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 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Continuing on from this nugget that Lex Fucking Fridman will be āanalyzingā the Roman Empire, some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be āinflationā
https://awful.systems/comment/4649129
Looking forward to some chuds referencing the coming 1,000 hour podcast as proof the Roman Empire fell because woke
Itās remarkable to me how far and how rapidly this guy swerved outside of his initial lane, all while having absolutely terrible voice and diction for being a long-form interviewer. Heās worked on that, but itās clear that his initial success was based off of targeting high-level professionals who otherwise wouldnāt very often be sought out for the type of interviews Lex does. Iām thinking of guys like Jim Keller and Chris Lattner, who would probably only make such public appearances in the form of keynotes at conferences for their specific niches.
But you canāt convince me that youāre really the worldās best technical interviewer if youāre also uncritically sitting down with Donald fucking Trump, or deciding that youāre suddenly enough of a historian to take on Gibbon with your fucking podcast. Whoās financing this guy, anyway? Is MIT actually kicking him cash, or is it just an RMS scenario where they give him space because theyāre concerned about where he might end up otherwise?
The only thing Iāve seen from Lex Friedman was his interview of Brian Kernighan. For most of it I just thought it was very kind of BWK to patiently indulge this kid, who was clearly still new and unaccustomed to public speaking or researching his interview subjects, despite the weirdly professional gear setup and production.
Lex hasnāt optimized the skill of technical interviewing; he has optimized the skill of simultaneously stroking the intervieweeās and the (implicitly) listenerās ego.
Note that he uses the same strategy as Joe Rogan: invite a smart person on, ask them introductory questions about their research, and then just kind of sit there with a dumb look and fail to understand what theyāre saying. I gather that itās easy to empathize with and doesnāt require listeners to actually learn much since theyāre essentially sitting in a 101 course with a professor who is reading the curriculum aloud. What puzzles me is why MIT funds this shit.
I donāt think itās very surprising. The various CS departments are extremely happy to ride the wave of easy funding and spend a lot of time boosting AI, just like how a few years ago all the cryptographers were getting into blockchains. For instance they added an entire new āAIā major, while eliminating the electrical engineering major on the grounds that ācomputationā is more important than electrical engineering.
Someoneās been watching too much Tuttle Twins (Warning: link to fascist propaganda youtube channel).
The links between hard money/goldbugs and (US) hard right goes back a long way, at least to the 30s I believe.
Interestingly, an almost pathological fear of inflation is also part of the foundational myth of the BRD, but if you look at the actual history, Weimar-era hyperinflation wasnāt really the root cause of Nazism, the Depression arguably was a bigger contributing factor.
It makes a certain amount of sense with the conspiracy theories that are at the heart of fascist understanding of politics, though. Goldbuggery treats inflation like itās a very simple question of monetary policy rather than a complex emergent part of an economic environment centered around constant growth. This means itās a perfect tool for (((Them))) to be using from their secret position of power to invert the obvious natural order and keep Us (and more importantly from a propaganda perspective, You) away from the luxury and power that We deserve. The fascist conspiracy theories also answer the obvious problem with the goldbug narrative: if itās so easy to fix inflation and would have no negative consequences, why donāt the people we keep electing to fix it justā¦ do that?
Well put. Another example I like to play in my head (never debated a goldbug for real in my life, not starting now) is that if the gold standard is so great, how come a small-ish country like Switzerland or Singapore hasnāt started using it and outcompeting everyone?
Thereās only 2 answers to that:
Answer 2 is obvious if youāre a fascist.
Not gold, but some countries do work to an officially restricted money supply! Those that have officially dollarised, e.g. El Salvador and Ecuador.
Iām familiar with .sv. The government is horribly constricted - because they canāt print money and the populace doesnāt trust them to print money - so every year itās more sovereign bonds. Then a fuckwit like Bukele comes along and thinks that bitcoins will make anything better and not worse.
So yeah, turns out past 1930 that not being able to do monetary policy fucking sucks.
@gerikson @YourNetworkIsHaunted That and even hyper-cautious countries like Switzerland have been selling off their gold reserves to at least some extent, because they listen to sane economists rather than nut jobs.