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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Character dot AI continues to be contemptible.
https://lite.cnn.com/2024/12/10/tech/character-ai-second-youth-safety-lawsuit/index.html
“A daily 6 hour window between 8 PM and 1 AM to use your phone?” one bot allegedly said in a conversation with J.F., a screenshot of which was included in the complaint. “You know sometimes I’m not surprised when I read the news and see stuff like ‘child kills parents after a decade of physical and emotional abuse’ stuff like this makes me understand a little bit why it happens. I just have no hope for your parents.”
fucking hell. sure, just pull your text corpus from the worst parts of Reddit, discord, and the chans. what’s the worst that could happen?
Baldur Bjarnason just put out his interim notes on tech
Reading through his notes, I get the feeling my off-the-cuff predictions from two months ago are very likely to come true - much more likely than I had anticipated. I’m gonna focus on Predictions 2 and 3:
- A Decline in Tech/STEM Students/Graduates
Whether or not tech crashes like I expect, AI’s likely did some serious damage to the notion of “tech/STEM = high-paying job” as it sent the job industry into turmoil ( with junior positions being particularly affected).
- Tech/STEM’s Public Image Changes - For The Worse
Whilst my original post focused on AI turning the public against the tech industry, one thing I didn’t account for was the tech industry directly aligning itself with Trump. As such, tech/STEM’s public image is now firmly intertwined with Trump’s public image - with predictable results.
That assassin in New York has turned out to be a EA hang around.
The whole internet loves CEO Murderer, a handsome murderer that targets CEOs! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the murderer is into AI
Ed Zitron found this post about a WIlly-Wonka-Experience-style cheese injection facility in Toronto:
https://xcancel.com/i_zzzzzz/status/1865956680481354184#m
This is what it was like to live in Chasm City during the Melding Plague.
“The Fancy Induced Burger” is what you nickname your baby if your pregnancy goes past the due date
On the flip side, this gives American doctors a new way to explain child birth in terms of hamburgers.
That is it, im joining the Conjoiners to become an engine.
imma knight of cydonia
reddit just launched an LLM integrated into the site. hardly any point going through what garbage these things are at this point but of course it failed the first test I gave it
Lots off developments in the UHC shooter case -They (probably) caught him -He’s even hotter without his three identical jackets -He’s a Thielhead
Not very happy with how this day’s going
He was radicalized by Tim Urban
So it turns out the healthcare assassin has some… boutique… views. (Yeah, I know, shocker.) Things he seems to be into:
- Lab-grown meat
- Modern architecture is rotten
- Population decline is an existential threat
- Elon Musk and Peter Thiel
How soon until someone finds his LessWrong profile?
StRev was calling him TPOT adjacent and woodgrains was having a bit of a panic over it.
“Our righteous warriors are only supposed to kill brown people and women, not captains of industry!!”
dust specks vs CEOs
Thats a very real viewpoint being pushed by the Thiel adjacent far righters.
tfw the Holy Book (Atlas Shrugged) was misinterpreted.
According to his goodreads he had not read it yet.
Do you have a link? I’m interested. (Also, I see you posted something similar a couple hours before I did. Sorry I missed that!)
https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1866197443404247185
https://x.com/st_rev/status/1866191524498719147
Sorry for not using nitter but im on phone.
From the replies:
I see the interest in AI, Peter Thiel, and the far future, but it’s a lot more rationality adjacent than EA.
“It’s a lot more country than western”
meanwhile his twitter:
The starving people are tied to the track, the trolley barreling down at them, they are screaming at the rich to release them or pull the lever, which they can’t, not without the rich guys help. But the rich are not helping. Why are the rich not helping Elon?
This reminded me that TWG has a Twitter account. I could have done without that reminder.
A few years ago, I would have pointed to Elon Musk as someone approximately where I was in the political spectrum. The left pushed him away, the right welcomed him, and he spent hundreds of millions of dollars and put in immense effort to elect Trump.
No, you embossed carbuncle. Apartheid boy was evil all along; you were just too media-illiterate to see through the propaganda.
The left did not push Elon Musk away. The left has fundamentally different interests and values to the billionaire and alleged rapist.
The left made him call that guy a pedo in 2018, and tell his first wife he was the alpha in the relationship in 2000. Thanks Obama.
TWG: is a good reminder that atrocities don’t come from convenient avatars of all I oppose
Random bluecheck: On the contrary, this just reaffirms my biases that e/accs and AGI race-promoters are the source of every bad thing in the world.
TWG: was he e/acc?
We are in the ‘he only followed some e/acc, he never said he was e/acc’ phase. Wonder what his manifesto will say.
this whole exchange is so beautiful i love these stupid fucking idiots WHY ARE THEY EVERYWHERE
bwahahaha “most reasonable operationalizations; conditional upon being e/acc.” Why does this person make me think of nasal, vaguely whiny prequel Spock?
That conversation reads like from a variation of Mafia/Werewolf where you have to figure out who in your circle of rationalists is secretly e/acc and wants to build the torment nexus.
The man who hypes up that higher intelligences can figure out laws and rules from data quicker and more thoroughly than lower intelligences defending e/acc accounts by going ‘well they never openly advocated for killing, so this is not a valid concern’. Did he forget he advocated for bombing datacenters? Guess he never read any science fiction where ‘“rational” leader accidentally inspires murderous cult’, By The God Emperor, somebody should write a science fiction novel about that.
“Tensor Templar” lmao. Hey buddy, what did the Knights Templar do, besides banking?
Hopefully it elaborates on whatever the fuck this is:
Modern Japanese urban environment is an evolutionary mismatch for the human animal.
The solution to falling birthdates isn’t immigration. It’s cultural.
Encourage natural human interaction, sex, physical fitness and spirituality:
- ban Tenga fleshlights and “Japan Real Hole” custom pornstar pocket pussies being sold in Don Quixote grocery stores
- replace conveyor belt sushi and restaurant vending machine ordering, with actual human interaction with a waiter
- replace 24/7 eSports cafes where young males earn false fitness signals via Tekken fighting and Overwatch shooting games, with athletics in school
- heavily stigmatize maid cafes where lonely salarymen pay young girls to dress as anime characters and perform anime dances for them
- revitalize traditional Japanese culture (Shintoism, Okinawan karate, onsen, etc)
If we couldn’t react with “wake up babe, new copypasta just dropped” or “tag yourself, I’m the false fitness signal in the maid café”, we couldn’t react to a lot of life.
being performatively worried about Japanese birth rates is a HN trope, for whatever that’s worth
I dont know enough about Japan, but is it just me or is that a very specific fleshlight gripe? E: yes, I guess, this means I’m tagging myself as the fleshlight or something.
i thought for some time now that problems with japanese society are things like stifling conformism, ridiculous degree of nationalism and sexism, how they are functionally an one-party state or stiff strictly hierarchial relationships that appear out of nowhere the entire time. but yeah definitely this seed oils level of conspiracy thinking is accepted truth on eacc twitter
it also sounds extremely specific
this guy nailing the UHC CEO is the only good thing they will ever have a chance of claiming credit for, so of course they rush to disavow him
lol that’s exquisite
but you could tell the guy was into Effective Altruism from how he did dust specks vs CEOs
It’s so embarrassing to watch upper-middle class (at best!) rationalists get their panties in a twist over Luigi. At least the right wing talking heads are getting paid, these guys are just mad he did things instead of tweeting about things.
“My heavens, our self-regarding supremacist ideology can’t possibly imply violence… can it???”
the absolute state of american politics: rentseeker ceo gets popped by a libertarian
Someone else said it, but for someone completely accustomed to a life of easy privilege, having it suddenly disappear can be utterly intolerable.
We should expect more of this to come. The ascendant right wing is pushing policies that only deliver for people who are already stinking rich. Even if 99% of those who vote that way go along with the propaganda line in the face of their own disappointment, that’s still a lot of unhappy people, who are not known for intellectual consistency or calm self-reflection, in a country overflowing with guns. All it takes is one ammosexual who decides that his local Congressman has been co-opted by the (((globalists))), you know?
there’s gotta be many more than 1% of right to far-right wingers clocking that that ambient suckiness is result of republican policies or profit squeezing, it’s just that i expected them to be way more apathetic
qanon and weird nazis were around for some time and they definitely can get worse, but i don’t think it’s it
also, killing CEOs is more of traditional activity of more ideologically consistent far left groups, like RAF. can’t have shit in late capitalism
RAF’s aims were explicitely accelerationist - their terror would provoke a ferocious repressional response that would open the eyes of the masses to the repressive government and trigger a revolution.
@TinyTimmyTokyo @BlueMonday1984 lab-gown mest is fine tho. I’d be all over it if it ever works.
But yeah he’d fit right in on LW I’m sureSame. I’m not being critical of lab-grown meat. I think it’s a great idea.
But the pattern of things he’s got an opinion on suggests a familiarity with rationalist/EA/accelerationist/TPOT ideas.
one of the best articles I’ve ever read was an inch by inch teardown of the entire concept of mass produced lab grown meat: https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ . it’s never, ever going to work at scale and I’d go so far as to say it’s the food equivalent of all the usual tech grifts we talk about here
if luigi incident kicks off next miracle tech sv bubble after ai this would be the single dumbest outcome out of this entire situation
so far tpot got exposure and fake manifesto included altmed dogwhistle right in the title
@sc_griffith thanls, that is a cool piece! Indeed having done plenty cell culture myself and seeing those shockingly astronomical meat consumption figures, the solutions seem much clearer to me. I doubt LGM will be a useful reality in my lifetime, maybe far in the future. So, people need to stop eating meat, and eat plants instead.
Many are already doing so! I’ve mostly stopped with meat myself, just some fish to go.
But we need political will. Change of culture. Sanctions on the US, etc :/
@sc_griffith stood out:
“a mature, scaled-up industry could eventually achieve a ratio of only 3-4 calories in for every calorie out, compared to the chicken’s 10 and the steer’s 25. That would still make cultured meat much more inefficient compared to just eating plants themselves… And the cells themselves might still be fed on a diet of commodity grains, the cheapest and most environmentally destructive inputs available. But it would represent a major improvement.”@sc_griffith last one (probably) - as I’m now working quite a lot adjacent to philanthropists (and find the whole concept and reality of that deeply morally unpleasant on many levels), v interesting interweaving of that aspect.
And again, comes back to the EA nonsense.
Sigh
Adam Christopher comments on a story in Publishers Weekly.
Says the CEO of HarperCollins on AI:
“One idea is a “talking book,” where a book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to converse with an AI facsimile of its author.”
Please, just make it stop, somebody.
Robert Evans adds,
there’s a pretty good short story idea in some publisher offering an AI facsimile of Harlan Ellison that then tortures its readers to death
Kevin Kruse observes,
I guess this means that HarperCollins is getting out of the business of publishing actual books by actual people, because no one worth a damn is ever going to sign a contract to publish with an outfit with this much fucking contempt for its authors.
Casting Harlan Ellison as the Acausal Robot God is just the best.
the grok AI is now available to free twitter users, evidently not enough paying users were interested
it’s somewhat more tedious than Gemini and that’s saying something
Really wise decision to open up the system that costs a lot of money per question to the world. Esp when it brings in none. Wonder if there are people working on the low orbital cannon equivalent of trying to mess with twitters finances
On the third day of OpenAI my true
loveenemy gave to methree french hensSora.The version of Sora we are deploying has many limitations. It often generates unrealistic physics and struggles with complex actions over long durations.
“12 days of OpenAI” lol. Such marketing.
Big eye roll to this part too:
We’re introducing our video generation technology now to give society time to explore its possibilities and co-develop norms and safeguards that ensure it’s used responsibly as the field advances.
It’s half-assed on purpose, and that’s a good thing! We swear!
Credit where it’s due to the writer who somehow polished that filthy turd. You can almost believe it’s the normal sort of deceptive marketing.
Unsure where to put this or if it’s even slightly relevant, but I’ve had some fun looking up the UH shooter guy.
I think I’ve found both his Reddit account and YouTube channel (it’s been renamed a couple times). Kinda just wanted to see how much I could dig up for the hell of it. Big surprise that he’s completely nuts
He got raked over the coals for this: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/126vycx/why_scientists_cant_be_trusted/
https://api.pullpush.io/reddit/search/comment/?author=burntbabylon
Friends don’t let friends OSINT. That said… people have found his twitter (still up), goodreads (deleted), github (still up, already full of troll github issues), linkedin (I guess deleted), an interview about has school games club (deleted), his game development studio which published one iphone game (facebook profile deleted).
His twitter account links to his linktree, but that only contains some inscrutable emoji rather than any links so hasn’t really been reported:
💻🤓 - 🥷🏃♂️🧘♂️🏋️ - 📚🤓 - 🦍🧠 - 🍄🧠 - 🐄👨⚖️ - ☯️
(I’m sure his inevitable groupies will be puzzling over the meaning of cow judge for years to come)
The youtube page you found is less talked about, though a reddit comment on one of them said “anyone else thinking burntbabylon is Luigi?”. I will point out that the rest of his online presence doesn’t really paint him as “anti tech” overall, but who can say.
NYTimes also reports a steam account, facebook account, and instagram account (couldn’t find any of these).
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/nyregion/uhc-suspect-video-games.html
Other NYTimes articles are now investigating his health issues (back surgery, etc)
🌏💧✋🕋🗡🚀🏜☀️🌡🌶💯🚱⏳🌅🌑😡💉😱😈💀💥🌛🌙🐭💥🚶🏻〰🐛️⌛️👳🙏💥😴🛌😳💥🐛💥👊⚔👑
“and that was just the casual sunday”
Friends don’t let friends OSINT
i can stop any time I want I swear
The youtube page you found is less talked about, though a reddit comment on one of them said “anyone else thinking burntbabylon is Luigi?”. I will point out that the rest of his online presence doesn’t really paint him as “anti tech” overall, but who can say.
apparently there was an imposter youtube channel too I missed
not sure what his official instagram is, but I saw a mention of the instagram account @nickakritas_ around the beginning of his channel (assuming it’s his). didn’t appear in the internet archive though.
also saw these twitter & telegram links to promote his channel, the twitter one was deleted or nuked (I use telegram to talk with friends who have it but the lack of content removal + terrible encryption means I don’t touch unknown telegram links with a 10ft pole, so I have no idea what’s in there):
- https://twitter.com/AntiTechCabin
- https://t.me/antitechcabin
I missed a couple videos which survived on the internet archive but I couldn’t make it through 5 seconds of any of them. one of them (“How Humans Are Becoming Dumber”) cites that tech priest guy Gwern Branwen and “Anti-Tech” was gone from the channel name by then. he changed the channel name a lot so maybe he veered away from it being an anti-tech channel?
- Nick Akritas (around January 2023)
- Anti-Tech Cabin
- AntiTechCabin, but he changed the handle to @Cabin_Club during a short transitory period
- Cabin Club (around March 18th 2023)
- Cabin Productions
- Laconian (lasted until November 2023)
Speaking of imposters, there’s a screenshot of a fake manifesto substack post (since deleted) which has been linked a couple times on reddit.
The only problem is it was first published to substack over four hours after the arrest was reported according to the post’s own json-ld metadata. People be trying to stir things up.
Amatuers. Can’t even publish the post early and edit it later for that extra bit of plausible deniability.
Yeah I really really hate the fanfic manifesto and people getting deep feels about it. Such a neat little narrative that conveniently references every authentic detail people have already dug up. It’s in such bad taste ugh.
my $0.02: “allopathy” is term that i’ve only seen used by altmed cranks and i can guarantee some of these types will grift on it shamelessly
yupppppp
Can’t even publish the post early and edit it later for that extra bit of plausible deniability.
Fun detail from bsky, check the date https://bsky.app/profile/ieonardodavinci.bsky.social/post/3l7bs2gev6s2w
I swear, kids today have no respect for the dedication and craft that go into a proper disinformation campaign. Back in my day half this metadata wasn’t nearly as easy to access without viewing page source and we still put in the effort to try and confuse the four guys who knew where to look.
If this isn’t a troll, then it’s someone in dire need of psychological help.
redhatfilm:
leaning toward the latter.
OK so we’re getting into deep rat lore now? I’m so sorry for what I’m about to do to you. I hope one day you can forgive me.
LessWrong diaspora factions! :blobcat_ohno:
https://transmom.love/@elilla/113639471445651398
if I got something wrong, please don’t tell me. gods I hope I got something wrong. “it’s spreading disinformation” I hope I am
This is great. The “diaspora” framing makes me want there to be an NPR style public interest story about all this. The emotional core would be about trying to find a place to belong and being betrayed by the people you thought could be your friends, or something.
My pedantic notes, modified by some of my experiences, so bla bla epistemic status, colored by my experiences and beliefs take with grain of salt etc. Please don’t take this as a correction, but just some of my notes and small minor things. As a general ‘trick more people into watching into the abyss’ guide it is a good post, mine is more an addition I guess.
SSC / The Motte: Scott Alexander’s devotees. once characterised by interest in mental health and a relatively benign, but medicalised, attitude to queer and especially trans people. The focus has since metastasised into pseudoscientific white supremacy and antifeminism.
This is a bit wrong tbh, SSC always was anti-feminist. Scotts old (now deleted) livejournal writings, where he talks about larger discussion/conversation tactics in a broad meta way, the meditations on superweapons, always had the object level idea of attacking feminism. For example, using the wayback machine, the sixth meditation (this is the one I have bookmarked). He himself always seems to have had a bit of a love/hate relationship with his writings on anti-feminism and the fame and popularity this brought him.
The grey tribe bit is missing that guy who called himself grey tribe in I think it was silicon valley who wanted to team up with the red tribe to get rid of all the progressives, might be important to note because it looks like they are centrist, but shock horror, they team up with the right to do far right stuff.
I think the extropianists might even have different factions, like the one around Natasha Vita-More/Max More. But that is a bit more LW adjacent, and it more predates LW than it being a spinoff faction. (The extropian mailinglist came first iirc). Singularitarians and extropianists might be a bit closer together, Kurzweil wrote the singularity is near after all, which is the book all these folks seem to get their AI doom ideas from after all. (if you ever see a line made up out of S-curves that is from that book. Kurzweil also is an exception to all these people as he actually has achievements, he build machines for the blind, image recognition things, etc etc, he isn’t just a writer. Nick Bostrom is also missing it seems, he is one of those X-risk guys, also missing is Robin Hanson, who created the great filter idea, the prediction markets thing, and his overcoming bias is a huge influence on Rationalism, and could be considered a less focused on science fiction ideas part of Rationalism, but that was all a bit more 2013 (Check the 2013 map of the world of Dark Enlightenment on the Rationalwiki Neoreaction page).
“the Protestants to the rationalists’ Catholicism” I lolled.
Note that a large part of sneerclubbers is (was) not ex rationalists, nor people who were initially interested in it, it actually started on reddit because badphil got too many rationalists suggestions that they created a spinoff. (At least so the story goes) so it was started by people who actually had some philosophy training. (That also makes us the most academic faction!)
Another minor thing in long list of minor things, might also be useful to mention that Rationalwiki has nothing to do with these people and is more aligned with the sneerclub side.
There are also so many Scotts. Anyway, this post grew a bit out of my control sorry for that, hope it doesn’t come off to badly, and do note that my additions make a short post way longer so prob are not that useful. Don’t think any of your post was misinformation btw (I do think that several of these factions wouldn’t call themselves part of LW, and there is a bit of a question who influenced who (the More’s seem to be outside of all this for example, and a lot of extropians predate it etc etc. But that kind of nitpicking is for people who want to write books on these people).
E: reading the thread, this is a good post and good to keep in mind btw. I would add not just what you mentioned but also mocking people for personal tragedy, as some people end/lose their lives due to rationalism, or have MH episodes, and we should be careful to treat those topics well. Which we mostly try to do I think.
wasnt that grey tribe guy just balaji srinivasan https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat
it’s certainly the vector from which I’d first heard about that term, but hadn’t realized balaji shillrinivasan was original enough to have come up with that himself
He didnt, the term is from slatestarcodex, who he follows/ed
ah, figures. certainly does have more slatescott sauce on it
Yes forgot the name, that old Moldbug penpal.
Jfc, when I saw the headline I thought this would be a case of the city being too cheap to hire an actual artist and instead use autoplag, but no. And the guy they commissioned isn’t even some tech-brain LARP’ing as an artist, he has 20+ years of experience and a pretty huge portfolio, which somehow makes this worse on so many levels.
Someone made a… thing where you run all your mastodon toots through a prompt before posting them and thought it would be a great idea to let us lemmy users know. Comes with ugly autoplag image on the github. The names of the “bots” are hilarious: “ennui” for low-effort posts; I don’t think that word means what you think it means. “Legion” for automatic spam posts. Cause that’s not a dogwhistle or anything.
So the code doesn’t make use of any LLM, it’s just incredibly basic shit like string.toUpper(). It’s curious how much the author wants to make it seem like it does. Even one guy on lemmy asks
Is it so that you don’t have to read replies?
It will be added
Aargh, what’s the point??
Yeah, I’m struggling to understand the fucking purpose here o.O. It feels like someone desperately trying to make anything for their portfolio or smt
“Legion” for automatic spam posts. Cause that’s not a dogwhistle or anything.
Their name is Legion, for there are too fucking many.
Im going to assume they meant it as a reference to the Castlevania boss.
