Skip Navigation

Posts
52
Comments
1,467
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • More than anything else, it was the skeptic movement’s decision that “no actually, being sexist is more fun” which drove out everyone interested in doing more than relitigating Bigfoot.

    The sewer-deep Islamophobia from "luminaries" like Richard Dawkins didn't help, either. One thing that is perhaps easy to miss now in looking back at "New Atheism" is how much it inhabited a shortly after 9/11 cultural space.

    And regarding the point above that the analysis needs "Explicit acknowledgement of the role of capitalism and colonialist tendencies in corrupting subcultures", the term New Atheism itself was a branding gimmick imposed from outside (codified by and perhaps first used in Wired magazine, of all places, AFAIK). The people who were already "in" it looked around and asked, "OK, what exactly is new about it?". As far as actual arguments went, there was little if anything that Paul Dirac had not already said in 1927.

  • I know both Watson and Myers. Neither of them were interested in "being tastemakers"; both of them stood on the right side of trying to make the skeptic/atheist spaces less of a sexist waste dump, and both of them caught hell for it. Myers was the one who blew the lid off Shermer's history of sexual harassment (and got blackballed from a lot of skeptics' events because of it). He was also part of the effort to make Atheism Plus a thing, and Watson was in favor too.* Carrier sued Myers and others after being removed from FreethoughtBlogs on what we'd now call #MeToo reasons. The rage tsunami directed at Watson for saying "guys, don't do that" was basically the trial run for GamerGate. More than anything else, it was the skeptic movement's decision that "no actually, being sexist is more fun" which drove out everyone interested in doing more than relitigating Bigfoot.

    Harriet Hall got into trouble for just-asking-questions transphobia.

    *The McCreight mentioned in that blog post later chose the name "Jey" and uses they/he pronouns.

  • The best I ever saw was a reply to a news story to the effect of, "If I were ever invited swimming in the Murderkill River, I would just not go."

    (This might be the original. Then again, it might not.)

  • J. Mijin Cha writes:

    My colleague reviewed a paper for the journal Climate and discovered it has been written by AI (citations that didn’t exist). Not only did the journal keep the paper, they asked her to re-review it. We are so cooked.

    Climate is an MDPI journal. Finland's journal-ranking service downgraded Climate to zero status.

  • Reported for being too soon

    :-P

  • "How do you keep yourself from going insane?"

    "I tell myself I'm a character from a book who comes to life and is also a robot!" (Hubert Farnsworth giggle)

  • Notice that the post is me quoting someone else.

  • That ramble fails to note the obvious: that the stills from Every Angel is Terrifying are Evangelion on ketamine.

  • No one point out that "keeping your head while all about you are losing theirs" is also a trope.

  • Handshake meme of Yud and Rorschach praising Harry S Truman

    From the comments:

    I got Claude to read this text and explain the proposed solution to me

    Once you start down the Claude path, forever will it dominate your destiny....

  • NotAwfulTech @awful.systems

    Coordinating a post-Calibre path forward

  • Growing up in Alabama, I didn't have the vocabulary to express it, but I definitely had the feeling when meeting some people, "Given the bullshit you alreasy buy, there is nothing in principle stopping you from going full fash." I get the same feeling now from Yuddites: "There is nothing in principle stopping you from going full Zizian."

  • The people who build these products aren't bad or evil.

    No, I'm pretty sure that a lot of them just are bad and evil.

    With the emergence of artificial intelligence, we stand at a crossroads. This technology holds genuine promise.

    [citation needed]

    [to a source that's not laundered slop, ya dingbats]

  • A belief system that inculates the believer into thinking that the work is the most important duty a human can perform, while also isolating them behind impenetrable pseudo-intellectual esoterica, while also funneling them into economic precarity... sounds like a recipe for delicious brownies trouble.

  • From Lila Byock:

    A 4th grader was assigned to design a book cover for Pippi Longstocking using Adobe for Education.

    The result is, in technical terms, four pictures of a schoolgirl waifu in fetishwear.

  • Dr. Casey Fiesler reports,

    I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let's dig into the findings.

    [...]

    Did you guess "that paper does not actually exist"?

    Did you also guess that NOT A SINGLE PAPER IN THEIR REFERENCES APPEARS TO EXIST? [...] When I was searching in various places to confirm that those citations were fabricated, Google's AI overview just kept the con going.

    Jill Walker Rettberg in the comments:

    There’s a peer reviewed published paper in AI & Society called Cognitive Imperialism and Artificial Intelligence which is clearly mostly AI-generated. Citations are real but almost all irrelevant. I emailed the editors weeks ago but it’s still up there and getting cited.

  • TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th October 2025 - awful.systems

    MoreWrite @awful.systems

    Book Review: Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Scott Aaronson

    SneerClub @awful.systems

    General HPMoR sneer collection

    SneerClub @awful.systems

    The shocking rise of one of the tech right’s favorite posters

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systems

    SneerClub @awful.systems

    Wake up babe, new "in this moment I am enlightened" copypasta just dropped

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Credulous coverage of AI slop on Wikipedia

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9 March 2025

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23 February 2025

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    DeepSeek might not be such good news for energy after all

    MoreWrite @awful.systems

    Random Positivity Thread: Happy Book Memories

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd February 2025

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th January 2025 - awful.systems

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Facebook "Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database, Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal"

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Elsevier: Proudly charging you money so its AI can make your articles worse

    SneerClub @awful.systems

    The Professor Assigns Their Own Book — But Now With a Tech Bubble in the Middle Step

    MoreWrite @awful.systems

    Harmonice Mundi Books: An idea for an ethical academic publisher

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 6 October 2025