BlueMonday1984

A solid piece on AI and ethics (and the general lack of them), featuring a nice sideswipe at our very good friends.

Fun fact: somebody managed to pull off deferred rendering on the Nintendo 64. And its let them show off impressively high-res textures at pretty solid framerates.

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.)

XCancel: https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1900247885142434220

Context: https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115

If I had a nickel for every "metafictional" "short" "story" a promptbro shat into existence on Twitter, I'd have two nickels. That's not much, but its two nickels too fucking many.

It's been a good minute since I took a shot at predicting how the AI bubble (and its burst) is gonna play out. This is less a dedicated post and more a compilation of the bajillion thoughts I've had about this.

1. Throwing the Humanities a Bone

Right off the bat, I suspect the arts/humanities will gain a degree of begrudging respect at the direct expense of tech's public image taking a nosedive. My primary reason for this is due to the slop-nami and its wide-spread impact on the Internet at large.

On one end, you have an utter tidal wave of AI-generated slop flooding basically every corner of daily life, giving us a nonstop torrent of misinformation (political or otherwise) and inhumanly shit "artwork" which clogs the Internet with garbage and drowns out human voices wherever it can, acting as an omnipresent annoyance at best and a direct threat to people's livelihoods at worst.

On the other end, you have the AI bros responsible for/complicit in this slop-nami, who uncritically praise whatever garbage gen-AI creates, relentlessly hype up its "creative" qualities and relentlessly doomsay about the incoming Artificial General Intelligence that will wipe out humanity/solve all of humanity's problems/God-Knows-Fucking-What.

Combined, these two aspects of the bubble paint a picture of tech as an utterly insipid and artless field, full of soulless dilletantes who are incapable of making or understanding art at best and actively hostile to it at worst.

If that new image of tech takes root in the public consciousness, its gonna make the arts/humanities look a fair bit better by comparison. Sure, the fields are still gonna have to deal with the stigma of being a "useless degree" but its better than your degree being taken as an indictment of you as a person.

Confidence: Low. This is pure gut instinct (and probably hope) talking from watching the slop-nami first-hand - whilst it could force people to appreciate the arts a bit more, nothing's stopping the slop-nami from devaluing the arts even fucking more.

2. Smells Like Fash Spirit

On another front entirely, I expect this bubble will leave the tech industry with a reputation as a Nazi bar - a reputation that will linger even after Trump and his cronies are thrown out of office.

Silicon Valley's sucking up to Trump and DOGE's AI-Powered^tm^ annihilation of the state is doing wonders on this particular front, but fascists' fascination with slop and TESCREAL being fash to its core are likely helping build this image as well.

Referencing an earlier comment of mine, AI as a concept will likely get hit with the stench of fash as well - considering the TESCREAL movement partially powering this bubble is fascist as hell, that seems likely.

Confidence: High. Unlike Prediction 1, I've got some solid evidence to suggest tech's picking up a reputation for fascism. Mainly Silicon Valley's jackbooted goose-stepping to Trump's tune.

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.)

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.)

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.

(Taking over for Gerard this time. Special thanks to him for starting this.)

Another banger video from f4mi, showcasing some pretty creative ways to sabotage slop summarisers/scrapers.

Sidenote: I was right - anti-scraping measures would make use of feeding false info to scrapers.