Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 28 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.
not only are the DCs burning water and harming ears, we’re on to the stage of taiwan not farming rice in service of making more chips
She shows us one of her rice paddies. It used to hold enough water to raise ducks. Now it's nothing but cracked earth and a few crispy flowers.
I’m neither a climate nor agriculture scientist so I can’t guess the longer term impact of this; I immediately wonder whether the soil could get harmed by disuse over years, along with other warming-related problems
I’m too angry to even sneer properly at this. it’s so fucking obviously nuts, but perverse incentives roll right ahead unchecked.
Here is the worst thing I didn't have to read today from a transhumanist:
Yes but laws are often outpaced, presumably having your dog walk in and say he liked it is a pretty good reason to have your bestiality charge thrown out and perhaps move on to the discrimination countersuit.
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Also this may have historic reasons, as the first futa was drawn centuries ago, long before the technology that enabled transgenderism, with breasts being the key difference.
Bonus round:
spoiler
What percentage of homeless people do you think would be worthwhile having as slaves? Many of them are broken people who can't reasonably support themselves in their current state, nor do anything to fix it.
This is vaguely similar to my idea for how to fix homelessness, build a community for them on a large scale, either state or national, where property is cheap and low skill jobs are abundant. Then you build a prison there, and everyone guilty of a 'crime of homelessness' such as trespassing, illegal camping, stealing food, etc. Then they get put in jail for a few days, probably put through some level of rehab, given basic medical care, and eventually a job for the massive debt they've just wracked up. What work it would be is the hard question, but the benefits to everyone else would pay for them to dig holes to fill back in if needed. Maybe have them sort recycling or something.
I went to college with him. Yarvin is curdled nerd rage personified. He also lies about his age. He's older than me & claims a birth date that would make him younger than me.
I was on a Quiz Bowl team with him & whenever he would buzz in for an answer, he would jerk his body spasmodically, which the other people on the team called "Yarvinating."
He's the kind of player that other Quiz Bowl players hate, known in the subculture as a "pickoff lord." That is to say, he's the kind of guy who would pad his stats by diving in to buzz on easy questions, make wild guesses on intros so he could get more points than teammates, etc.
Hand to God. If anybody disputes me, I've got at least one other person who would remember the "Yarvinating" anecdote. I've got legit Quiz Bowl cred. I used to play against Ken Jennings before he was even a Jeopardy! contestant, let alone host.
I connected on Facebook with a former classmate, somebody else from that team who once appeared in a College Jeopardy! tournament. We're both kind of just gobsmacked that we were there for somebody else's Lex Luthor origin story.
Another bit of tea... He lies about his age. He was an upperclassman at Brown when I was a freshman & he claims to be younger than me.
Yarvin played on the College Bowl-only team for Brown from 1989 to 1992. In 2021 he published a poem[2] stating that "No one can fucking touch me / In College Bowl." Brown failed to advance out of the Region 1 tournament for all four years of Yarvin's participation, making his lifetime record at intercollegiate tournaments 0-4 and demonstrating that, at a minimum, the Brandeis, MIT, and Williams teams were capable of "touching" his performance.
Called “Mr Smile”, it was developed by the Japanese technology company InstaVR and is said to be able to accurately rate a shop assistant’s service attitude.
It has also been designed with “game” elements that invite staff to improve their attitude by challenging their scores.
The company said its goal was to “standardise staff members’ smiles and satisfy customers to the maximum”.
No idea how true it is but apparently crowdstrike fired some of their QA and replaced it with AI, anybody heard about this? (source bsky) (Also 'AI' is doing a lot of work here, that could be anything)
It looks absolutely dire, particularly in motion, but posters are still falling over themselves to call it "cool" and "exciting" or claim that people "might not notice" that it's complete and utter arse.
Trump selecting JD Vance has his running mate has led to stuff I know from this venue bleeding into stuff I follow (shamefully) for US politics. Case in point, behold Mencius Moldbug between Richard Hanania and some racist dweeb from Cambridge:
Those formalized proofs are so incredibly ugly, it's amazing. Of course it doesn't much of a sensible indentation, but then there are single proof steps where I have no idea what it's even doing. [...] And then there are nonsense mathematical steps. The solution of problem 2 starts with induction, before introducing any variables. It applies induction to the number 12. And it write 12 as (10)+2. Then it proceeds to do the whole proof in the base case of the induction, and notices that the induction step is trivial, since the goal is the same as the induction hypothesis (but instead of the assumption tactic it uses congr 26).
(Personal sidenote: Tech's public image is almost certainly gonna take a nosedive as a result of this AI bubble. "We made a machine with the express purpose of putting artists out of business" isn't a business case, its the setup for a shitty teen dystopian novel.)
(Fuck, now I wanna try and predict how the AI bubble bursting will play out...)
Just found out from a screenshot in a tweet that Marc Aandreesen considers Nick Land to be some kind of patron saint of "techno-optimism". Setting aside Land's ugly views about everything... I didn't think optimism was what he was known for. More like grasping, desperate, disgusted embrace of the onward march of capital.
I like Jeremy because he is an OG, but I think his requirement for proof that targeted advertising "works" before the browsers implement these features is off the mark for me. He's an agency guy, a bit like Andy Budd, so they tend to have these really visceral takes about the state of the web but with this skewed perspective of best interests
I'm not familiar with Indian politics but I'm curious if anyone understands what this site is or what its politics are https://democracycollective.in (I'm just nosy and curious, I saw this pop up out of nowhere)
A specification for those who want content searchable on search engines, but not used for machine learning.
The basic idea is effectively an extension of robots.txt which attempts to resolve the issue by providing a means to politely ask AI crawlers not to scrape your stuff.
Personally, I don't expect this to ever get off the ground or see much usage - this proposal is entirely reliant on trusting that AI bros/companies will respect people's wishes and avoid scraping shit without people's permission.
The report released late last week by Solano County said the proposed new city of 50,000 — possibly up to 400,000 decades from now — would likely cost the county billions of dollars and create substantial annual financial deficits, while slashing agricultural production, damaging climate-change resilience, and potentially threatening local water supplies. The project, according to the report, “may not be financially feasible.”
HN shows what they think of the 3 people with actual thoughts on the issue by downvoting them to death