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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Today in “Promptfondler fucks around and finds out.”
So I’m guessing what happened here is that the statistically average terminal session doesn’t end after opening an SSH connection, and the LLM doesn’t actually understand what it’s doing or when to stop, especially when it’s being promoted with the output of whatever it last commanded.
Shlegeris said he uses his AI agent all the time for basic system administration tasks that he doesn’t remember how to do on his own, such as installing certain bits of software and configuring security settings.
Emphasis added.
so I snipped the prompt from the log, and:
❯ pbpaste| wc -c 2063wow, so efficient! I’m so glad that we have this wonderful new technology where you can write 2kb of text to send to an api to spend massive amounts of compute to get back an operation for doing the irredeemably difficult systems task of initiating an ssh connection
these fucking people
Assistant: I apologize for the confusion. It seems that the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet is not the correct one for your network. Let’s try to determine your network configuration. We can do this by checking your IP address and subnet mask:
there are multiple really bad and dumb things in that log, but this really made me lol (the IPs in question are definitely in that subnet)
if it were me, I’d be fucking embarrassed to publish something like this as anything but a talk in the spirit of wat. but the promptfondlers don’t seem to have that awareness
“I only had this problem because I was very reckless,” he continued, "partially because I think it’s interesting to explore the potential downsides of this type of automation. If I had given better instructions to my agent, e.g. telling it ‘when you’ve finished the task you were assigned, stop taking actions,’ I wouldn’t have had this problem.
just instruct it “be sentient” and you’re good, why don’t these tech CEOs undersand the full potential of this limitless technology?
Hopefully this doesn’t break the rules. But where can I find some educational podcasts that aren’t overly capitalist, reactionary, rationalist, or otherwise right-leaning or authoritarian in nature.
I want to specifically avoid content like Lex Friedman, Huberman, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris. That sounds good on the surface but goes down a rabbit hole of affirming reactionary bias.
I’m not amazing with words, so I hope what I’m saying makes sense. Thanks.
Most everything from Cool Zone Media is going to be pretty decent. Haven’t listened to the whole catalogue, but Ed Zitron of Better Offline is an established nonmember (as far as I know) friend of the sneer and Behind the Bastards is truly excellent.
Maintenance Phase is an excellent examination of diet and health grifters, and Mike’s others (You’re Wrong About and If Books Could Kill) are also pretty excellent.
I also want to spotlight Wittenburg to Westphalia, a history podcast ostensibly about the wars of the reformation and the social and economic chamges of the early modern period. But in order to really give a sense of how dramatic those changes are, he has so far provided only an incredibly thorough examination of medieval European society from the politics to economics and social structures. He has an episode about unfree labor that I found particularly interesting.
The Wittenburg podcast sounds like right up my alley, thanks for the tip!
Behind the Bastards is very easy to listen to and usually focuses on documenting the bad shit that various reactionary and fascist figures have done (in a humorous manner — the host was a writer for Cracked during its peak). a couple of the most recent episodes have covered some of the same topics we talk about in SneerClub and TechTakes, and they’re well worth a listen even if you know the subject matter well. I haven’t checked it out yet, but I think It Could Happen Here is a spin-off with the same main host that’s also broadly anti-fascist.
e: also, and I had to look this up cause I keep switching podcast apps: I Don’t Speak German is also good, and my co-admin David was on it (episode 82? I swear it was more recent than that… David were you on more than once?)
i was! ep 82 and 85
IDSG has slowed down a lot cos Daniel’s got shit going on right now, but they try to do one when they can
These aren’t exactly educational but the two pods I bring up in this joint are “If Books Could Kill” and “Scam Goddess”. Again, they aren’t exactly educational but you’ll learn from them!
Some others that might work for you, mixture of informative and entertaining hosts
- Some More News
- This Machine Kills
- Never Post
- Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
- Maintenance Phase
- You’re Wrong About
A medium nation’s worth of electricity!
I didn’t realize I was still signed up to emails from NanoWrimo (I tried to do the challenge a few years ago) and received this “we’re sorry” email from them today. O can’t really bring myself to read and sneer at the whole thing, but I’m pasting the full text below because I’m not sure if this is public anywhere else.
spoiler
Supporting and uplifting writers is at the heart of this organization. One priority this year has been a return to our mission, and deep thinking about what is in-scope for an organization of our size.
National Novel Writing Month To Our NaNoWriMo Community:
There is no way to begin this letter other than to apologize for the harm and confusion we caused last month with our comments about Artificial Intelligence (AI). We failed to contextualize our reasons for making this statement, we chose poor wording to explain some of our thinking, and we failed to acknowledge the harm done to some writers by bad actors in the generative AI space. Our goal at the time was not to broadcast a comprehensive statement that reflected our full sentiments about AI, and we didn’t anticipate that our post would be treated as such. Earlier posts about AI in our FAQs from more than a year ago spoke similarly to our neutrality and garnered little attention.
We don’t want to use this space to repeat the content of the full apology we posted in the wake of our original statements. But we do want to raise why this position is critical to the spirit—and to the future—of NaNoWriMo.
Supporting and uplifting writers is at the heart of what we do. Our stated mission is “to provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page”. Our comments last month were prompted by intense harassment and bullying we were seeing on our social media channels, which specifically involved AI. When our spaces become overwhelmed with issues that don’t relate to our core offering, and that are venomous in tone, our ability to cheer on writers is seriously derailed.
One priority this year has been a return to our mission, and deep thinking about what is in-scope for an organization of our size. A year ago, we were attempting to do too much, and we were doing some of it poorly. Though we admire the many writers’ advocacy groups that function as guilds and that take on industry issues, that isn’t part of our mission. Reshaping our core programs in ways that are safe for all community members, that are operationally sound, that are legally compliant, and that are mission-aligned, is our focus.
So, what have we done this year to draw boundaries around our scope, promote community safety, and return to our core purpose?
We ended our practice of hosting unrestricted, all-ages spaces on NaNoWriMo.org and made major website changes. Such safety measures to protect young Wrimos were long overdue.
We stopped the practice of allowing anyone to self-identify as an educator on our YWP website and contracted an outside vendor to certify educators. We placed controls on social features for young writers and we’re on the brink of relaunch.
We redesigned our volunteer program and brought it into legal compliance. Previously, none of our ~800 global volunteers had undergone identity verification, background checks, or training that meets nonprofit standards and that complies with California law. We are gradually reinstating volunteers.
We admitted there are spaces that we can’t moderate. We ended our policy of endorsing Discord servers and local Facebook groups that our staff had no purview over. We paused the NaNoWriMo forums pending serious overhaul. We redesigned our training to better-prepare returning moderators to support our community standards.
We revised our Codes of Conduct to clarify our guidelines and to improve our culture. This was in direct response to a November 2023 board investigation of moderation complaints.
We proactively made staffing changes. We took seriously last year’s allegations of child endangerment and other complaints and inspected the conditions that allowed such breaches to occur. No employee who played a role in the staff misconduct the Board investigated remains with the organization.
Beyond this, we’re planning more broadly for NaNoWriMo’s future. Since 2022, the Board has been in conversation about our 25th Anniversary (which we kick off this year) and what that should mean. The joy, magic, and community that NaNoWriMo has created over the years is nothing short of miraculous. And yet, we are not delivering the website experience and tools that most writers need and expect; we’ve had much work to do around safety and compliance; and the organization has operated at a budget deficit for four of the past six years.
What we want you to know is that we’re fighting hard for the organization, and that providing a safer environment, with a better user interface, that delivers on our mission and lives up to our values is our goal. We also want you to know that we are a small, imperfect team that is doing our best to communicate well and proactively. Since last November, we’ve issued twelve official communications and created 40+ FAQs. A visit to that page will underscore that we don’t harvest your data, that no member of our Board of Directors said we did, and that there are plenty of ways to participate, even if your region is still without an ML.
With all that said, we’re one month away! Thousands of Wrimos have already officially registered and you can, too! Our team is heads-down, updating resources for this year’s challenge and getting a lot of exciting programming staged and ready. If you’re writing this season, we’re here for you and are dedicated, as ever, to helping you meet your creative goals!
In community,
The NaNoWriMo Team
@maol Bloody hell, they really dropped the ball.
I wasn’t aware of any of this as I haven’t been involved for over 10 years.
It’s a shame that they lost sight of the basics.
God that’s exhausting. Wasn’t Nanowrimo supposed to be a fun thing at some point? Is there anyone in the world who thinks this sort of scummy PR language is attractive?
I was not prepared for how many words the spoiler unlocked
I was not prepared for how many words would land in my inbox 💀
I don’t have the broader context to comment on the changes they discussed regarding child endangerment and community standards apart from “Wait… oh my God you weren’t already doing that???”
But it’s such a huge pull back to go from “hating AI is ableist and basically Hilter” to “uhhhh guys we’ve had our plates full cleaning up the mess and the most we’ll say about AI is to stop being assholes about it on our forums.” Clearly there’s still a lot of cleaning up to do at some level.
Ex-headliners Evergreen Terrace: “Even after they offered to pull Kyle from the event, we discovered several associated entities that we simply do not agree with”
the new headliner will be uh a Slipknot covers band
organisers: “We have been silent. But we are prepping. The liberal mob attempted to destroy Shell Shock. But we will not allow it. This is now about more than a concert. This is a war of ideology.” yeah you have a great show guys
By “liberal mob” he means “people who asked for their money back and aren’t coming anymore”
I wish them a merry cable grounding fault and happy earth buzz to all
My current hyperfixation is Ecosia, maker of “the greenest search engine” (already problematic) implementing a wrapped-chatgpt chat bot and saying it has a “green mode” which is not some kind of solar-powered, ethically-sound, generative AI, but rather an instructive prompt to only give answers relating to sustainable business models etc etc.
See my thread here https://xcancel.com/fasterandworse/status/1837831731577000320
I’m starting to reach out to them wherever I can because for some reason this one is keeping me up at night.
They’re from Germany and made the rounds on the news here a few years back. They’re famous for basically donating all their profits to ecological projects, mostly for planting trees. These projects are publicly visible and auditable, so this at least isn’t bullshit.
Under the hood they’re just another Bing wrapper (like DuckDuckGo).
I actually kinda liked the project until they started adding a chatbot some months back. It was just such a weird decision because it has no benefits and is actively against their mission. Their reason for adding it was “user demand” which is the same bullshit Proton spewed and I don’t believe it.
This green mode crap sounds really whack, lol. So I really wonder what’s up with that. I gotta admit that I thought they were really in it because they believed in their ecological idea (or at least their marketing did a great job convincing me) so this feels super weird.
I got a downvote for some reason…
Some people just want to watch the world burn
It seems they undid it. Maybe Ecosia are on to me
That is a good username. Also very scummy business practices. I have a quite big dislike for people who pull that kind of shit.
Thanks! I thought it shows up on here too. Anyway, you can find me on all the places with that username
I have sent an email to their press enquiries contact asking for more information, but I don’t know if I have the “press” clout to warrant a response (I know I don’t)
as seen via jwz, the tail wagging the dog continues (archive) at mozilla
“if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em” but the wrong way around. I guess they got tired of begging google for money?
And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet
this tracks analogously to something I’ve been saying for a while as well, but with some differences. one of the most notable is the misrepresentation here of “the internet”, in the stead of “all the entities playing the online advertising game to extract from everyone else”
This particular bit of news has me so down. :(
I get ya.
❤️
Thanks I hate it.
[Advertising is] the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.
Content is a scarce resource y’know. Heaven forbid the content farms go out of business; or we might end up having to read Sherlock Holmes isekai fanfiction rather than a content farm’s two paragraphs and three screen-fulls of ads surrounding the tweet du jour. That would be
terribleactually quite nice.We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history
WTF. How is it possible for a company to be this self-congratulatory about entering the advertising space?! Someone needs to fork Firefox.
this aged like fine milk (granted it’s from 2019)
the predominant fork (afaik) is called LibreWolf
some indications that it is not atm entirely resilient to the upstream bullshit, but I’m curiously eyeballing whether that changes
personally, I’m hoping on servo
from the (current?) prick-in-chief at YC in this post:
and everyone in our industry owes a debt to open source builders
nice of you to admit it. now maybe pay down some of that debt by using sending of your piles of money to those projects
oh, what’s that, you only want to continue taking from it and then charging other people service rent, without ever contributing back? oh okay then
a debt in the special non-financial sense
the miracle of VC is learning to write like ChatGPT
ah, the special non-financial sense, you mean blood debts? I think many of us will be happy to hold tan et co to account for blood debts
a land acknowledgement for the open source they’re trampling on and will keep trampling on
nasb, fedi is for losers
been feeling this for a while too and wondering how to put it into words. especially in light of all the techfash, pressing climate and general market problems, etc
one of the things I’ve been holding onto (hoping in?) is my estimation/belief that I don’t think the current state of all the deeply-fucked systems is inherently stable, or viable. as I’ve said here before, that very instability is part of why so many of them are engaged in trying to set things up to protect those self-same systems, as they know the swingback is coming and they want to make it as hard as possible to claw things back from them
but how long until it breaks, and with how much splash damage, are things I haven’t really been able to estimate
You know that famous Keynes quote, right. To paraphrase: “the tech sector can remain irrational for longer than the planet can remain habitable”.
My computer crashed as I was writing a response. In short:
I think fedi existing and having the userbase it has is “victory” enough. Capitalism and fascism push us to think “winning” and “success” are the greatest thing to aspire to. To “win” over capitalism and fascism will require an unlearning and disavowal of those aspirations.
This is absolutely an important idea, but in the context of anti-capitalism I think there’s a kind of catch-22 at play. The alternative systems that operate under a capitalist paradigm have serious externalities that come back to bite us whether we engage or not with them. My wife and I have spent some late nights over the last week trying to help family and friends in North Carolina keep track of which roads are usable, who is or isn’t confirmed to be alive yet, etc. Maybe I’m a little extra feisty about climate change today, but it seems like while the alternative doesn’t have to “win” in the same way that capitalists want to we do still need them to lose. Existing independently in parallel isn’t a sustainable end goal, though I do agree that parallel structures are an important part of the solution.
oh yeah, I agree quite strongly with that sentiment too (and that’s why I didn’t re-use the words of the post I linked)
the fedi has some pretty dire threats (shit like threads etc) that I do think it needs to deal with by way of more teeth (consider it self-protective boundary setting), but in general I think a lot of the current state of it satisfying people just for being happy to be themselves is perfectly fine and good
side note: part of my problem is that my thinking on matters is a bit waterlogged due to shortage of knowledge/references, and backfilling that is … well, hard to find the right resources for reading, and perpetual spoon shortage. I’ve been working my way through some Graeber and some other stuff, but very slowly and need more things. also doesn’t help that ZA is, functionally, a desert island
Oh also what does nasb mean
I can’t recall who proposed it
Im reminded of the “Rationalism is systematized winning”. Post for some reason. This post and the recent musk chess post just makes me wonder about “what does winning” even mean. But in the spirit of wargames, i have not thought about it much more than that.
musk… chess… post… ?
actually, forget I asked. I’ve had an eventful enough week of bullshit, and am going to close my friday off with some careless daydrinking and relaxation
(e: I would add: good god “musk chess post” must be one of the craziest strings of words I’ve seen in a while)
The only one I’m aware of is the ages old “chess is too simple” and I feel like that one was stupidity distilled in such a high concentration I don’t ever need to hear any of his other opinions on chess, or games in general to be honest.
Between that and his Elden Ring build I think games were one of the earliest identified fields where Elon is actively dumb. Later extended to automotive design and literally everything.
This article (regrettably substack) really explores all the nooks and crannies of cringe hiding in the musk chess post: https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/what-elon-musks-favorite-game-tells
r/SubredditDrama’s watching shit go down in r/EffectiveAltruism, and there’s a lotta sneers going on
It is worth mentioning that this is the question that catalysed the SRD post:
Most Effective Aid to Gaza?
I’m not in support of Effective Altruism as an organization, I just understand what it’s like to get caught up in fear and worry over if what you’re doing and donating is actually helping. I donate to a variety of causes whenever I have the extra money, and sometimes it can be really difficult to assess which cause needs your money more. Due to this, I absolutely understand how innocent people get caught up in EA in a desire to do the maximum amount of good for the world. However, EA as an organization is incredibly shady. u/Evinceo provided this great article: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/effective-altruism-is-a-welter-of-fraud-lies-exploitation-and-eugenic-fantasies/
Man, that hits close to home. It’s a hard sell to sneer at people ostensibly doing their best to do good. Any kind of altruism, particularly one ostensibly focused on at least trying to be effective, feels like a such a rare treat that I feel like the worst kind of buzzkill letting newcomers know what cynical doomer ass death obsessed sex cult (and not even in a kinkily cool way*) a big chunk of EA and other TESCRL are. I can relate to them in so many ways, especially remembering what my teenage self was like, but at the same time it’s weirdly hard to articulate how immature those opinions (some of which) I used to, and they continue to hold, are**.
Anyway, charity is a symptom of the failure of society. Luxury is a human right. Profit is exploitation. Nobody gets a billion dollars without mass homicide.
* but unfortunately often in an uncool, very rapey way
** not all of them, there are levels of cringe I managed to avoid even in my teenage years
(Another post so soon? Another post so soon.)
“Gen AI competes with its training data, exhibit 1,764”:
Also got a quick sidenote, which spawned from seeing this:
This is pure gut feeling, but I suspect that “AI training” has become synonymous with “art theft/copyright infringement” in the public consciousness.
Between AI bros publicly scraping against people’s wishes (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C), the large-scale theft of data which went to produce these LLMs’ datasets, and the general perception that working in AI means you support theft (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), I wouldn’t blame Joe Public for treating AI as inherently infringing.
I researched cool topics using ChatGPT, Claude, Google
That’s not what research means, you embossed carbuncle.
I linked NotebookLM to the Wikipedia entry of each topic and generated the podcast audio
It’s fucking James Somerton with extra steps!
Back in my day, you had to create your own kooky “evidence” for conspiracies.
“curated”
it shouldn’t surprise me that the dipshit who was massively involved in “solving language” doesn’t understand the meaning of words, but grrrrr
(and I say that as an armchair linguist who understands that language is as people use it (fuck prescriptivism))
dipshit who was massively involved in “solving language”
“In the what now?”, he said, voice trembling with a mixture of horror and excitement
2015 - I was a research scientist and a founding member at OpenAI.
proudly displayed on his blog timeline
Wait, did OpenAI claim somewhere they will “solve language”?
no, that’s a personal extrapolation/framing characterising some of the shit I’ve seen from these morons
(they engaged with very few linguists in the making of their beloved Large Language Models, instead believing they can just data-bruteforce it; this plan gone as well as has been observed)
The horror. Replacing the joy of looking into something and making your findings available in your own style to others replaced by autogenerated slop. And soon this will be all over the place, we will look back on the past period of low effort clickbait with nostalgia.
https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1841848120897912967#m
jfc
Edit: replaced screenshot of tweet + description with link to tweet
jesus christ, as if “podcasts” consisting of random idiots regurgitating wikipedia weren’t bad enough as it is
aaaaaaaah
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
it’s like he’s purposefully trying to think as little as possible
thinking needs many strawberry reasoning tokens! maybe these grifters just aren’t as rich as they portray
can’t tell if serious
……pwahahahaha
“if only you know” in the purest form I’ve seen all week
App developers think that’s a bogus argument. Mr. Bier told me that data he had seen from start-ups he advised suggested that contact sharing had dropped significantly since the iOS 18 changes went into effect, and that for some apps, the number of users sharing 10 or fewer contacts had increased as much as 25 percent.
aww, does the widdle app’s business model collapse completely once it can’t harvest data? how sad
this reinforces a suspicion that I’ve had for a while: the only reason most people put up with any of this shit is because it’s an all or nothing choice and they don’t know the full impact (because it’s intentionally obscured). the moment you give them an overt choice that makes them think about it, turns out most are actually not fine with the state of affairs
Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?
I doubt it, unfortunately.
sickos yes energy if true, sigh
@froztbyte @jwz Not the biggest Apple fan, but you got to give them credit: with privacy changes in their OSs, they regularly expose all the predatory practices lots of social media companies are running on.
There are so many features of modern applications and platforms that I have to wonder why anybody would have thought it was a good idea, this is just one of them. Sharing your contacts shouldn’t even be an option. As somebody else in this thread put it, it’s not your data.
@froztbyte @blakestacey they fat-finger it and regret it later
wut
@froztbyte @blakestacey
Let me play world’s saddest song…@froztbyte I’m so unsympathetic to that notion.
Also, literally zero of my friends here came via my phone’s contacts.
@froztbyte @blakestacey I really need to get on the apple ecosystem
New piece from Ars Technica: Meta smart glasses can be used to dox anyone in seconds, study finds:
Two Harvard students recently revealed that it’s possible to combine Meta smart glasses with face image search technology to “reveal anyone’s personal details,” including their name, address, and phone number, “just from looking at them.”
In a Google document, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases. They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to dox someone in a glance or surface information to scam someone in seconds—or other nefarious uses, such as "some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media.
This is all possible thanks to recent progress with LLMs, the students said.
Putting my off-the-cuff thoughts on this:
-
Right off the bat, I’m pretty confident AR/smart glasses will end up dead on arrival - I’m no expert in marketing/PR, but I’m pretty sure “our product helped someone dox innocent people” is the kind of Dasani-level disaster which pretty much guarantees your product will crash and burn.
-
I suspect we’re gonna see video of someone getting punched for wearing smart glasses - this story’s given the public a first impression of smart glasses that boils down to “this person’s a creep”, and its a lot easier to physically assault someone wearing smart glasses than some random LLM
-
This is a gut feeling I’ve had since Baldur talked about AI’s public image nearly three months ago, but this gives me further reason to expect the public are gonna be outright hostile to the tech industry once the AI bubble pops.
Thank you for the Dasani video, fucking amazing.
What the hell does “spunk” mean in the US??
I’m not USAian but I’d bet both “jizz” and “gusto”, depending on context
100%. This criti-hype is going to blow up in their faces. “They” being, in order:
- AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio
- Meta
- PimEyes
In addition to your analysis, I’d like to point out that this reads just like the Rabbit R1, but for stalkers who also have a deep craving to look like an insufferable dork. This whole thing could be, and already is, an app – if someone needs this kind of evil bullshit, clearview.ai been around forever.
I also now wonder how illegal this could be in various jurisdictions. I know that aiming security cams at public roads is a bit frowned upon here in .nl for example
-
Maybe not the right place, not really a sneer but anyways. The Smile (aka Yorke & Greenwood from Radiohead) made a music video with StableDiffusion and I’m pretty bummed out. 😔
This truly was our OK Computer
-Jhon “Lemmy” Radiohead, frontman of band Radiohead
OK User
Say it isn’t true
For real, I can’t find info about this. Can you share a source?
You can look up the “Creative Programmers” mentioned in the description too.
Well to be fair, this kind of weird picture melding is the correct way to use the technology. Though it’s hardly groundbreaking at this point is it, I feel I’ve seen it a million times.
this was what I was thinking, too. and this particular video doesn’t even seem to make great use of it? it’s extremely milquetoast, doesn’t vary at all, and doesn’t even do anything visually interesting more than once (if that, and that it then just repeats and repeats and repeats and…)
Yeah, it doesn’t look good. Both artists are shilling NFTs on their personal profile but only one of them, Ciro Negroni, is openly pro AI. The studio site, weirdcore.tv does have some folio projects credited as being with AI visuals and they also have studio NFT projects. They do seem to specialise in lots of different styles of digital glitch art.
It doesn’t look good. Especially the lack of questions about AI in the official The Smile tweet thread announcing the video
Did I say it doesn’t look good?
Edit: I’d like to know https://x.com/fasterandworse/status/1841878497662283978
As previously mentioned, the “Behind the Bastards” podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I’m just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.
This is something I’ve noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There’s a nostalgia for the “old” internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I’ve always thought that’s dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.
This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.
I have a lot of time for nostalgia about older versions of the web, but it really ticks me off when people who actively participated in making the web worse start to indulge in nostalgia about the web. Doesn’t Yarvin get a lot of money from Peter Thiel?
There were women and people of colour on the old web, and feminists and radical anti-racists too - they were just outnumbered and outgunned. One of the earliest projects listed on the cyberfeminism index are VNS Matrix, who were “corrupting the discourse” way back in 1991.
To be perfectly fair i was a very callow youth at the time and probably bounced off stuff like that had I come in contact with it.
(why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest)
Because they think you live in a real country, not the USA.
old internet
I wonder for how many people this is a reactionary impulse, wanting back to the ‘old internet’ they didn’t actually participate in. At least in modern days the flamewar posts are quite limited in length, in the old days they could reach novel sizes. Anyway sure we should go back to the old internet, where suddenly your whole university had no internet because there was a dos attack on the network to force a netsplit on an a random irc channel.
why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest
I’m thinking combination of you probably having set all your privacy settings to non serviam and most of their sponsors having opted out of serving their ads to non US listeners.
I did once get some random scandinavian sounding ads, but for the most part it’s the same for me, all iheart podcast trailers.
The funniest thing I got was ads for Maybelline in a podcast about WW2. Know your audience!
The YouTube version doesn’t have the ads
