Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)
Some Rat content got shared on HN, and the rats there are surprised and outraged not everyone shares their deathly fear of the AI god:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451971
"Stop bringing up Roko's Basilisk!!!" they sputter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452426
"The usual suspects are very very worried!!!" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452348 (username 'reducesuffering checks out!)
``Think for at least 5 seconds before typing.'' - on the subject of pulling the plug on a hostile AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452743
Read that last one against my better judgment, and found a particularly sneerable line:
Now, I'm not particularly smart, but I am capable of a lot of things AI will never achieve. Like knowing something is true, or working out a problem, or making something which isn't slop.
Between this rat and Saltman spewing similar shit on Politico, I have seen two people try to claim text extruders are smarter than living, thinking human beings. Saltman I can understand (he is a monorail salesman who lies constantly), but seeing someone who genuinely believes this shit is just baffling. Probably a consequence of chatbots destroying their critical thinking and mental acuity.
There have been a lot of cases in history of smart people being bested by the dumbest people around who just had more guns/a gun/copious amounts of meth/a stupid idea but they got lucky once, etc.
I mean, if they are so smart, why are they stuck in a locker?
It's practically a proverb that you don't ask a scientist to explain how a "psychic" is pulling off their con, because scientists are accustomed to fair play; you call a magician.