
Summary: Artificial Intelligence has too much hype. In this podcast, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation. They’re joined by special guests and talk about everything, from machine consciousness to science fiction, to political economy to art made by machines.
It’s pretty great. The closing bits of improv from her cohost are a bit meh imo but the AI hype assessments are legitimately amazing.
