Just two weeks til’ Halloween now.

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.)

  • Architeuthis ( Architeuthis@awful.systems ) English
    13·
    1 day ago

    Decent monday morning take from robert evans:

    Schrodinger’s double-think.

    transcription

    Quote skeet:

    This is a researcher at Anthropic. Some of these people have lost their minds! What is mainlining Claude all day doing to them?

    there are basically two possible futures at this point. either we’re all going to die of[sic] the future is going to be Good beyond our wildest imagination. the trick is to hold this duality in your head and not be driven insane by one side.

    Robert Evans (the only Robert Evans):

    some of these people get so locked into a labyrinth of Rationalist thought experiments that they are no longer really capable of interacting with reality 1/2

    you can in fact limit the horizons of possibility in your own mind so severely that you are no longer able to “think” in a useful way 2/2

    • schnoopy ( schnoopy@awful.systems ) English
      6·
      1 day ago

      Well, we are all going to die. So… musing over?

      We all get that right, everyone is going to die. Everything living you lay eyes on is going to die. I am 100% certain that the future contains the death of everyone alive today.

      Do they mean immanently? Why?

        • schnoopy ( schnoopy@awful.systems ) English
          7·
          21 hours ago

          I don’t have to be thrilled about death to have a basic understanding of how basic our understanding of consciousness, biology, and neurology are. Nor to know how much the physical world resists making tiny machines and measurements necessary to explore these frontiers, or the ethical dilemmas involved in exploring how consciousness works that vastly slow and perhaps outright prevent answering questions like “can we replace little bits of someone with some machine we can maintain easier in the interest of prolonging them?”

          Also I do happen to know how the universe ends.

          • scruiser ( scruiser@awful.systems ) English
            10·
            21 hours ago

            I don’t have to be thrilled about death to have a basic understanding of how basic our understanding of consciousness, biology, and neurology are.

            I think its the mid-wit meme, lesswrongers know just enough to imagine some grand solution like brain uploading or nanobots might cure death and not enough to appreciate all the reasons each of those solutions won’t work.

            • schnoopy ( schnoopy@awful.systems ) English
              7·
              21 hours ago

              One of the funniest things I ever read was a result of a survey of laypeople, physics UGs, physics Grads, postgrads, and faculty on various “cool future” things.

              predictions of the likelihood of things geeks constantly dream about craters once you get past the very basics. I can only assume that fields that aren’t mine, and are in general vastly more complex, are at least as full of evidence of god hating us and not allowing us nice things.

              I remember reading some of yuddies writing about nanomagic and noticing that the word “sticktion” never showed up.

              • scruiser ( scruiser@awful.systems ) English
                4·
                21 hours ago

                Judging by the way LLMs and generative AI has been used, even when we do get something vaguely like a realistic version of sci-fi fantasies, capitalism and people who can’t distinguish the limits of the real thing from the fantasy will manage to misuse it.

                • Soyweiser ( Soyweiser@awful.systems ) English
                  2·
                  15 hours ago

                  This doesnt apply to everything, like VR and 3d printers were a sci-fi fantasy and now they are mundane economically viable but not revolutionary products.

                  Biohacking and nanomachines otoh dont seem to be viable and you hear nothing about those anymore. Only a little bit in the uncreative (and going on the experts unrealistic) ‘ai will create bioweapons’ critihype. No ‘It will turn people into cyberzombies’ (quake 2 was pretty good (that was aliens not AI but still)).

    • swlabr ( swlabr@awful.systems ) English
      5·
      1 day ago

      (To the tune of the teenage mutant ninja turtles theme*): self-inflicted psychic debuff

      *The correct theme, not the heretical one. If you have to ask, you’re wrong