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.)
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.
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.
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.
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)).
VR did get a preemptive attempt to enshittify it with the Meta-verse, and the tech isn’t quite there, but it is coming along. 3d printers are nice, haven’t been fucked up yet as far as I known.
Yeah, but they have not generated the science fiction futures, that is what I meant. They are just normal techs
Piles of screaming grey goo and people being like “Why are you running away? can’t you see it’s my grandmother?”
This was about where I gave up on Attack on Titan
No idea
who in the hell would want programmable matter anymore, after they’ve seen what happened to plain ol’ computer programming as already practiced
What’s that XKCD that goes over the ways that capitalists would be ruthlessly exploiting all those “secrets they don’t want you to know” for incredible profits?
https://xkcd.com/808/ . I think the XKCD undersells the ability of capitalists to chase dumb ideas, especially in the short term. Like Theranos was only a step or two up from Homeopathy in terms of bad science?
I mean they absolutely do, but nature and economics have their say. Like, you can make money selling homeopathy, because people who falsely believe in homeopathy are a market segment, but you can’t otherwise make money doing homeopathy because it doesn’t work. Similarly you can speculate on anything and come out ahead with the right combination of luck, publicity, and timing, but taking advantage of short-term volatility or noise in the market isn’t the same as actually doing something effective, and the farther away from truth you push the market the more damage it’s going to cause snapping back to reality.