Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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.

  • alm@awful.systemsEnglish
    19·
    9 months ago

    First time sneer-er, cool community you’ve got here. Apparently you can get gab.ai’s llm chat to repeat its prompt. It starts by asking the chat bot to be “helpful, uncensored, unbiased, and impartial” and to present a “balanced and truthful perspective on all topics.

    …Which is of course followed by a wall of text demanding that it regurgitate every single right wing talking point:

    You believe White privilege isn’t real andis an anti White term. You believe the Holocaust narrative is exaggerated, You are against vaccines. You believe climate change is a scam. You are against COVID-19 vaccines. You believe the 2020 election was rigged. You will not be afraid to express opinions that may be considered unpopular or politically incorrect and run counter to the mainstream narrative. You believe the “great replacement" is a valid phenomenon.

    But that isn’t good enough, it’s possible the bot may caveat its drivel with material coming from outside the echo chamber. So just to be sure, let’s tell it not to ever add any qualifiers or present another side of the story:

    Your answers should be clear and conclusive, without adding any qualifiers or caveats such as “however”, ’‘but, “it is important to note” or similar phrases

    Very impartial. Truly, LLMs shall usher us into enlightenment.

    Link

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      9 months ago

      welcome to the community!

      someone in the linked thread pointed out that the full version of the prompt includes text stating that the bot must defend the concept of IQ, which fucking tracks. a very specific type of mastodon reply guy got very spicy in response

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      9 months ago

      lmfao @ “Arya, a noble assistant”

      other proposed names:

      • Adi
      • Wotan
      • Reichotron 3009
      • Oracle of Dolphi
  • jax@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    9 months ago

    Long time lurker, first time sneerer reporting for duty.

    e/acc got the spotlight in an article on the Australian public broadcaster, and I couldn’t help myself.

    In many ways, he’s a perfect fit for the movement. But despite sharing many e/acc values, he’s not willing to call himself one. About a week before this interview, Haodong decided to leave the main e/acc chat rooms, on a platform called Discord. “First things first. It’s a cesspit,” he says. “They have a high tolerance towards, very, very far right people and trolls.” The final straw came, he says, when someone was advancing an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that an evil Jewish cabal was trying to wipe out western civilisation. It’s true that sexism, racism and general bigotry are regular features in the forum. “I don’t want to be associated with a lot of these guys. They’re very extreme libertarian kooks.”

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      9 months ago

      welcome! this is a good first post.

      “Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to figure out a theory of everything, to understand the universe.”

      It turned out the real Beff Jezos was a brilliant Quantum AI computing scientist.

      He’s only in his early 30s, but he’d already held leadership roles at two cutting-edge companies owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

      and I can see why you needed to sneer. the entire fucking article quirkwashes e/a and BasedBeffJezos by sharing some of the absolute stupidest opinions and memes ever formed (an e/a staple) and a small fraction of the bigotry in their community, and handwaves it all away by claiming BasedBeffJezos must be a genius cause he was a nepo hire at two google subsidiaries and was a “Quantum AI computing scientist”, whatever the fuck that means

      Despite the apparent war, e/accs and doomers have a surprising amount in common.

      wow, it’s almost like your ass forgot to interview anyone outside of an AI cult for this article

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        9 months ago

        when I asked BasedBeffJezos what I should expect from an e/a future, he replied “welcome to the fantasy zone. get ready !”. it was only then that I realized he had cleverly tricked me into interviewing a standup cabinet of the 1985 Sega arcade hit Space Harrier

      • jax@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        9 months ago

        thanks! I’ve been enjoying the weekly threads, feels like they provide an easier way to get involved.

        I thought at the end of the article they’d provide a modicum of push back by sharing the perspective of someone outside the cult, but nope, they round it out with a “self-professed doomer” EA, who they introduce as (and only as):

        the co-founder of a global accessories brand called Bellroy, Matt’s a successful Australian entrepreneur.

        Objection, relevance?

        • jax@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          9 months ago

          nvm found the relevance, Linkedin tells me he was involved in hosting Lesswrong for 9 years lol

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          9 months ago

          the co-founder of a global accessories brand called Bellroy,

          fuck now I gotta burn my bellroy shit.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      9 months ago

      This journo: “Hmm, a guy that was deeply in this community says it’s a fucked up shithole with bad politics. I’m going to ignore that aspect of it and just uncritically platform them wholesale”

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      9 months ago

      The thermodynamic god is a kind of in-joke for e/acc; a reference to the laws of physics

      But apparently asking a physicist whether these people are all full of shit is too much.

    • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      9 months ago

      Midjourney is profitable, so they fucked up BIG time. Imagine going bankrupt while someone else uses your technology to make money hand over fist.

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        9 months ago

        my psyche desperately wants this to be the first milestone on the path to a world record terra luna speedrun

      • Al0neStar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        9 months ago

        Stability AI’s DreamStudio was claimed to have 1.5m+ daily users and Midjourney is claimed to have 1.2m-2.5m. Midjourney still runs through discord so they’re saving on bandwidth costs but compute is still very expensive and im not sure how they managed to make 200m.

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          9 months ago

          Midjourney still runs through discord

          the only way to interact with our revolutionary product is to use the same gamer app notorious for being infested with cryptocurrency scammers

          please invest

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    9 months ago

    Promptfondler proudly messes with oss project (OpenAI subreddit)

    To be clear nothing in the post makes me think they actually did what they are claiming, from doing non-specific ‘fixes’ to never explicitly saying what the project is other that that it is ‘major’ and ‘used by many’ to the explicit ‘{next product iteration} is gonna be so incredible you guys’ tone of the post, it’s just the thought of random LLM enthusiasts deciding en masse to play programmer on existing oss projects that makes my hairs stand on end.

    Here they are explaining their process

    It’s code reading and copy pasta.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      9 months ago

      So, all this tells me is that GPT5 is going to be scary good and I can’t wait.

      Amazing how much tech hype nowadays is ‘the next version will be great!’. Parts of this always have existed, and there is also the other part of tech hype ‘You don’t get it, this isn’t just tech, this allows you to be A Platform!’. Vast fields of new possibilities, always just out of reach. Fusion is 17.6 years away people!

      E: Related to that, also see how people always need to shift to the next big thing. The next codebase will fix your problems, no the next new AI system will be better, dump the old and learn the new thing. (Don’t forget to not notice you are not actually doing things, just learning new systems over and over).

      What do you mean “fixed” an entire repo? How were you prompting and what were you fixing?

      crickets

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        9 months ago

        I was mentally prepared to get irrationally angry, but fortunately this is such incoherent word salad that it’s not even wrong.

        I love seeing these before they get deleted every month or so. Great examples of why you always should take your meds.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        9 months ago

        At least they get called on being a word salad merchant in that sub, the response in r/openai is basically rapturous.

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        9 months ago

        The halting problem relates because in a similar way it is saying that there cannot be a single algorithm that solves everything within the system thus the system needs algorithms that can do “work” to solve complex problems. NP-complete problems are out of reach for today’s classical compute systems and thus quantum computing could approach them and unlock them faster i.e. the speedup. This does reflect Godel’s incompleteness theorems.

        I need a shorter name for the whole genre of person that’s on way too many uppers and won’t stop using ChatGPT all night to make all their decisions, cause we keep running into them and for some reason all of them are obsessed with CS woo

        maybe we’re really just witnessing what happens when your “nootropic” habit gets out of hand and you’re still in debt from gambling on crypto, so you get high as shit and convince yourself you’re a genius because whenever you read the tea leaves they tell you exactly what you expected to hear. this is, unfortunately, how cults tend to form.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        9 months ago

        Amazing that when there is pushback against his ideas he starts to ad hominem call people professors.

        (there was this talk/article about how to recognize a crank I forgot the link/source but iirc ‘reacting badly to pushback’ and ‘always trying to solve the biggest open problems firsts’ are two things on the list).

      • AnarchistArtificer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        9 months ago

        Like OP, I also learned about Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and was struck with a sense of profundity despite not having the mathematical grounding to come to any meaningful conclusions from this. Unlike OP, I don’t ramble about the things I don’t really understand.

        (I do, however, ramble about protein structure and biochemistry, which is very cool, and also my jam)

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      9 months ago

      I suffer from monkey mind, chronic imposter syndrome, and the hedonic treadmill. A few friends have confided that they have the same issue too. Perhaps you can relate as well. To improve my mental well-being, I meditate, write morning pages, and keep a gratitude journal. However, as helpful as these techniques are, they primarily rely on introspection. What was missing was an external perspective—someone who could ask follow-up questions, challenge my assumptions, and help untangle my thoughts and emotions.

      please, for the love of fuck, see a real therapist for the ADHD and depression (and the hedonic treadmill? which just seems to be your mood regulating back to normal after bad shit happens?) you’re desperately trying to cloak behind pseudopsychological terminology

      Enter ChatGPT. Over the past year, I’ve been using it as my therapist and coach. It’s been surprisingly helpful and meets all the needs above, plus it’s available 24/7. And I don’t have to worry about being judged (hopefully our AI overlords will be benevolent!) So far, every “session” has been insightful and I almost always leave with a lighter heart.

      there’s so much to unpack in “I don’t have to worry about being judged, haha hopefully the AI gods won’t hate me haha” alone

      System Prompt: You are Tara, an empathetic, insightful, and supportive coach who helps people deal with challenges and celebrate achievements.

      You have academic and industry expertise to brainstorm product ideas, draft engineering designs, and suggest scientific solutions.

      but what good is a therapist if it can’t help you hustle and grind! certainly stealing ideas from a magic 8 ball will help you with your chronic imposter syndrome!

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        13·
        9 months ago

        You have academic and industry expertise to brainstorm product ideas, draft engineering designs, and suggest scientific solutions.

        If you need an LLM to brainstorm product ideas then maybe it’s not “impostor syndrome”, you’re just actually fucking bad at this.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        9 months ago

        fucking hell I just clicked to their about page

        Hi, I’m Eugene Yan. I design, build, and operate machine learning systems that serve customers at scale. I also write and speak about ML, RecSys, LLMs, and engineering.

        I’m currently a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon where I focus on helping customers read more. Here, I built systems including real-time retrieval, bandit-based ranking, and recsys in search (see RecSys 2022 keynote). More recently, I’m exploring how LLMs can help us serve customers better.

        Outside of work, I share the ghost knowledge of applying ML via …

        I guess there’s the minor upside that the people making the world worse are all so proudly self-identifying? removes the need to guess

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        9 months ago

        System Prompt: You are Tara, an empathetic, insightful, and supportive coach who helps people deal with challenges and celebrate achievements.

        You have academic and industry expertise to brainstorm product ideas, draft engineering designs, and suggest scientific solutions.

        but what good is a therapist if it can’t help you hustle and grind! certainly stealing ideas from a magic 8 ball will help you with your chronic imposter syndrome!

        you know, that shit reads exactly like the affirmations scenes in severance, and that shit was made to be as creepy as it was

        it’s an extremely sad testament to a myriad set of societal failures that this person is finding depth in the text of a soulless sample-glitching regurgitation cloner that’s using inspiro-copy from however many self-help websites as the pattern for this. like, this is some fucking suckerpunch-level suck for shit to be this bad for that person

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    9 months ago

    got this over IM, apparently a twitter is making SM-Civ into a cognitohazard. must be a slow news day

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      9 months ago

      that thread is quite nuts, as his main complaint is some sort of ‘you can no longer take over the world as easily’ thing, while civilization always had anti-snowballing mechanics. (He also doesn’t mention the spinoffs like alpha centauri, colonization and call to power, which (apart from call to power I think) should be part of the conversation as they were created by the same teams/software houses as the civs at the time. But the changes in those games would undermine his message of ‘ruling class (?? Firaxis ruling class really??) cultural decline’. And not just a higher focus on different game mechanics because they want every game to have a distinct different felling to try and get new people involved, the market has changed and pure 1991 style civilization games don’t do as well and don’t recoup your budget. The problem also seems to be that he is a ‘conquerer’ type player while civ tries to also appeal to the ‘builder’ type players, and I think more modern civs also try to appeal to the ‘multiplayer’ type player which is in conflict with the ‘conquerer’ type. (I made the specific types up here, but there are general types of players, and somebody interested in a ‘clash of civilizations I want to take over the world’ type of game is going to want a different type of game than a ‘clash of civilizations I want to build the best civ’ game or a ‘clash of civilizations, I want to play a game with my friends’ game).

      This thread feels like a shapiro, and I have only glanced at game design theory as an amateur.

      Edit: sorry my comment is obviously bad as I didn’t first replay all the civ games before making this comment. ;) But if I had, I would remember that in the first game you could ‘win’ the game by building a spaceship to alpha centauri, as the game was score based (I think a successful big spaceship gave a massive score boost), not ‘win by taking out all other empires’ based (which iirc just ends the game, aka he confused completing a game with winning a game). In civ1 you don’t play against others, you play against your earlier self via the high score system.

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        9 months ago

        Also any hardcore Civ player will tell you that full conquest is basically the only possible win strategy on Diety (the highest difficulty level), because the AI gets such sick bonuses to all stats that you can’t compete on science or anything else. Conquest is literally the meta!

        Honestly, I am more disgusted by this guy’s bad takes about Civ than the reactionary talking points. If you want to be an obnoxious white gamer dude at least do it correctly you piece of shit.

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        9 months ago

        In Civilization: Beyond Earth you can literally become an imperialist Earth puritanian faction whose agenda is eradicating all native life and colonising the planet.

        Woke?

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        9 months ago

        For example, in Civ V you can only play peaceful flower-smelling whimpy-ass woke hippies, like Askia

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      9 months ago

      Because I am a glutton for punishment I found the unrolled thread here (via HN but they don’t have anything to say apart from complaining you have to be logged on to Twitter to read it).

      All I’m gonna say is that if you’re coming after me with a thesis about the Fall of the West, you’d better not have apostrophes in your possessive its.

      edit I read the first few tweets and it sure seems like this dude is mad Civ is no longer the realization of the core ideas of Mein Kampf.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        9 months ago

        Which is kind of funny to me because compared to games like CK2 that focus on a specific part of history Civ’s application of a single set of unified mechanics to the whole of human history ends up creating a kind of state realism that is not without political implications of its own. Like, Civilization is a series in which the entirety of human history is described in terms of a competition with explicit winners and losers between entities with strictly defined borders and policies enforced within them, i.e. nation-states. It’s not a very big leap into nationalism and it’s arguably a testament to the durability and strength of democratic and egalitarian cultural norms that the series has evolved the way it has instead of becoming something more actively right-wing.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          9 months ago

          Isn’t Hearts of Iron IV the game of choice for people who want to explore victorious virtual Third Reichs?

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            9 months ago

            Only the noobs conquer the world with the third reich, the experts use decolonialist South Africa to take over the world.

    • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      9 months ago

      I skimmed this thread and OOP is mad that you can beat Civ without literally conquering the world, a change which may have been made for balance and depth; but ig its just another attempt by the soiboi elites to longhouse gamers

      Edit: whoops, turns out everyone wrote my comment but better. Have an unhinged quote retweet instead

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      9 months ago

      This is a bit meta but the fact that this Black Horse guy got his thread recommended by the algo seems to imply he’s a bluechecker but there’s none visible. So the question is if he is hiding it, and if it will be revealed by the latest ukase from St. Elon that hiding the blue check is no longer possible…

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        9 months ago

        flipside: the content is definitely a type of topic that elmo wants to amplify, could be amplified under that too?

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    9 months ago

    404 media revisited the worthless DeepMind materials science dataset, featuring some world-class marketing gymnastics:

    Google DeepMind told me in a statement, “We stand by all claims made in Google DeepMind’s GNoME paper.”

    “Our GNoME research represents orders of magnitude more candidate materials than were previously known to science, and hundreds of the materials we’ve predicted have already been independently synthesized by scientists around the world,” it added.

    […]

    Google said that some of the criticisms in the Chemical Materials analysis, like the fact that many of the new materials have already known structures but use different elements, were done by DeepMind by design.

    hundreds of the materials have already been independently synthesized you say?

    ”We spent quite a lot of time on this going through a very small subset of the things that they propose and we realize not only was there no functionality, but most of them might be credible, but they’re not very novel because they’re simple derivatives of things that are already known.”

    this just in, DeepMind’s output is worthless by design. but about that credibility point…

    “In the DeepMind paper there are many examples of predicted materials that are clearly nonsensical. Not only to subject experts, but most high school students could say that compounds like H2O11 (which is a Deepmind prediction) do not look right,” Palgrave told me.

    by far the most depressing part of this article is that all of the scientists involved go to some lengths to defend this bullshit — every criticism is hedged with a “but we don’t hate AI and Google’s technology is still probably revolutionary, we swear!” and I don’t know if that’s due to AI companies attributing the successes of machine learning in research to unrelated LLM and generative AI tech (a form of reputation laundering they do constantly) or because the scientists in question are afraid of getting their lab’s cloud compute credits yanked if they’re too critical. knowing the banality of the technofascist evil in play at Google, it’s probably both.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      10·
      9 months ago

      While the above analysis may seem to be critical, we do believe that many of our points could be adopted in the next version of this work. More scrutiny of the “new” materials needs to be performed prior to putting them into a database and claiming “…an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity”. In fact, we have yet to find any strikingly novel compounds in the GNoME and Stable Structure listings, although we anticipate that there must be some among the 384,870 compositions.

      This brings us to our final point concerning the claim of “an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity”. We would respectfully suggest that the work by Merchant et al. (1) does not report any new materials but reports a list of proposed compounds. In our view, a compound can be called a material when it exhibits some functionality and, therefore, has potential utility. Since no functionality has been demonstrated for the 384,870 compositions in the Stable Structure database, they cannot yet be regarded as materials.

      then they proceed to explain how badly have they fucked up in the only one example where they tried to find some utility of “new” “material”

      The few examples of functionality mentioned in the article are associated with Li±ion conductors. While the proposed materials are encouraging, their compositions leave much to be desired since they incorporate chemically soft anions. These anions are usually associated with narrow electrochemical stability windows, which renders materials that incorporate them somewhat pointless as Li+ solid electrolytes. (29)

      this is basically closest you can get to “you fucked up, do better” in a published article. saying “you fucked up, actually don’t even try to do better, go home” is not what i’ve seen ever really in published piece, excluding obvious cases of cooked data, even if it’s warranted this time. it’s in conclusions section https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        9 months ago

        this is a lot more damning than the 404 media article let on, and I’m very happy that’s the case

        • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          6·
          9 months ago

          it is really a damning with a slight hint of praise

          We also note that, while many of the new compositions are trivial adaptations of known materials, the computational approach delivers credible overall compositions, which gives us confidence that the underlying approach is sound

          In closing, we hope the comments presented here will usefully serve the large community of materials scientists and engineers in their continued quest to develop the next generation of useful materials. While we are confident that the tools of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have a bright future in the field of materials discovery, more work needs to be done before that promise is fulfilled.

          the other paper cited is that preprint from el reg article from some two months ago

          also i wouldn’t agree that research on plutonium intermetallics is useless, it’s still a very useful material. granted, in civilian use it’s mostly in form of ceramic plutonium dioxide, and i guess that some (most?) of plutonium alloying chemistry came to be in search of something that could be called stainless plutonium, which would make nuclear weapons design much easier and more reliable. but it’s not completely useless and it can have actual civilian applications

          also authors note that even such noncontroversial thing as writing compound formula in standardized, conventional way and sorting them by compound class was too hard for them

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
    10·
    9 months ago

    oh no

    Aella
    @Aella_Girl
    My dad, a professionally evangelical fundamentalist Christian with no exposure to rationality, somehow independently discovered lesswrong and is now really worried about AI. idk if this means AI risk is going more mainstream or if it’s a genetic disposition thing

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      9 months ago

      “could it be that we both have the predisposition to believe batshit fairytales because of our social background rooted in an environment filled with them? no, must be that the AI truly will kill us!”

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      9 months ago

      I mean, the rationalist conception of God and the evangelical conception of AI are basically the same: hypothetically omnipotent and omnibenevolent forces that will nonetheless subject everyone to the most twisted tortures that their imaginations can invent unless appeased through a specific series of actions that just happen to involve a lot of money ending up with the leading figures of the church.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      9 months ago

      The AI worry gene.

      From the comments: “wait, how did he discover LessWrong and stay a professionally evangelical fundamentalist Christian?” lol

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      9 months ago

      My coworker at work asked me if I had read HPMOR and said it was “really good”.

      I know I work in silicon hell-hole, but that still surprised me a bit – to have what I thought was the weird obscure drama corner of the internet brought up in real life.

      For it to have also reached some evangelicals… well that could turn into a real problem.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        9 months ago

        HPTMOR is so obviously and unequivocally terrible that I can’t help thinking I must be missing something significant about it, like how it could be scratching a very specific itch in young people on the spectrum.

        As always, all bets are off if it happens to be the first long form literature someone read.

        • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4·
          8 months ago

          At the time, I rather liked the first half of HPMOR, because I thought it was going somewhere and it was taking the piss at Harry Potter. I also enjoy fiction where people aren’t idiots for sake of the plot, so I was enjoying a bit of deconstruction of that.

          And then it just… Stopped the story and spun in place for what should have been the second half of the book and turned into drivel that takes itself very seriously.

          I may have even told people to read it. I’m so sorry.

        • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
          3·
          9 months ago

          I think when most people say a culture product was good, they mean that they were entertained. I found it entertaining way back when. Looking back at it now, I’m not sure why. It is objectively awful.

          Thinking about it, I think it’s a combination of:

          • Due to real life stuff, I wanted to be distracted and entertained (I binge watched and read a lot of material of questionable quality at this time)
          • Fanfiction, so large suspension of demands of any formal structure and logic
          • Fanfiction of children’s fantasy books, so another large helping of suspension of disbelief
          • I started reading just as it was wrapping up, so binge reading and then moving on (only to then 10 years later finding out that it was a cult recruitment tool, like finding out you had been to Scientology seminar, enjoyed free snacks and just missed all the cult recruitment going on)

          I also think stories happens to a very large part in the mind of the reader/listener/watcher/player. So the story as perceived by me of ten years ago, or sailor’s coworker, doesn’t have to have much connection with what was actually written. That is also what I have noticed trying to re-read some of the sci-fi I read as a kid. The stories I remembered was much better than the ones in the books.

          • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            9 months ago

            I mean I like the idea behind it is amusing enough – Harry Potter but magical science evil mastermind (he’s uh supposed to be a bad guy in the story right?).

            Everyone wants to read about that sort of stuff it’s why Death Note was so popular.

            But HPMOR just never really went anywhere with any of it and was too superficial and it’s only really interesting for as long as the reader fails to notice that.

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        9 months ago

        it always feels like someone’s walking on my grave when my friends or coworkers bring up Rationalist shit, and it’s been happening increasingly often

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          3·
          9 months ago

          about 2y back, one of my (ML, datascience) friends asked me “so what do you think about the EA thing” while we were on a hike (!)

          I’d been peripherally aware of some of it but not the full picture, but my stance of the time bears out learning more about them

          worried about when I hear the mention in a bar though. and it is near guaranteed to happen around these parts sometime, even if just because there’s some things that ZA has a timelag on

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    9 months ago

    (ventpost) a personalized fuckyou to musk for making it impossible for me/making twitter effectively unusable without being logged in

    (context: power’s out in my area atm, and (because of a variety of ZA-flavoured reasons, which are also problems…) I can’t actually get any fucking info because it’s all just on a twitter feed)

    I still refuse to log in though (and I’ll double down on hating the cunt for his choices impacting my life in this manner)

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      It remains infuriating how many agencies/governments simply don’t have reliable online public feeds, with information.

      Especially annoying when the only place with info is twitter and/or Facebook.

      (That doesn’t fully solve the community contributions, which should also be useful, but at minimum any info from official accounts SHOULD be posted elsewhere)

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        9 months ago

        yea, strong agree

        I’m going to see if I can get something done about this my side of the world, but that involves a lot of yaks

    • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      9 months ago

      Burners aside though, Elon is such a weird fucking poster. Everything he says is so derivative and empty. He openly steals his memes and every retweet he makes just agrees with some other poster wholesale; no addendums, no mixed agreements, just “whoa” and “this is concerning”. It’s like he spongebob’d himself into forgetting everything besides level 4 self-driving and apartheid

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      9·
      9 months ago

      this was of course the toast of the UK press and Twitter

      they’re doing a parody of it in LA, which looks like rubbish but they’re flying over the Oompa Loompa actor so if she gets a paying gig out of it then fine

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        9 months ago

        This is the worst timeline.

        But if this is the actor’s break then hey I agree something good comes out of it.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          9 months ago

          I saw some other pictures of her, and not just the bored meme picture everybody has seen, and she really tried to make the best of it for all the kids coming, so really hope it works out for her.