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.)
I do think Ed is overly critical of the impact that AI hype has had on the job market, not because the tools are actually good enough to replace people but because the business idiots who impact hiring believe they are. I think Brian Merchant had a piece not long ago talking about how mass layoffs may not be happening but there’s a definite slowdown in hiring, particularly for the kind of junior roles that we would expect to see impacted. I think this actually strengthens his overall argument, though, because the business idiots making those decisions are responding to the thoughtless coverage that so many journalists have given to the hype cycle just as so many of the people who lost it all on FTX believed their credulous coverage of crypto. If we’re going to have a dedicated professional/managerial class separate from the people who actually do things then the work of journalists like this becomes one of their only connectors to the real world just as its the only connection that people with real jobs have to the arcane details of finance or the deep magic that makes the tech we all rely on function. By abdicating their responsibility to actually inform people in favor of uncritically repeating the claims of people trying to sell them something they’re actively contributing to all of it and the harms are even farther-reaching than Ed writes here.
I don’t like to speculate, but it seems tptacek is not happy about it for some reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44291623
If tptacek weren’t a chicken he’d go ask Ed directly. Ain’t like he’s hard to find.
Given the relative caliber of those two I think this may be considered an attempted inducement to suicide by better writer. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.
More network state nonsense is afoot: https://frontiervalley.com/ https://www.thenerdreich.com/startup-seeks-trump-ai-emergency-for-california-tech-city/
They (who?) have publicly drafted an executive order because they want to take over the Alameda Naval Air Station (a superfund site).
Edit: Per the twitter account the weirdo behind this is James Ingallinera.
network state
Great, a new stupid thing to know about. How likely is it that a bunch of people that believe they are citizens of an online state will become yet another player in the Stochastic Terrorism as a Service industry?
I might be the only person here who thinks that the upcoming quantum bubble has the potential to deliver useful things (but boring useful things, and so harder to build hype on) but stuff like this particularly irritates me:
Quantum fucking ai? Motherfucker,
- You don’t have ai, you have a chatbot
- You don’t have a quantum computer, you have a tech demo for a single chip
- Even if you had both of those things, you wouldn’t have “quantum ai”
- if you have a very specialist and probably wallet-vaporisingly expensive quantum computer, why the hell would anyone want to glue an idiot chatbot to it, instead of putting it in the hands of competent experts who could actually do useful stuff with it?
Best case scenario here is that this is how one department of Google get money out of the other bits of Google, because the internal bean counters cannot control their fiscal sphincters when someone says “ai” to them.
Quantum computing reality vs quantum computing in popculture and marketing follows precisely the same line as quantum physics reality vs popular quantum physics.
- Reality: Mostly boring multiplication of matrices, big engineering challenges, extremely interesting stuff if you’re a nerd that loves the frontiers of human knowledge
- Cranks: Literally magic, AntMan Quantummania was a documentary, give us all money
Best case scenario here is that this is how one department of Google get money out of the other bits of Google, because the internal bean counters cannot control their fiscal sphincters when someone says “ai” to them.
That’s my hope either - every dollar spent on the technological dead-end of quantum is a dollar not spent on the planet-killing Torment Nexus of AI.
preprint, but this looks like it’ll be making a splash soon
I wouldn’t be shocked about it - the general throughline of “AI rots your brain”, plus the ongoing discussion of AI in education, would give any shrewd politician an easy way to pull a Think Of The Childrentm on the AI industry, with minimal risk of getting pushback.
