Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 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.)
A nice long essay by Freddie deBoer for our holiday week: the release of GPT-5; I wholly recommend reading the whole thing!
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-rage-of-the-ai-guy?fbclid=IwY2xjawL997BleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHquW8yelFLOgdFaXhSV4P2Na_7y570BG-PNLQNiaL2IDINneF433FmchhTm8_aem_lUc_4aSj4rMAmIZ8i7io_w
Choice snippet to whet your appetites:
“With all of this, I’m only asking you to observe the world around you and report back on whether revolutionary change has in fact happened. I understand, we are still very early in the history of LLMs. Maybe they’ll actually change the world, the way they’re projected to. But, look, within a quarter-century of the automobile becoming available as a mass consumer technology, its adoption had utterly changed the lived environment of the United States. You only had to walk outside to see the changes they had wrought. So too with electrification: if you went to the top of a hill overlooking a town at night pre-electrification, then went again after that town electrified, you’d see the immensity of that change with your own two eyes. Compare the maternal death rate in 1800 with the maternal death rate in 2000 and you will see what epoch-changing technological advance looks like. Consider how slowly the news of King William IV’s death spread throughout the world in 1837 and then look at how quickly the news of his successor Queen Victoria’s death spread in 1901, to see truly remarkable change via technology. AI chatbots and shitty clickbait videos choking the social internet do not rate in that context, I’m sorry. I will be impressed with the changes wrought by the supposed AI era when you can show me those changes rather than telling me that they’re going to happen. Show me. Show me!”
like with the terrorist group isil, you should not give it to freddie de fucking boer.
I’m ignorant- give me the lore drop.
Back in 2017, Freddie lost an argument with Malcolm Harris, lobbed some completely made-up sexual harassment allegations against Harris, and then blamed the whole thing on a bipolar episode. Nowadays he just makes up professors to get mad at.
According to wikipedia he’s a eugenics enjoyer. Another W for nominative determinism I guess.
Explains his gushing over Scott in the intro.
I still think he makes a lot of good points in that promptfondlers are losing their shit because people aren’t buyin the swill they’re selling.
In a similar vein, check out this comment on LW.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hhbibJGt2aQqKJLb7/shortform-1?commentId=25HfwcGxC3Gxy9sHi
So belieiving in the inevitable coming of the robot god is dogma on LW now. This is a cult.
Also note the standard error that people make (Which Rationalists talk about but people also never seem to internalize) Scott is wise and knowledgeable, until we get to a thing DeBoer knows about, and then it suddenly is strange and out of place. But the wise and knowledgeable thing doesn’t get revalued, which considering the complaint about Scott is a bit of a lack of selfawareness moment. Almost like something that looks like it is written in wise and knowledgeable and pleasing way doesn’t have to be that. Anyway, sorry for the sidetrack we were talking about genAI and this is not relevant to that.
Gell-Mann amnesia.
Hey come now, it is a common Dutch last name. Don’t slander Dutch people who are called boer (farmer) like that. Do it for the right reasons. We all suck, no matter our last names.
Wasn’t the original designation of Boers (as in the Boer war) a denigrating term?
No idea. Prob best to check wikipedia for that. Could be last names, could be occupation, could be some denigrating term.
Looks like it’s an endonym, or was at the time. OFC the reason for the Great Trek was that the boers were pissed they couldn’t have slaves anymore while under British rule. Charming people all around.
Oof, thanks for the heads up!
Guh wtf
I feel ya, I got got by that Sam Kriss piece dunking on hpmor last week.
Never trust a guy with a substack
I’m waiting for the day substack puts RSS access behind a paywall. Unfortunately some decent blogs are still on that platform
I was thinking about that in reaction to something else. Anytime somebody casually brings up chrischan (she has been a decades long stalking/harassement target) should have been a bit of a red flag.
(E: not blaming people for missing that btw, it just stood out to me).
Could be worse, I got got by some neofascist scum who was dunking on rationalists.
This is just a strictly worse version of David’s AGI (A Guy in India) sneer.
Freddy is clearly gesturing at a critique of a kind of Whig history here, and I fully agree but think his overall implications (at least so far) are off-base. He seems to be arguing that AI-based technological processes are not inevitable and that the political, economic, and social worlds are not actually required by physical necessity to follow the course predicted by its modern prophets of doom. But I think the appropriate followup to this understanding of history is that things, broadly speaking, don’t just happen. History is experienced in the active voice, not the passive, and people doing things now is what can shape the kind of future we get. In as much as the Internet was coopted by capitalism and turned into its present form, that should be understood as a consequence of decisions people made at the time. We can understand the reasons for those decisions and why they didn’t choose differently to carry us down alternate paths, but that should not deny their agency, lest we lose sight of our own.