Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Neal Stephenson comes out strong and funny against GenAI here:
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/a-remarkable-assertion-from-a16z
āHypothesis 1: it was written by a clankerā
Lmao imagine reading a Stephenson book and being peeved that it ends
(His sex scenes are far far far worse than his endings, those are a mercy)
oh yeah the relationship between the fusion-device wielding 30-something Aluetian freedom fighter and the 16 year old skateboard courier in Snow Crash isā¦ of its time
Yup thatās one of them. The cryptonomicon protagonist no-nut-Novembering all the way to the ww2 treasure is another special fave
We were reading through various classics for bookclub and we noticed how many books had a ~14 year old girl has romantic/sexual relationship/gets abused by 30+ year old man. Snow Crash was one of those. I know popular thinking on this has changed a lot the past 20+ years but still always a shock, esp when you realize how much you didnt notice it.
Also a reason why the first evil dead aged very badly. Dont show that to people without warning them unless you want them to leaf.
Years ago, I said, āIāve never finished a Stephenson novel.ā Someone replied, āNeither has he.ā
Best part is the footnote:
@nfultz @gerikson best part of the footnote is that he puts quotation marks around āthinkā. Scary :)
Stephenson knows how computers work.
@dgerard he does, looks like
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 Sub-hypothesis 1B: the AI was fed the whole book but the input was truncated because whatever toolchain they used wasnāt made to handle 160k words at a time.
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Andreessen Horowitz? More like, And hereās some horse shit
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@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 please do not insult the noble machine consciousnesses thus. It was probably written by a venture capitalist.
Someone in the comments found the github (??) where they made the site or something, and it def was generated initially, but it used heavy nerd speak so it was translated.
āWarning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function.ā
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 The only thing that could have made that article better is if heād literally ended it mid-sentence.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984
Hypothesis 3: As some people seem to insist, āliterallyā has recently morphed into a contronym, and now it figuratively also means āfigurativelyā.
ā¦sorry, I meant it literally also means āfigurativelyā.
ā¦no, wait, thatās just the same thing. š It *actually* also means āfigurativelyā.
(Really? People couldnāt find a better new word to provide emphasis than āliterallyā? What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now? Do they care? Ughā¦)
āLiterally, not figurativelyā, said in a Sterling Archer voice.
ā Merriam-Webster
It seems really common for words for factuality to become intensifiers. I just used the word āreallyā as an intensifier, thought it really means things occurring in reality. āVeryā had the same thing happen to it, as it originally meant ātruthfullyā (as in āverifyā or āverityā). If I say something is ātruly massiveā, am I likely specifying the massiveness is not imaginary in some sense, or am I trying to convey massiveness beyond the lower bounds of āmassiveā? Is a āproper bangerā of a tune distinct from an improper banger or is it just a highly bangerful banger?
fuzzy logic says this thing has mass most of the time, ish
english is a fuck
Bit late to tilt at this windmill tbh. Prescriptivist pedantry is prohibited past puberty. This was decreed by Maximilian D. English (the D stands for dictionary) in 1727. I donāt make the rules (MDE does)
tom sawyer literally rolling in wealth
but he never helps huck finn out financially?
pretty shit story, mark