Just two weeks tilā Halloween now.
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 soo 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.)
I donāt have to be thrilled about death to have a basic understanding of how basic our understanding of consciousness, biology, and neurology are. Nor to know how much the physical world resists making tiny machines and measurements necessary to explore these frontiers, or the ethical dilemmas involved in exploring how consciousness works that vastly slow and perhaps outright prevent answering questions like ācan we replace little bits of someone with some machine we can maintain easier in the interest of prolonging them?ā
Also I do happen to know how the universe ends.
I have been forced to on multiple occasions explain to people that there is a difference between thinking that thereās anything at all intrinsically good about the fact that things like us that have come about the way we did come with expiration dates, and dealing with it.
I think its the mid-wit meme, lesswrongers know just enough to imagine some grand solution like brain uploading or nanobots might cure death and not enough to appreciate all the reasons each of those solutions wonāt work.
One of the funniest things I ever read was a result of a survey of laypeople, physics UGs, physics Grads, postgrads, and faculty on various ācool futureā things.
predictions of the likelihood of things geeks constantly dream about craters once you get past the very basics. I can only assume that fields that arenāt mine, and are in general vastly more complex, are at least as full of evidence of god hating us and not allowing us nice things.
I remember reading some of yuddies writing about nanomagic and noticing that the word āsticktionā never showed up.
Judging by the way LLMs and generative AI has been used, even when we do get something vaguely like a realistic version of sci-fi fantasies, capitalism and people who canāt distinguish the limits of the real thing from the fantasy will manage to misuse it.
who in the hell would want programmable matter anymore, after theyāve seen what happened to plain olā computer programming as already practiced
This doesnt apply to everything, like VR and 3d printers were a sci-fi fantasy and now they are mundane economically viable but not revolutionary products.
Biohacking and nanomachines otoh dont seem to be viable and you hear nothing about those anymore. Only a little bit in the uncreative (and going on the experts unrealistic) āai will create bioweaponsā critihype. No āIt will turn people into cyberzombiesā (quake 2 was pretty good (that was aliens not AI but still)).
Piles of screaming grey goo and people being like āWhy are you running away? canāt you see itās my grandmother?ā
This was about where I gave up on Attack on Titan
No idea
Whatās that XKCD that goes over the ways that capitalists would be ruthlessly exploiting all those āsecrets they donāt want you to knowā for incredible profits?