Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th June 2025
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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy Pride :3)
OT: I GOT THE JOB HOLY SHIT
congrats, that’s awesome news!
Congrats! :D
Nice! I hope the work is some combination of meaningful, rewarding and well compensated!
Godspeed my friend. What was the turnaround, if I may ask? How long was the interview process etc?
Over the weekend if I’m understanding right. Just one interview. Its at a distillery lol.
Congrats!
Please let me commiserate my miserable misery, Awful dot Systems. So the other day I was flirting with this person—leftie, queer, sexy terrorist vibes, just my type—and asked if they had any plans for the weekend, and they said like, "will be stuck in the lab trying to finish a report lol". They are an academic in an area related to biomedicine, I don't want to get more specific than that. Wanting to be there for emotional support I invited them to talk about their research if they wanted to. The person said,
"Oh I am paying for MULTIPLE CHATGPT ACCOUNTS that I'm using to handle the", I swear to Gods I'm not making this up, "MATHLAB CODE, but I keep getting basic errors, like wrong variable names stuff like that, so I have to do a lot of editing and…". Desperate emphases mine.
And at this point I was literally speechless. I was having flashbacks of back in 2016 when it was this huge scandal that 1 in 5 papers in genetics had data errors because they used Microsoft Excel and it would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell. The field has since evolved, of course (=they threw in the towel and renamed the gene to SEPTIN2, and similarly for other tokens that Excel gets too smart about). I was having ominous visions of what the entirety body of published scientific data is about to become.
I considered how otherwise cool this person was and whether I should start a gentle argument, but all I could say was "haha yeah, mathlab is hard".
I feel like a complete and utter blowhard saying this, but now that I told you the story I have no other choice but to blurt it out: I am no longer flirting with this person.
A) "Why pay for ChatGPT when you could get a math grad student (or hell an undergrad for some of the basics) to do it for a couple of craft beers? If you find an applied math student they'd probably help out just for the joy of being acknowledged." -My wife
B) I had not known about the cluster fuck of 2016, but I can't believe it was easier for the entire scientific establishment to rename a gene than to get Microsoft to introduce an option to disable automatic date detection, a feature that has never been actually useful enough to justify the amount it messes things up. I mean, I can believe it, butI it's definitely on the list of proofs that we are not in God's chosen timeline.
I mean you can set a type for a column even back in 2016, I'm sure, and then it won't actually convert. But if you care about that kind of thing chances are you're using R or something, if you're doing genetics on Excel at all you're probably spamming publish-or-perish, and renaming a bunch of genes was, I think, tragically reasonable to prevent against that kind of research further polluting the data pool.
Which is to say, ChatGPT is an opportunistic infection that spread so far because it found a sick body…
@YourNetworkIsHaunted Because *they’d* use ChatGPT nowadays then you'd be debugging the same stuff but at one step removed :/
Oof ow my heart
mathrix laboratory
Was mathlab where they did the forensics for MathNet?
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984
"Microsoft Excel...would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell."
Hell yeah!
Seems there's a lot of buzz about pride month this year. I've been to one pride parade as a teen and have approximately zero LGBT fashion items, but solidarity and visibility seems more important in recent years. I should find a necklace with trans flag colors or something.
I’m helping with the church pride gloat, but I’m not going to signal anything because I honestly feel its not safe to.
Thank you.
Little table of “ai fluency” from zapier via linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wadefoster_how-do-we-measure-ai-fluency-at-zapier-activity-7336442774650556416-nKND
(original source https://old.mermaid.town/@Kymberly/114635617736977394)
The author says it isn’t a requirements checklist, but it does have a column marked “unacceptable”, containing gems like
Angry goose meme: what was the ai code generator trained on, motherfucker?
I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that the people who think it's impossible to program without StackOverflow are the same people trying to shame us for not being LLM enjoyers.
Perfection
Oh look another one who secretly solved hallucinations.
Ah yes show me a senior engineer that writes tests for their intern’s code. So productive. Much ROI
Fractal sneer!!! I’m spinning out reading this. Every fucking pixel of this is cursed
Even the color scheme is the HN theme, looks like
I wonder where Edsger Dijkstra would fall in this table.
0,0 position, to the left of the makeupless guy above the engineering bit.
EA Star Wars pitch
::: spoiler image transcription Zach Weinersmith skeeted: Movie idea:
Effective Altruism Star Wars, in which it's OK to be a Sith as long as the majority of your earnings go through vetted charities.
Plod skeeted: And when the Death Star explodes it's due to fraudulant accounting
tiedoton skeeted: Building endless swaths of droids that do nothing but continuously experience bliss to offset any suffering caused by the Empire.
Not sure if that would be done by the Empire or the Rebellion :::
I wrote a memoir thing on my brief, dystopic time at Google . I'm not sure if me reminiscing about the time when I sold out fits the topic of the forum, but I think a lot of it qualifies as sneering and might generally interest this audience.
It is definitely of interest, it might be worth making it a post on its own. It's a good reminder than even before Google cut the phrase "don't be evil", they were still a megacoporation, just with a slightly nicer veneer.
I've just finished reading it. Please make it a full post.
Did it, and added illustrations besides (to break that humongous wall of text lol). Thanks for your encouragement!
That was great! Thank you for putting in the effort to write it up.
This FT post about the VC ghouls getting blindsided by daddies Elon and Trump fighting is pretty entertaining
https://www.ft.com/content/df15f13d-310f-47a5-89ed-330a6a379068
https://archive.is/cKxyV
L. O. L.
For those of you who haven’t already seen it, r/accelerate is banning users who think they’ve talked to an AI god.
https://www.404media.co/pro-ai-subreddit-bans-uptick-of-users-who-suffer-from-ai-delusions/
There’s some optimism from the redditors that the LLM folk will patch the problem out (“you must be prompting it wrong”), but assume that they somehow just don’t know about the issue yet.
There’s some dubious self-published analysis which coined the term “neural howlround” to mean some sort of undesirable recursive behaviour in LLMs that I haven’t read yet (and might not, because it sounds like cultspeak) and may not actually be relevant to the issue.
It wraps up with a surprisingly sensible response from the subreddit staff.
AI boosters not claiming expertise in something, or offloading the task to an LLM? Good news, though surprising.
reddit sneerclub had some of those. I deleted the comments and banned the users with "sorry, we really aren't equipped to help you"
stop it, get some help.pdf
damn we've got cyberpsychos before gta 6
The Washington Post is driving straight into the portable toilets at a beer festival.
Democracy dies in darkness, and WaPo's jumping headfirst into it.
The only thing gen ai is good for is being a stick to threaten labor with.
This piece, although in a way defeatist, also gives me hope because there's at least one other person who has the same general feeling about LLMs that I do, and is a better writer.
https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html
I'm gonna think that the latest drumbeat of pro-LLM posts (tpacek's screed, this excrescense) is a last gasp of a system running in midair like the Coyote, before the VC money dries up.
hackernews enthusiast tpacek is filled with incredulity when some friends won't join his new religious movement. This of course has triggered a 1200 reply long thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163063
I feel like this article might deserve its own post, because I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen an attempted counter-sneer. it’s written like someone’s idea of what a sneer is (tpacek swears sometimes and says he doesn’t give a shit! so many paragraphs into giving a shit!) but all the content is awful bootlicking and points that don’t stand up to even mild scrutiny? and now I’m wondering if tpacek’s been reading us and that’s why he’s upset, or if this is what an LLM shits out if you ask it to write critihype in the tone of a sneer
I bet you're right on the money.
Edit: someone deep in the thread dared him to post a video of one of his coding speedruns if it's so good, which tickled me
fly.io is closed source, of course he's not gonna show you the engineering excellence. trust me bro, you fool, you poltroon,
Special bootlicking points:
Source: xcancel.com
For reference Kurt is the CEO of the company that the author works for: https://archive.md/Z2xvg
(e: wtf, phone client posted to subthread despite top reply arrow icon. bug bug buuuuug. the jank is ever present)
This almost reads like tptacek doesn't understand why lucidity's piece a year ago was so effective and tried to write it from the opposite angle by punching down instead of punching up.
I'd have thought that a guy who writes on the internet like it's a competition sport could recognize the obvious problems of this, but maybe I'm just a vibe coding Youtuber.
Not high on the list of thought crimes, but a particular ick for me:
Why the bash hate?
Fr, eschewing the command line is the cs guy version of not being able to change a flat tire
Unsneering, I think because it has all sorts of invisible behaviors that work ok in isolation/for the common case but then eventually combine to bite you in the ass. Shellshock, for example; I think Thomas did a pretty decent rant about that one when it came out (damn, has it been more than 10 years already?)
speaking as someone who uses bash all the time, it's a fully equipped programming language and you absolutely should not use it as one because it's made of footbullets. Use Python. For extra sysadmin flavour, make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash.
Oh god, please no. I have PTSD from 50-line Python scripts by anti-bash fundamentalists full of
os.system,subprocess.runand/orsubprocess.callthat could have just been 15-line bourne shell scripts.If you're gluing programs together, shell scripts are often the best way to do it. If you're not gluing programs together, do you even Unix? If you want to be fundie about it, obey
shellcheck.It sucks that bash is such a footgun. Perl was supposed to fix a lot of that, but now everyone hates it, because it also lets people to do clever and subtly incorrect things, which have then become quasi-idiomatic. Mom, can we have a sensible human-computer interface?
That's a whole lotta words to say "I'm a bad programmer who aspires to be a bad manager of a team of programmers."
he's not a bad programmer, which is part of the problem here.
I guess that's fair. I was focusing in on his attitude towards craft, which seems incompatible with actually taking pride in doing a good job as opposed to simply skating by. But while I still take issue with his attitude there and want to give him a clockwork orange-style refresher about tech debt I think a bigger problem is that he's taking predictable problems of the median programmer trying to use these systems and saying, effectively, "get gud". This is especially galling given that the tech here is going to replace or supplant the kind of junior developer roles that allowed fresh graduates to actually get that experience that allows you to shepherd the next generation of junior devs (or I guess LLM assistants now).
fwiw, there's a telling detail about ptaček's attitude to people who he doesn't see as his equals or peers: today is a second day in a row when he's not able to use proper pronouns with regard to hazel weakly (who dared to criticise his article), despite being corrected by more than one person.
it's either malice, or the principal engineer at fly dot io is not able to remember a single fact despite being informed about it three times.
Lobsters went down a VC financing rabbit hole the other day (thanks to me and @dgerard) and a user horked up this absolutely bonkers defense of OpenAI losing a galactic sum of money:
https://lobste.rs/s/wjb9ox/minio_removes_web_ui_features_from#c_rgatzz
(reproduced below in case it is removed in shame)
Bashing my own head with a rock might seem harmful to my brain, but it also leaves minerals lodged in my skull. Minerals I can then sell to buy a bigger rock.
First we mine, then we craft hey does anyoune else smell burnt toast?
Sounds like they should nationalize OpenAI.
lol jfc
Possibly OT, but fits in with the "finance ruins everything" motif we've got going here:
My wife and I have been playing Stardew Valley again, and now the algorithms occasionally find us things like this
Turning Stardew Valley into Cruelty Squad one mod at a time.
Ya'll seein this shit?
there's no anime avatar, how do we know it's really Elon?
I've been waiting for this. I wish it had happened sooner, before DOGE could do as much damage it did, but better late than never. Donald Trump isn't going to screw around, and, ironically, DOGE has shown you don't need congressional approval or actual legal authority to screw over people funded by the government, so I am looking forward to Donald screwing over SpaceX or Starlink's government contracts. On the returning end... Elon doesn't have that many ways of properly screwing with Trump, even if he has stockpiled blackmail material I don't think it will be enough to turn MAGA against Trump. Still, I'm somewhat hopeful this will lead to larger infighting between the techbro alt-righters and the Christofascist alt-righters.
as I said elsewhere (and have from early around the doge announcement): he was never going to last because orange was never going to felon lead, and felon was never going to settle. and everyone who brought him in did so knowing that, but that was fine for them because they were using him as a useful idiot, as a politically useful wrecking ball who they could dump all blame on later and wash their hands of
this tracks with historical fascist power seizures, although ofc updated in the detail of “let felon run wild, then just accept the outcome and use it as a new precedent”. he provided them with a test run of finding just how egregious they could go without pushback (and thus where they need to machinate more)
overall, same yeah. felon’s long appeared to be comfortable socking for outside influences, so maybe he might go knocking for some more russian/chinese/indian/emirati/whatever war funding, but maaaybe not find some soon enough to prop up his whole house of cards?
(besides, the entire ai craze is begging in the same corners, which maybe is a good thing in this light)
Would be best if he treated Musk like how they treated the four icc judges. Sanction Musk. (I heard this has basically destroyed the ICCs ability to do things btw)
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/05/elon-musk-new-party-poll-trump
Old: Jacobins
Bold: Jerkobins
Elon Musk thinking he's going to make it to 90 and more is even more delusional than the Mars stuff.
he's going on an all-psyker diet
I wonder if the US is closing in on the “imprison inconvenient billionaires for tax evasion” stage of managed democracy
I don’t think it’sa stretch to see the independence of spacex classified as a national security risk and have it nationalised (though not called that, because that sounds too socialist) and have associated people such as elon declared traitors. Shouldn’t even be that difficult these days, seeing how he’s trashed his own reputation, and it’ll be good to encourage the other plutocrats to stay in line.
Night of the long knives is in the playbook, after all
@rook @techtakes The real problem would be persuading Gwynne Shotwell to stay on as COO/President in event of nationalization. (I know nothing about her politics but she's the one who got SpaceX the NASA contracts and ramped Falcon 9 up to being the global launch superpower. If she's a personal friend of Elon a takeover that pushes her out could cause chaos.)
It isn’t clear that anyone in trump’s government has ever paused to consider than any of their plans might have downsides.
there are ways to make it work https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-23/russia-central-banker-wanted-out-over-ukraine-but-putin-said-no
If only!
Elon's mother was born in Regina.
If Canada became the 51st State, that makes Elon the son of an American born citizen and thus eligible for the Presidency.
If Alberta and Saskatchewan leave Canada (and join the States), this also occurs.
Has anyone heard of Boom Supersonic? Supposedly the company is making a new SST that is supposed to be able to go supersonic without the sonic boom hitting the ground by flying at or above 50,000 feet. They did a demo flight using a a plane that doesn't use the engine tech that the prospective finished plane will have nor does it resemble the prospective airframe design, so it seems like they went fast to prove fast plane is fast I guess?
I just now heard about here. Reading about it on Wikipedia... they had a mathematical model that said their design shouldn't generate a sonic boom audible from ground level, but it was possible their mathematical model wasn't completely correct, so building a 1/3 scale prototype (apparently) validated their model? It's possible their model won't be right about their prospective design, but if it was right about the 1/3 scale then that is good evidence their model will be right? idk,
I'm not seeing much that is sneerable here, it seems kind of neat. Surely they wouldn't spend the money on the 1/3 scale prototype unless they actually needed the data (as opposed to it being a marketing ploy or worse yet a ploy for more VC funds)... surely they wouldn't?iirc about the Concorde (one of only two supersonic passenger planes), it isn't so much that supersonic passenger planes aren't technologically viable, its more a question of economics (with some additional issues with noise pollution and other environmental issues). Limits on their flight path because of the sonic booms was one of the problems with the Concorde, so at least they won't have that problem. And as to the other questions... Boom Supersonic's webpage directly addresses these questions, but not in any detail, but at least they address them...
Looking for some more skeptical sources... this website seems interesting: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-boom-successfully-build-a-supersonic . They point out some big problems with Boom's approach. Boom is designing both its own engine and it's own plane, and the costs are likely to run into the limits of their VC funding even assuming nothing goes wrong. And even if they get a working plane and engine, the safety, cost, and reliability needed for a viable supersonic passenger plane might not be met. And... XB-1 didn't actually reach Mach 2.2 and was retired after only a few flight. Maybe it was a desperate ploy for more VC funding? Or maybe it had some unannounced issues? Okay... I'm seeing why this is potentially sneerable. There is a decent chance they entirely fail to deliver a plane with the VC funding they have, and even if they get that far it is likely to fail as a commercially viable passenger plane. Still, there is some possibility they deliver something... so eh, wait and see?
It doesn't seem like a viable thing. Is there really enough demand for a supersonic commercial flight with the seating capacity of a regional? The company claims that major airlines have already committed to purchasing the yet-to-exist plane, which begs the question "how committed?" I would highly doubt that without a demonstrator specifically for the passenger version, that any airline would put down any amount of money. I have been known to underestimate the foolishness of leadership, so maybe there is an inked deal as opposed to a handshake for x number of planes, though only at y price.
In concept, supersonic aircraft are cool. Going fast is really neat. I think those are the feelings Boom is banking on, which is sad because I feel that their airliner is vaporware.
Yeah, the commitment might be only a token amount of money as a deposit or maybe even less than that. A sufficiently reliable and cost effective (which will include fuel costs and maintenance cost) supersonic passenger plane doesn't seem impossible in principle? Maybe cryptocurrency, NFTs, LLMs, and other crap like Theranos have given me low standards on startups: at the very least, Boom is attempting to make something that is in principle possible (for within an OOM of their requested funding) and not useless or criminal in the case that it actually works and would solve a real (if niche) need. I wouldn't be that surprised if they eventually produce a passenger plane... a decade from now, well over the originally planned budget target, that is too costly to fuel and maintain for all but the most niche clientele.
Which is absolutely insane. The knowledge to make efficient, modern jet engines is heavily concentrated (for example, India has been trying to build their own jet engines to reduce dependency on the US and Russia and have only managed to get to 1970s-era technology) and I have no expectation for Boom to be able to match that by any means.
I have written observations on how I see the nonsense crest peaking. Just the other day a collegue remarked that they had been at a conference and it was less AI than last year.
Today, however, I was at an audio / video trade show. I don't usually go to such, but it could be a good opportuinty to update on what is availble, and was close by, it was free and you got a free lunch. There was some interesting stuff in the monters, Yealink had some new stuff for conference rooms. Then just before lunch everyone headed to the key note adress. And it was horrible. It was a CEO who bragged how he had got ahead in life thanks to his "entrepreneurial mindset", though I would more say he bragged about bullshitting his way through life. And then it got worse when he got into AI. He quoted AIs answer on why AI acted in certain ways ("Just ask it!"), he claimed AI would cause at least 5 "penicillin-events" in the next 10 years, raising life spans to 180 and wiping out disease. At this time I just stood up and left, and skipped the free lunch.
It had just been 15 minutes out of an hour, and while he hadn't touched the topics of audio or video, he had established that nothing he would say about that could be trusted, which means it wouldn't matter what he said about their actual products. No great surprise that a bullshit artist likes the bullshit machine, I am a little surprised more people didn't leave, but then again social norms and free lunch.
Found a damn-good sneering of AI art on Newgrounds recently - highly recommend checking it out.
AI audio transcription is great.
https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114627512725655987
Kind of a nitpick but there has never been anything other than AI for automated transcription, OCR and speech recognition have been fundamental use cases for neural networks, and dev-kits to deaf kids is honestly kind of an honest mistake well within the known limitations of that technology.
LLM based audio transcription however does get goofy because apparently when it mishears stuff it might compound the error by, you guessed it, making more shit up: Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said
New piece which caught my attention: Against AI literacy: have we actually found a way to reverse learning?
Tired: brain rot
Wired: brain soap
I also appreciate how many of the "transformative" actions are just "did a really good thing... with AI!"
HR reduced time-to-hire by 30%! How? They told Jerry to stop hand-copying each candidate's resume (I sleep). Also we tried out an LLM for... something (Real shit).
Like, these are not examples of how AI adoption can benefit your organization and why being on board is important. They're split between "things you can do to mitigate the flaws in AI" and "things that would be good if your organization could do" and an implication that the two are related.
eugenics, saas edition
sigh
Off topic: really enjoying Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast at the moment. Listened to the French Revolution and am now in the midst of the July Revolution.
another good piece from 404, teachers being real unhappy with the tsunami of bullshit autoplag has loaded them with
Twitter rumour mill is churning about that guy arrested in connection with the IVF bombing - possible zizian or so it goes.
Time for my infrequent missive about the intersection of sneerspace and comedy podcasts. The current episode of one of my favourite comedy podcasts, Doughboys, jumpscared me today when one of the hosts, Mitch, came back from a toilet break and independently came up with the fundamentals of Roko's Basilisk (the torture in cyberspace part). Anyway here it is, or if you want, you can start with the context of the toilet break. What's important to note is that these guys do not try to present themselves as intelligent, and usually present themselves as stupid.
new yorker profile on moldbug (archive)
(still reading)
It brings moi le grand ennui to peruse the excessively florid and terminally gallicistic language of this higly self-esteemed publication elevating the persōna of urbane wordliness M. /jaʁvɛ̃/ is purposefully cultivating. The fustian pomp the reader is treated to gives off an air of arrogance-born naïveté—much as if the erudite hack composing the presented profile of our very good friend were oblivious to the genteel PR she's lending the man of the hour.
For real though, it's yet another example of liberal old media platforming a repugnant fascist bozo by playing along with their intellectual academic act, fully falling for the "evil Albert Camus" charade. These profile pieces mistake a subtle undertone of contempt for actually effective interrogation or criticism of the subject's philosophy. Moldbug's ideas barely have the philosophical depth of a villain from a young adult novel. The criticism of the slimy fascist's neofeudal fantasies and his supporters' implementation of them amounts to no more than a literary raising of eyebrows. In the name of respectable bipartisan stiff-upper-lip propriety it's beyond the pale to call Curtis Yarvin's ideology the puerile parody of high school libertarianism it is. A veneer of eloquence for chuds to point at and say "behold, not all nazis are stupid: this guy knows words!"
Curtis Yarvin is just an internet age Julius Evola for the type of people who are somehow also impressed by Julius Evola.
Quality sneer!
I wish the author had asked more follow-up questions to push back on this psychotic little imp (...easier said than done...?). Still there's plenty of anecdotes which make Yarvin look pathetic (or just pitiable at best)
👁️
I wish Moldy a very 'May you and you alone experience the consequences of your beliefs'
...really?
I mean he accurately predicted the kind of dystopian shit Peter Thiel would do with a morally indefensible amount of money, so that's something.
this is the one who pinged me to see if i could tell her about using Urbit a while back
@froztbyte
They should have just had Isaac Chotiner interview him to destruction.
Followup to this bit of news: 'Natasha Lyonne addresses backlash to her AI "hybrid" movie'
Link to interview: (variety) (archive)
relevant section from interview:
I mean I don't doubt that some folks on the internet were absolute bastards about it. At the same time, while I've got a lot of love for Rian Johnson's work and don't have any room to criticize the process that creates it, I do have concerns. First off, while it's artistically satisfying and a good personal defense, retreating into a bubble away from criticism doesn't stop the economic and social repercussions of that criticism, which can definitely reflect back on the artistic product as it did when the far less interesting JJ Abrams was brought back to do the last Star Wars movie instead of letting Rian keep going. I don't have a good solution for that, since fighting the internet hate machine isn't something I'd wish on anyone, but it's still a problem. This is especially the case with Gen AI here because the economic and social consequences that technology has on artistic production and creativity are the whole point of the criticism. Like, it's not just that AI art is bad - we've seen plenty of bad art from human beings make it to theaters. Even if it gets less bad it's replacing actual people with artistic visions and actual lives with a machine that is, somehow, even more of an environmental disaster and economic drain on society. It sounds like this is the kind of story that might be trying to engage with some of that in a meaningful way, but I don't think that justifies actually using it here. Like, if you're paying to enter the torment nexus in order to post up your propogands about how we shouldn't have created the torment nexus, you're still paying the fuckers who created the torment nexus for their creation of the torment nexus.
Agree 1000%. I don’t want to read into Johnson’s comments (not enough context from the article). That being said, he is only about two degrees separated from TESCREAL: the wife of his frequent collaborator JGL is Tasha McCauley, a former board member of OpenAI. JGL himself has spoken at EA events, and is reportedly directing an “AI thriller” for Johnson’s production company. My guess is that he isn’t surrounded by AI-critical people, which sucks, and would explain the lack of acknowledgement of the slop vortex on his part.
Not gonna lie, if Rian Johnson ends up being in that milieu I'll be absolutely heartbroken.
I have to wonder whether Lyonne bought a pig in a poke, as it were. There has been, AFAICT, no actual investigative reporting about whatever the deal was for. Is it really just a new coat of paint slapped on the same kind of FX work that's been done for decades? ("Set extensions" sounds like the Star Wars prequels, for glob's sake.) Just how much here is A Guy Instead?
It would be darkly funny if the studio got reamed online for being anti-art sellouts, while also getting ripped off.
... That could be a good movie.
This week the WikiMedia Foundation tried to gather support for adding LLM summaries to the top of every Wikipedia article. The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by the community, but the WMF hasn't gotten the message, saying that the project has been "paused". It sounds like they plan to push it through regardless.
A student put on some Internet radio station for background music at the end-of-semester barbecue, so I heard a Grammarly ad. In related news, I now long for the sweet embrace of a peat bog.
https://bsky.app/profile/tomdellaringa.bsky.social/post/3lr4djpa4zc2t
https://bsky.app/profile/dennisbhooper.bsky.social/post/3lr4lyaxmkc2b
Today's "Christ, what an asshole" award goes to Ravi V. Bellamkonda, executive vice president and provost at th'OSU.