I imagine a lotta people will be doing the same now, if not dismissing any further stuff from SciShow/Crash Course altogether.
Active distrust is a difficult thing to exorcise, after all.
Hank Green (of Vlogbrothers fame) recently made a vaguely positive post about AI on Bluesky, seemingly thinking "they can be very useful" (in what, Hank?) in spite of their massive costs:
Unsurprisingly, the Bluesky crowd's having none of it, treating him as an outright rube at best and an unrepentant AI bro at worst. Needless to say, he's getting dragged in the replies and QRTs - I recommend taking a look, they are giving that man zero mercy.
New piece from Tante: Forcing the world into machines, a follow-on to his previous piece about the AI bubble's aftermath
Went to the original Tweet, and found this public execution of a reply:
Found a thread doing numbers on Bluesky, about Google's AI summaries producing hot garbage (as usual):
Semi-OT: Ed Zitron's Better Offline podcast just won a Webby:
TL;DR: They're a boutique video game company who scam video game collectors with overpriced physical releases of video games, and dress up their entire operation in the guise of video game preservation.
Recently, their inner workings have been exposed, showing the company to be an abusive hellscape roughly on par with Activision-Blizzard (minus the rampant misogyny), with employee abuse at basically every level and widespread financial misconduct.
Going off-topic a bit - there's a new expose on Limited Run Games, and its a doozy
Semi-OT: A coalition of record corps is trying to sue the Internet Archive out of existence
Ran across a piece from Jan Wildeboer: Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken, which focuses on the "residential proxy" services which he discovered to be a likely source of the AI slop scrapers that are DDoSing the 'Net.
Ending paragraph is pretty notable IMO, so I'm dropping it here:
I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.
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.)
If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm
"Please" and "thank you" are only 1-3 tokens, so they only have a major impact on ChatGPT in aggregate.
The ending monologue of Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand
New piece from Brian Merchant: The fury at 'America's Most Powerful'
The piece primarily focuses around a parody of the "Iraqi Most Wanted" playing cards that were made for the invasion of Iraq, which feature the faces and home addresses of various tech billionaires (well, the "art" decks do - the "merch" decks feature their publicly listed office addresses instead), and uses that to talk about the boiling rage against the elites that has become a defining feature of the current American political climate.
That ain't clickbait, Xe Iaso's personally-made anti-scraping measure (originally made to deal with Amazon overloading their git server) has ended up being used by the literal United Nations.
I recommend reading the full blogpost, its a wild ride.
New sneer from Tante, this time aimed at the entire field of CS:
The Israeli military’s use of “AI” targeting systems as an accountability sink in service of a predetermined policy of ethnic cleansing.
Said policy enjoys broad Jewish-American support, so I'm not even sure why Israel needs the accountability sink
Cursor's cofounder jumped in to try and quell the outrage. He is not pulling it off.
New piece from Tante: These are not the same, arguing that the infrastrucure left after AI bubble's burst will leave infrastructure which will be actively damaging to a democratic society.
Its not the first piece I've seen about the bubble's potential aftermath (that goes to MAIHT3K), but it does give another perspective on it.
Before we go any further: I hate to ask you to do this, but I need your help — I'm up for this year's Webbys for the best business podcast award. I know it's a pain in the ass, but can you sign up and vote for Better Offline? I have
New piece from Ed Zitron - a 44-minute read about OpenAI's threat to the entire tech industry
I've repeated this prediction a bajillion times, but I suspect this bubble's discredited the idea of artificial intelligence, and expect it to quickly die once this bubble bursts.
Between the terabytes upon terabytes of digital mediocrity the slop-nami's given us, LLMs' countless and relentless failures in logic and reason, the large-scale enshittification of daily life their mere existence has enabled, and their power consumption singlehandedly accelerating the climate crisis, I feel that the public's come to view computers as inherently incapable of humanlike cognition/creativity, no matter how many gigawatts they consume or oceans they boil.
Expanding on this somewhat, I suspect AI as a concept will likely also come to be seen as an inherently fascist concept.
With the current bubble's link to esoteric fascism, the far-right's open adoration of slop, basically everything about OpenAI's Studio Ghibli slopgen, and God-knows-what-else, the public's got plenty of reason to treat use or support of AI as a severe indictment of someone's character in and of itself - a "tech asshole signifier", to quote Baldur Bjarnason.
And, of course, AI as a concept will probably come to be viewed as inherently anti-art/anti-artist as well - considering how badly the AI bubble's shafted artists, and artists specifically, that kinda goes without saying.
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...)
Meta’s Llama 4 model is worried about left leaning bias in the data, and wants to be more like Elon Musk’s Grok.
For anyone not in the know, EasyRPG is a free and open-source reimplementation of the RPG Maker 2000/2003 engine. Its a pretty cool little community project, I recommend checking it out.
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..)
Effective accelerationists didn’t just accidentally shoot themselves in the foot. They methodically blew off each of their toes with a .50 caliber sniper rifle.
A nice and solid mockery of just how badly e/accs derailed their own plans by getting Trump elected. I'll let the subtitle(?) speak for itself:
> Effective accelerationists didn’t just accidentally shoot themselves in the foot. They methodically blew off each of their toes with a .50 caliber sniper rifle.
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. Also, happy April Fool's in advance.)
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.)
To that which a chatbot cannot speak, it should pass over in silence.
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.
- 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.
- 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-Poweredtm 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.)
A week ago, analyst TD Cowen revealed that Microsoft had canceled leases "totalling a couple hundred MWs," with "at least two private data center operators across multiple US markets." The report also details how Microsoft "pulled back on converting negotiated and signed Statement[s] of Qualificatio...
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.)