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 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 so 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. A lot of people didn't survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account's cake day, too, so that's cool.)
I feel this is an artefact of the near complete collapse of mainstream journalism, combined with modern tech business practises that are about securing investment and cashing out, and every other concern is secondary or even entirely absent. It’s all just selling vibes.
People only ever report the hype, the investors see everyone else following the hype and panic that they might be left out and bury you in cash. When it all turns sour and people ask pointed questions about the exact nature of the magic beans you were promising to grow, you can just point at the blog post that no-one read (or at least, only poor people read, and they’re barely people if you think about it) and point out that you never hid anything.
I don't even think many AI developers realize that we're in a hype bubble. From what I see, they genuinely believe that the Models Will Improve and that These Issues Will Get Fixed. (I see a lot of faculty in my department who still have these beliefs.)
What these people do see, however, are a lot of haters who just cannot accept this wonderful new technology for some reason. AI is so magical that they don't need to listen to the criticisms; surely they're trivial by comparison to magic, and whatever they are, These Issues Will Get Fixed. But lately they have realized that with the constant embarrassing AI failures (AI surely doesn't have horrible ethics as well), there are a lot of haters who will swarm the announcement of any AI project now. The haters also tend to be people who actually know stuff and check things (tech journalists are incentivized to not do that), but that is an advantage because they're just random internet commenters, not big news outlets.
My theory is that now they add a ton of caveats and disclaimers to their announcements in a vain attempt to reduce the backlash. Also if you criticize them, it's actually your fault that it doesn't work. It's Still Early Days. These Issues Will Get Fixed.
I tell people that this is code for RAM and storage will cost 10x by this time next year when this comes up. Highly recommended.
We're Still Early never dies