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. Sorry this wasn’t up earlier, I couldn’t connect to awful.)
Samo Burja (“How Roman Emperors Handled the Succession Problem”), SlateScott, and POTUS have all expressed interest in Herbert Hoover. Is this part of a broader online right thing in the USA?
If you want to re-litigate the New Deal, rehabilitating Hoover is a good first step.
The American far-right has the New Deal as its foundational Dolchstosslegende.
I’m not sure if we missed this one or if just I did, but there’s a class action suit against Eightfold AI. The company is accused of essentially creating a social credit score based on your digital footprint and using it to drop applications before anyone at the hiring company got a chance to see them.
I spent the last two years watching my options for keeping my family housed slowly dry up while throwing out hundreds of applications. Now I’m concerned that it dug up my old reddit account from when I was a stupid teenager or decided that comments I made here weren’t suitable for participating in the goddamn economy.
Samo Burja of Leverage Research and Palladium Magazine is trying to pivot to respectability https://samoburja.com/ He also has a Substack blog. People call him a sociologist and a political scirentist but he seems (echo me) entirely self-published except for a few opinion pieces and his highest educational credential is “studied at the University of Ljubljana.” The Long Now Foundation gave him money which is disappointing.
I looked at the table of contents of his manuscript and … zero history. All blathering on about some theory he cooked up from first principles to fellate rich people. The fact that anyone takes this seriously is a stunning indictment on the state of humanities education.
Hol up! It’s kind of unfair to blame some poor soul with a PhD in Beowulf for failing the beat the fash out of a determined dickhead over the course of a single quarter. (half serious)
I mean, did Samo even complete a degree?
In a quick DuckDuckGo I can’t find any site that claims Samo Burja has a degree.
His concept of live player is just another way of saying that most people are NPCs. The manuscript appears to call Elon Musk an engineer which is like calling Cheops an architect (alternatively, Musk must “fundamentally understand engineering”).
Diversity and inclusion is suddenly great if it involves fascists doing entryism.
i thought that pause ai was just rationalist controlled opposition
Yeah exactly.
I want to pause ai because it’s a hypercapitalist project designed to further deskill and commoditise the middle class which coincidentally destroys the environment.
They want to pause ai because they believe that spicy autocomplete is intelligent and will one day soon manifest as a giant angry vengeful snek.
We are not the same.
The impression I’ve gotten it that it is relatively less toothless than some of the other rationalist spin-off movements aimed at preventing doom. And it is willing to deign to try to coalition build with normies that want to stop AI for normie reasons (except apparently they’ve made even that a bad thing, from the tweet it is willing to unapologetically coalition build with fascists!) But yes, it still has a lot of rationalist hangups and quirks getting in the way of actually acting effectively.
(ported over from previous thread)
So I managed to find some more of the AI 2027 author’s opinions on their predictions after a bit of poking around, I’ll let this snippet speak for itself
EDIT: in several comments below, AI 2027 co-authors Daniel Kokotajlo and Eli Lifland provide clarifications and corrections to what I’ve written here. Uplift – the extent to which AI tools are accelerating AI R&D progress – is indeed well short of where the AI 2027 scenario predicts. However, the authors do believe they were on track regarding the rate at which uplift would progress; they merely have adjusted their view of where things stood in early 2025. So uplift is indeed short of the AI 2027 scenario, but may now be advancing at the predicted pace, just from a delayed starting point. And frontier AI lab revenue is in fact ahead of AI 2027’s predictions; the 80% figure I’m citing here, which is labeled “economic value” in the linked report, turns out to reflect company valuations in addition to revenue. Finally, valuations have jumped since the 80% figure was computed and are now “about on trend”. Daniel and Eli provided some other clarifications as well, see their comments.]
Lesswrong has some funny objections to AI: 2040. They buy the overall premise, sure, but even that much still leaves lots of gaps in the “scenario”. And they have even more galaxy brain takes… My favorite complaint: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pFzctpJBat95SrCyC/ai-2040-plan-a?commentId=54dZes9uNqDdbNGBu
tldr; AI: 2040 is leaving out all the other sci-fi singularity tech just around the corner like genetic augmentations and cybernetic brain implants!
You laugh, but chatgpt has given me psyhic powers, and I can now tap into a whole new realm. There even was this smart psyhic agent called neurgalle or something who helped me with a skin condition.
Oh hey, a full top level post complaining AI-2027 wasn’t sci-fi enough (they literally use the words “I don’t think it is science-fictional enough”)! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Lc8v92pGPtjF3gsCv/some-quick-thoughts-on-ai-2027
