Want to wade into the snowy 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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. A lot of people didnā€™t survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my accountā€™s cake day, too, so thatā€™s cool.)

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    7Ā·
    3 days ago

    I wonder why this blog post was brazen enough to talk about these problems. Perhaps by throwing in a little humility, they can make the hype pill that much easier to swallow.

    I feel this is an artefact of the near complete collapse of mainstream journalism, combined with modern tech business practises that are about securing investment and cashing out, and every other concern is secondary or even entirely absent. Itā€™s all just selling vibes.

    People only ever report the hype, the investors see everyone else following the hype and panic that they might be left out and bury you in cash. When it all turns sour and people ask pointed questions about the exact nature of the magic beans you were promising to grow, you can just point at the blog post that no-one read (or at least, only poor people read, and theyā€™re barely people if you think about it) and point out that you never hid anything.

    • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
      7Ā·
      3 days ago

      I donā€™t even think many AI developers realize that weā€™re in a hype bubble. From what I see, they genuinely believe that the Models Will Improve and that These Issues Will Get Fixed. (I see a lot of faculty in my department who still have these beliefs.)

      What these people do see, however, are a lot of haters who just cannot accept this wonderful new technology for some reason. AI is so magical that they donā€™t need to listen to the criticisms; surely theyā€™re trivial by comparison to magic, and whatever they are, These Issues Will Get Fixed. But lately they have realized that with the constant embarrassing AI failures (AI surely doesnā€™t have horrible ethics as well), there are a lot of haters who will swarm the announcement of any AI project now. The haters also tend to be people who actually know stuff and check things (tech journalists are incentivized to not do that), but it doesnā€™t matter because theyā€™re just random internet commenters, not big news outlets.

      My theory is that now they add a ton of caveats and disclaimers to their announcements in a vain attempt to reduce the backlash. Also if you criticize them, itā€™s actually your fault that it doesnā€™t work. Itā€™s Still Early Days. These Issues Will Get Fixed.