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.)
If you blocked SE Gyges on bsky1 (completely understandable) you may have missed that the former Obama official from Former Obama Admin Official Says Itās Time To Consider Military Strikes on Chinese Data Centers to Prevent Them From Reaching AGI has apparently received upwards of $500K from Coefficient Giving.
transcript
itās cool that youāre doing bednets or whatever but if your ideological project has decided that unilaterally declaring wars of aggression because yud said to is one of its charter missions i think your project is bad and should be burned
it is unfortunate that most of your opposition is andreessen horowitz and peter thiel. you guys donāt even seem to know they are your opposition, though, since you keep making deals with them; so iām sort of inclined to just think that everyone sucks here and to curse both your houses
for the low low price of, what is this, like fifteen million dollars? you too can get pet obama officials to bless eliezer yudkowskyās fever dreams
gyges went off the deep end quite some time ago, up to and including support for a crypto/ai grifterās ādystopiabreakerā claims that not falling with the autoconfabulator crowd is basically being anti-vaccine.
thereās nothing centrist about him, along the lovely racist theophite, heās one of the more aggressive confabulation machinery grift promoters.
I assure you I mean centrist in the most derogatory way possible. His shtick is pretending heās the adult in the room while bsky is too much of an anti-AI echo-chamber, but all heās doing is being condescendingly dismissive of pretty much all anti-llm-peddler criticism (Zitron is a fraud, but Iām serious people so wonāt engage with what heās saying) while vaguely gesturing towards the slopocalypse being mostly business as usual except with a few more nifty tools, and heās Always Posting.
No wonder he tripped on his dick the moment people pushed back and immediately trotted out the most laughable hackneyed persecution complex bullshit.
I donāt know who the lovely racist theophite is supposed to be, but to me the other notable gyges-style lowkey booster is quantian, who i knew as an occasional generally reasonable guest in the trashfuture pod. I wonder what caused him to turn into an LLM water-carrier and if it was at all more complicated than simply having AI adjacent investments.
theophite is known for this post which i think is most of how he got a following
to him being a rabid racist: there was a palestinian guy posting on bsky asking for donations at one of the worst points of the genocide and theophite took it upon himself to start acting as a one man misinfo shop about him, screenshotting his posts and coming up with unjustified theories about how he was ai generated, represented some sinister force, etc. eventually the guy was proven to be completely authentic, theophite kept going and idk what happened after that because i blocked him. the whole thing was obsessive and overtly about hostility to poor and brown people
What a POS
It always surprises me when someone starts with āAI safety is a sex cult inspired by bad science fictionā or āprompt engineering is ritual magic without the fun sacred namesā and then wheels to ābut chatbots and āAgentic AIā are still the wave of the future!ā
I guess maybe the sex cult and the ritual magic make the standard grifting seem credible by comparison? Like, E-Dub and company donāt pass the sniff test but Saltman and friends seem like reasonable adults who canāt all be wrong?
For real. Even if he was at all genuine about worrying that not pushing back against anti-AI sentiment was setting the stage for more problematic anti-science backlash he still got lost in the sauce almost immediately.
Ah yes SE Gyges, the most reasonable pro ai guy.
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