Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 21 July 2024
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.
This isn't really too interesting yet; but something to keep an eye on. As things like blockchain and AI alignment becomes weirdly political it's likely that sneering will get unpleasantly close to politics at times. And yet sneer we must.
Other self-titled techno-optimists highlighted Vance’s ties to venture capital, Thiel, and Andreessen, saying the “Gray Tribe [is] in control.” Gray Tribe is a reference to a term originating from Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex blog, which points to a group that is neither red (Republican) or Blue (Democrat), but a libertarian, tech savvy alternative.
I really should write more about technofascism while I still have electricity, clean water, a relatively unfractured global information network, and there aren’t too many gunshots outside
Ah yes, Alexander's unnumbered hordes, that endless torrent of humanity that is all but certain to have made a lasting impact on the sparsely populated subcontinent's collective DNA.
edit: Also, the absolute brain on someone who would think that before entertaining a random recent western ancestor like a grandfather or whateverthefuckjesus.
imagine one day buying some shitpost novelty stickers from that one site you heard a friend mention sometime, and then getting them and laughing about it and forgetting it
all too rapidly the years pass: young trees shoot up, older trees start boughing their way past electrical lines, the oldest all already in their position of maximum comfort. whole generations of memes have been born and died. you no longer even get to make fun of your weird aunt for still sending the dancing baby gif (these days it’s all about the autotune clips of a decade ago..)
and then one day you get reminded that the shitpost novelty sticker web store exists by receiving an email from them
Apparently they also once chained a design into 'liberal moron' from what was some political message once in the past, so it isn't coming from nowhere. Guess it wasn't an innocent mistake.
According to one story at least, Wigner eventually concluded that if you take some ideas that physicists widely hold about quantum mechanics as postulates and follow them through to their logical conclusion, then you must conclude that there is a special role for conscious observers. But he took that as a reason to question those assumptions.
(That story comes from Leslie Ballentine reporting a conversation with Wigner in the course of promoting an ensemble interpretation of QM.)
Under this, let's charitably call it, "interpretation", the Schrödinger cat analogy makes no sense, surely THE CAT is bloody conscious about ITSELF BEING ALIVE??
there’s so much quantum woo in that article I want to sneer at, but I don’t know anywhere close to enough about quantum physics to do so without showing my entire ass
If you want a serious discussion of interpretations of quantum mechanics, here is a transcript of a lecture "Quantum Mechanics in Your Face" which has the best explanation I've ever seen. I'd recommend the first 6 of Peter Shor's Quantum Computation notes (don't worry they're each very short) for just enough background to understand the transcript.
There are some interesting ideas in that general direction (wrapping Bell inequalities within different new types of thought experiment, etc.), but some of the people involved have done rather a lot of overselling, and now bringing in talk of "AI" just obscures the whole situation. Which was already obscure enough.
Well a good thing to remember re quantum mechanics, Schrödinger Cat is intended as a thought experiment showing how dumb the view on QM was. So it is always a bit funny to see people extrapolate from that thought experiment without acknowledging the history and issues with it. (But I think that also depends on the various interpretations, and this means I'm showing a cheekily high amount of ass here myself).
To me, the most sneerable thing in that article is where they assume a mechanical brain will evolve from ChatGPT and then assume a sufficiently large quantum computer to run it on. And then start figuring out how to port the future mechanical brain to the quantum computer. All to be able to run an old thought experiment that at least I understood as highlighting the absurdity of focusing on the human brain part in the collapse of a wave function.
Once we build two trains that can run near the speed of light we will be able to test some of Einstein's thought experiments. Better get cracking on how we can get enough coal onboard to run the trains long enough to get the experiments done.
Does anyone here know what Justine Tunney’s deal is? I’d been following her redbean project for a time but came across an article that left me rather startled
I saw people making fun of this on (the normally absurdly overly credulous) /r/singularity of all places. I guess even hopeful techno-rapture believers have limits to their suspension of disbelief.
It told him he was very smart and correct so he had an hypnogasm yes.
(For the people not in the know and who want some more psychic damage, look up Scott and his 'I can hypnotise you into having orgasms' blog posts, the man is utterly nuts, and it is really scary how many people seriously follow him).
explaining these things to normal humans is how you turn them into humans with years of psychic damage, and I support that mission wholeheartedly
an attempt at a summary:
the dilbert guy, who believes he can hypnotize women into having sex with him, now also believes he knows a magic incantation to teach hypnosis to a chatbot, and heavily implies the chatbot was able to hypnotize him in turn (presumably into having sex with it)
In the spirit of the fondly-remembered "Cloud-to-Butt" plugin, I propose a new tool that transforms mentions of AI and LLMs to something else. But what shape should our word transformer take? While scatology is good shit, I bet we can come up with something more clever than "ChatGPT-to-Poop"
BTW, take 1d6 psychic damage when you realize that Cloud-to-Butt was released more than ten years ago
Edit: Favorite suggestions so far:
AI-to-Bob @sc_griffith
AI-to-DFE (Dumpster Fire Elemental) @YourNetworkIsHaunted
Speaking more generally, Wget's recursive crawl can cause problems if run with inadequate rate limiting. e.g. here's what wikipedia's robots.txt says:
#
# Sorry, wget in its recursive mode is a frequent problem.
# Please read the man page and use it properly; there is a
# --wait option you can use to set the delay between hits,
# for instance.
#
User-agent: wget
Disallow: /