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.)
If you blocked SE Gyges on bsky1 (completely understandable) you may have missed that the former Obama official from Former Obama Admin Official Says It’s Time To Consider Military Strikes on Chinese Data Centers to Prevent Them From Reaching AGI has apparently received upwards of $500K from Coefficient Giving.
transcript
it’s cool that you’re doing bednets or whatever but if your ideological project has decided that unilaterally declaring wars of aggression because yud said to is one of its charter missions i think your project is bad and should be burned
it is unfortunate that most of your opposition is andreessen horowitz and peter thiel. you guys don’t even seem to know they are your opposition, though, since you keep making deals with them; so i’m sort of inclined to just think that everyone sucks here and to curse both your houses
for the low low price of, what is this, like fifteen million dollars? you too can get pet obama officials to bless eliezer yudkowsky’s fever dreams
gyges went off the deep end quite some time ago, up to and including support for a crypto/ai grifter’s “dystopiabreaker” claims that not falling with the autoconfabulator crowd is basically being anti-vaccine.
there’s nothing centrist about him, along the lovely racist theophite, he’s one of the more aggressive confabulation machinery grift promoters.
I assure you I mean centrist in the most derogatory way possible. His shtick is pretending he’s the adult in the room while bsky is too much of an anti-AI echo-chamber, but all he’s doing is being condescendingly dismissive of pretty much all anti-llm-peddler criticism (Zitron is a fraud, but I’m serious people so won’t engage with what he’s saying) while vaguely gesturing towards the slopocalypse being mostly business as usual except with a few more nifty tools, and he’s Always Posting.
No wonder he tripped on his dick the moment people pushed back and immediately trotted out the most laughable hackneyed persecution complex bullshit.
I don’t know who the lovely racist theophite is supposed to be, but to me the other notable gyges-style lowkey booster is quantian, who i knew as an occasional generally reasonable guest in the trashfuture pod. I wonder what caused him to turn into an LLM water-carrier and if it was at all more complicated than simply having AI adjacent investments.
It always surprises me when someone starts with “AI safety is a sex cult inspired by bad science fiction” or “prompt engineering is ritual magic without the fun sacred names” and then wheels to “but chatbots and ‘Agentic AI’ are still the wave of the future!”
I guess maybe the sex cult and the ritual magic make the standard grifting seem credible by comparison? Like, E-Dub and company don’t pass the sniff test but Saltman and friends seem like reasonable adults who can’t all be wrong?
For real. Even if he was at all genuine about worrying that not pushing back against anti-AI sentiment was setting the stage for more problematic anti-science backlash he still got lost in the sauce almost immediately.