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 so 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.)
in which le gwern and sword guy neal sponsor a writing contest
https://www.gpuworld.org/
I may as well through my name in the hat, I could use the cash. but, who the hell gave them $100k for this? I guess BTC is back up.
So I love Neal’s books, I think he’s a fun story-teller and anathems orbital mechanics scene has loads more tension than any slop in something like interstellar.
But whenever he gets involved in social-technological commentary I am reminded of Ursala Le Guinn’s remarks on SciFi authors being professional liars, not prophets.
Anyway, scour the submissions for little Lytton contest entrants
The advent of the AI bubble has made this distinction much more trenchant for me. I was already somewhat aware before, but I am now much more likely to judge someone’s character on whether they believe science fiction, broadly, is a roadmap to the future or a reflection and exploration of current conditions and historical contingencies.
When they are using science fiction as a venue to be weirdly horny, what are they weirdly horny for, and in how many star systems do they know the age-of-consent laws?
The main thing I have noticed, thinking back, is that his books often require an Interesting Billionaire to move the plot forward – Dodge, T.R. Schmidt, Eliza, the sultan of Kinakuta, whatever – and my suspension of disbelief can no longer always rise to the occasion on that count, even in an SF setting. Which is also I think why Anathem remains my favorite.
@picklefactory The point of the “interesting billionaire to move the plot forward” is that for science fiction to engage the reader it plausibly needs a character with *agency*, i.e. the ability to drive a change in the status quo.
Having a Magic Billionaire on call allows the author to neatly sidestep the humongous amount of maneuvering it takes to put an Ordinary Joe in a position to start the plot moving. (Neal did it in Cryptonomicon and it was painful to behold: ate a third of the book.)
It has been ages since I’ve read them but anathem is definitely his best work. I did really enjoy zodiac, snowcrash, and the cryptonomicon when I read them ~15 years ago though.
His books are always a bit libertarian (usa meaning, derogatory) although snowcrash is a very funny send up of what that might actually look like if adopted wholeheartedly so idk how much they can be said to endorse it wholeheartedly.
Some of it reminds me of the incoherence of Pratchett’s politics. A sort of “Just let smart people with good values do what they want and things will be ok” without establishing how you determine who that applies to or really sitting with how fragile that is.
Recycling previous joke: https://awful.systems/post/6373632/9569779
I’m convinced Stephenson is personally very right wing but also smart enough not to advertise it publicly.
@gerikson I know Neal (we’ve gone drinking together) and I think he *is* right wing/conservative by disposition, but also thoughtful enough to understand nuance and shades of grey: he’s not a reflexive knee-jerk type, or willing to follow someone else’s flag.
Damn, imagine living in this world and being like “You know, those people who’d keep women chained to the house, kill the gays, force a state religion on people, and segregated society have some good points”
Did you ever ask him about his day job? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson#Outside_of_writing is pretty colorful and the sword kickstarter especially was not a good look.
@nfultz @techtakes Neal is a great big history nerd. I do not take him for a big-time business brain.
Lol. Lmao.
Turns out the only cause of inequality in the world is that there’s just too much progress. Once the Best GPU has finally been designed, it’ll just keep rolling off the production line, and those charitable manufacturers will gladly distribute them at bargain prices to all the impoverished masses. Who all have a reliable source of energy to devote to churning out slop.
writing a story that looks like it’s about everyone having their own LLMs but it’s actually about the predicted state of clime catastrophe by 2040 and the consequences of the fascist turn in world politics, and the GPUs don’t make the slightest difference to anything and don’t really matter for the plot
What the hell kind of prompt is this oh my god. I’m getting bored just contemplating the idea of trying to think up a story.
No.
I suppose my only-half-joking grant proposal I talk about with linguist friends in which you run an entire large text through a base-model LLM, extract the residual stream, and score every token according to perplexity compared to the ground truth reality in order to ask and answer super interesting questions about information theory in human communication doesn’t count?
s/gpu/Butt-Face Chester Cheeks/g and you got yourself a deal.
“The year is 2040. Everybody has access to a Butt-Face Chester Cheeks. What happens in this butt-business as usual future?”
Keep in mind that Butt-Face Chester Cheeks is simply a special case of Tickle Me Elmo, and strategize accordingly
the third name is a vc-type, and I bet it won’t take much scratching to find that linked to our good friends and the ongoing public image adjustment campaign that’s seeing funding from a few corners
I dug into the link at the bottom of the rfp, it’s definitely a lot more crypto / ethereum leaning than ai, none of the names rang any bells to me as I’m less acquainted with that group. https://www.paradigm.xyz/frontiers-2026 and https://www.paradigm.xyz/writing but they do have shocking amounts of js on their pages, hung the tab, probably trying to mine something.