Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 21 July 2024 - eviltoast

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.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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      5 months ago

      We were asking around AI industry peons in March and they all guessed around three quarters too. I woulda put it at maybe two years myself, but I was surprised at so many people all arriving at around three quarters. OTOH, I would say that just in the past few months things are really obviously heading for a trauma.

      • jonhendry@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        Perhaps that’s part of why so many SV types are backing Trump. Grifting off Trump may be their fallback after the AI bubble collapses.

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        I’m severely backlogged on catching up to things but my (total and complete) guess would be something like: all the recent headlines about funding and commitments are almost certainly imprecise in localisation and duration - everyone that “got money” didn’t necessarily get “money” but instead commitments to funding, and “everyone” is a much smaller set of entities that don’t encompass a really wide gallery of entities

        So for all the previously-extant promptfondlers/ model dilettantes/etc out there, the writing may indeed have been (and may still be) on the wall ito runway (“startup operating capital remaining available and viable to avoid death”)

        Based on the kind of headlines seen (and presuming the above supposition for the sake of argument), and the kind of utterly milquetoast garbage all the interceding months have produced, I don’t think it’s likely that much of the promised money will make it through to this layer/lot either. But that’s entirely a guess at this stage (and I can think of some fairly hefty counter-argument examples that may contribute to countering, not least because of how many people/orgs wouldn’t want to be losing face to fucking this up)

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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          5 months ago

          crypto’s VC investment fell off a cliff after the crash, and that investment is what we were talking about there

          hence their pivot to AI

          • pyrex@awful.systems
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            5 months ago

            Oh, OK. I think all the VC-adjacent people still really believe in crypto, if it helps. They probably also don’t believe in it, depending on the room. I think it will come back.

            • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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              5 months ago

              they’ve stopped putting fresh money in, but they believe fervently in the massive bags they’re holding