Want to wade into the snowy 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
The one-shotting phenomenon (or how a positive initial experience with the technology seems to lead to a heavily biased view of its merits) should probably be considered a distinct cognitive bias at this point.
Turns out a lot of bright people canāt deal with a technology being utterly subjective in its efficiency, and also how thatās specifically the part that reduces it to being so narrowly useful as to force the existential question, given the insane resource burn and the socioeconomic disruption thatās part and parcel, even if like Doctorow you think that their rape and pillage of artistās rights and intellectual property in general isnāt an especially big deal.
Also, local LLMs are hardly extricable from the whole mess, they are basically a byproduct, and updated versions only will keep coming as long as their imperial size online counterparts remain a viable concern.
Itās gotta be tied to the idea of anchoring, right? Like, the first credible bit of information you have is what sets the tone for everything that comes afterwards. At that point in a sufficiently complicated information ecosystem, confirmation bias kicks in and itās hard to break out of.
Itās not that he doesnāt think itās a big deal. Itās the one thing heās most consistently cared about for most of his career as an activist. Heās willing to put up with anything else if it circumvents copyright. And thatās why heās been consistently pushed, I reckon, despite his nominal hostility towards the hands that feed the media ecosystem he flourishes in.
Probably shouldāve written ānot a deal breakerā instead of not a big deal.