The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.

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.)

  • flere-imsaho ( mawhrin@awful.systems ) 
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    1 day ago

    bow before the true champion of the working class, s e gyges:

    a lot of opposition to AI is rent seeking, and the material incentives of being a rentier, even a small time one, lead you towards fascist conclusions from first principles

    between him saying this, and other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious and being enslaved (and being actually fine with helping promulgating what they truly believe is slavery, because hey, you need to pay the rent), i am afraid something worse than usual entered the californian drinking water.

    (not linking to the skeet on purpose).

    • Architeuthis ( Architeuthis@awful.systems ) 
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      23 hours ago

      other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious

      Hey now, segyges has had his own whinging multithousand word blogpost on model consciousness out since early spring (tldr: currently not really conscious, but it’s inevitable because I really want it to, so don’t be on the wrong side of history when it happens).

      He seems to be angling for the role of TPOT scott alexander, except instead of gradually cultivating a consensus in favor of eugenics and being ruled by high IQ overmen his long term thing is establishing any perceived anti-AI stance as an unforgivable moral failing.

      • fullsquare ( fullsquare@awful.systems ) 
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        22 hours ago

        just yesterday that motherfucker posted allegation that “slop” is a word from nazi vocabulary. so that bitch says that any criticism of ai is far right signifier actually. as in, the product being sold on a promise of displacing all labour and redirecting all wealth to five sfba dipshits, and cooking brains of maga boomers worldwide as we speak

            • TrashGoblin ( TrashGoblin@awful.systems ) 
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              5 hours ago

              “Slop” as we use it to describe AI outputs came into the discourse via left-wing twitter and podcasts using “slop” as a term for mass entertainment media (like Marvel movies — cape slop). Used negatively but also self deprecatingly: I can’t wait for the new episode of “Stranger Things”, because I need my slop. The explicit metaphor is pigs happily eating buckets of food waste from a trough. It’s just slop. Nothing nefarious.

              • Hypnosifl ( Hypnosifl@awful.systems ) 
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                1 hour ago

                I think this may have been a case of the “dirtbag left” types using slang that originated on 4chan, I did a search with date restrictions on the 4plebs archive site and found posts using it for mindless entertainment going back to 2012 at least

                • blakestacey ( blakestacey@awful.systems ) 
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                  9 minutes ago

                  Here’s an example from an 1897 book review I found in the google books corpus: “There never was anything in all this world quite so provincial as American literature. When we over here are not reading slop we read the books that bear the approval of London.” Or this doggerel from the October 1920 issue of Farm Journal: “I read all kinds of printed junk / the good, the noble and the punk / the ancient and the new / and men who see me reading slop / predict that if I do not stop / my head will go askew.”

                  These both seem like wiktionary’s current sense 8 (“Content or entertainment which is worthless, or produced and consumed mindlessly”), so I don’t see any need to credit 4chan or 21st-century anti-Semites in general.

                  https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73708#comment-1642217

    • Soyweiser ( Soyweiser@awful.systems ) 
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      1 day ago

      Look he is right, if you redefine ‘rent’ to mean something totally else that includes people being paid for their labour.

      In the same way that telling people they should pay their fair share of taxes is actually saying you want to murder them. (Sorry crazy libertarian logic is the only way I can make sense of this).

    • istewart ( istewart@awful.systems ) 
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      1 day ago

      Yeah this is literally pants-on-head crazy. The explicit business model of the AI companies is rent-seeking on as much human activity as they can figure out how to intermediate. I suspect our friend is having a bit of a dark night of the soul, and trying to cope with it by turning his opposition’s obviously correct argument back on them in slipshod fashion. Dare I say, a typical Republican tactic?

    • I tried coming up with a good interpretation of what he said and I came up empty handed. I’m sure he will write a very helpful 5 part 20000 word blog post explaining exactly what he means.

      So far I’ve come up with this: the AI can supposedly do jobs faster and better than any human, so if we try to stop that, we are destroying economic value and “rent seeking”. If a thief goes to my house, steals one of my own drawings, scribbles on it himself to make it “better”, and sells it for 5 cents, I shouldn’t stop him because I will be destroying the economic value that he is creating. Oh yeah and this leads to fascism for some reason.

      And pro-AI people are not rent seeking at all. They just want to transfer the economic value of labor, knowledge, and expertise to whoever happens to own data centers.