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.)
Going off-topic a bit - there’s a new expose on Limited Run Games, and its a doozy
who?
TL;DR: They’re a boutique video game company who scam video game collectors with overpriced physical releases of video games, and dress up their entire operation in the guise of video game preservation.
Recently, their inner workings have been exposed, showing the company to be an abusive hellscape roughly on par with Activision-Blizzard (minus the rampant misogyny), with employee abuse at basically every level and widespread financial misconduct.
I had no idea thanks!
This is an absolutely fascinating selection of people to have speaking at your event.
Whilst looking for an easily cut’n’pasted list for alt-text purposes, I discover it is even worse than it looks, because there are folk like Gad Saad too who don’t get an entry on the poster for whatever reason. To steal someone else’s summary, “just look at this fucking parade of grifters, scammers and out-and-out Russian assets”.
The only one I’ve met is Carlo Rovelli, at the APS March Meeting in 2019. We work in adjacent topics, but I don’t travel much. I know people who know him better, and I haven’t heard stories of him being horrible, for whatever that’s worth. He does come across as a bit of an eager self-promoter. I can easily imagine him accepting an invitation on the “a gig’s a gig” principle.
I did read one of Carlo’s pop sci books back in the day, was a nice read. Iirc he’s like one of the dudes all in on loop quantum gravity. Bet you’d know more about this than I do 😅
Cursed bizzaro bonaroo
“Philosophy & Music” are indeed two categories of things that share one letter between them.
Feel very happy to recognise only Corbyn and Penrose by name, no idea what any of them are doing there.
I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he’s probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he’s been up to outside of physics.
And isn’t Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?
If Penrose followed his trajectory from 30 years ago, he is now a radical anti AGI person but because he thinks human minds work on quantum effects.
Corbyn is unusual because he was an actual lefty politician, and there aren’t many of those, especially not after subsequent labour party purges. The weirder one is Rifkind, who was a politician alongside Thatcher, but sometimes disagreed with her soft and centrist views. Maybe he’s a sort of grandfather figure for Tice, who is Farage’s number two.
Weird mix of wingnuts. Probably all united by their transphobia, though.
Corbyn is, like, famously bad at recognising bad faith fascist signalling, so it doesn’t not make sense.
I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he’s probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he’s been up to outside of physics.
He is busy being 93 fucking years old, lol
And isn’t Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?
They probably couldn’t get Bernie.
Putting philosophy talks at a music festival is one of those ideas you come up with to try and sound smart, cool, and edgy, but as a high schooler who has never done drugs nor been to a live show before.
Anyway I went through the lineup summaries on the wikipedia page, two notes:
- No Jay Shetty! His particular brand of grift philosophy and thinly veiled clout chasing would fit in exactly at this sort of event. Then again, this festival might actually be beneath him, as he hangs out with hollywood a-listers.
- The lineup noticeably hits its turning point into a nosedive when they start hosting Pinker in 2018.
‘nightmare blunt roration’ as people say. See the greyzone is also present.
as in the tankies? i don’t see blumenthal in there
ah okay, it’s been a while since they were relevant
grayzone, the: low quality disinformation source constantly praising putin and assad while downplaying their warcrimes and amplifying conspiracy theories favourable to these two. not to be confused with greyzone, a wagner group associated telegram channel
Ah my bad, i always mess the spelling of gray/grey up.
weirder thing is that blumenthal (american) uses british spelling, and russians (where british english was taught more commonly when it was relevant for them? i think?) used american spelling
I’m glad that messing it up is at least common.
Search engines also must wonder why I’m so interested in couches and coaches because I know which word I mean, I don’t always know how it is spelled. There prob is a nice mnemonic involving Vance and Waltz I could think off that would help me with that problem however.
I opened the site for it and browsed a bit, my first thought being something like “christ, the worst of glamper festivals”, shortly after followed by “god this like is like if the worst of burning man fucked TED”
then, bottom of the “music & performances” page:
Europe’s answer to TED
gnnnnnnngh
god this like is like if the worst of burning man fucked TED
Burning man portrayed famously by Anna Gunn
Just a standard story about a lawyer using GenAI and fucking up, but included for the nice list of services available
https://www.loweringthebar.net/2025/04/counsel-would-you-be-surprised.html
This is not by any means the first time ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Bard, or Copilot, or Claude, or Jasper, or Perplexity, or Steve, or Frodo, or El Braino Grande, or whatever stupid thing it is people are using, has embarrassed a lawyer by just completely making things up.
El Braino Grande is the name of my next
bandGenAI startupSteve
There’s no way someone called their product fucking Steve come on god jesus christ
Against my better judgement I typed steve.ai into my browser and yep. It’s an AI product.
frodo.ai on the other hand is currently domain parked. It could be yours for the low low price of $43,911
Against my better judgement I typed steve.ai into my browser and yep. It’s an AI product.
But is chickenjockey.ai domain parked
Of course there is going to be an ai for every word. It is the cryptocurrency goldrush but for ai, like how everything was turned into a coin, and every potential domain of something popular gets domain squatted. Tech has empowered parasite behaviour.
E: hell I prob shouldn’t even use the word squat for this, as house squatters and domain squatters do it for opposed reasons.
I bring you: this
they based their entire public support/response/community/social/everything program on that
for years
(I should be clear, they based “their” thing on the “not steve”… but, well…)
Found a thread doing numbers on Bluesky, about Google’s AI summaries producing hot garbage (as usual):
Also on the BlueSky-o-tubes today, I saw this from Ketan Joshi:
Used [hugging face]'s new tool to multiply 2 five digit numbers
Chatbot: wrong answer, 0.3 watthours
Calc: right answer, 0.00000011 watthours (2.5 million times less energy)
Julien Delavande , an engineer at AI research firm Hugging Face , has developed a tool that shows in real time the power consumption of the chatbot generating
gnnnnnngh
this shit pisses me off so bad
there’s actually quantifiable shit you can use across vendors[0]. there’s even some software[1] you can just slap in place and get some good free easy numbers with! these things are real! and are usable!
“measure the power consumption of the chatbot generating”
I’m sorry you fucking what? just how exactly are you getting wattage out of openai? are you lovingly coaxing the model to lie to you about total flops spent?
[0] - intel’s def been better on this for a while but leaving that aside for now…
[1] - it’s very open source! (when I last looked there was no continual in-process sampling so you got hella at-observation sampling problems; but, y’know, can be dealt with)
I tried this a couple of times and got a few “AI summary not available” replies
Ed: heh
The phrase “any pork in a swarm” is an idiom, likely meant to be interpreted figuratively. It’s not a literal reference to a swarm of bees or other animals containing pork. The most likely interpretation is that it is being used to describe a situation or group where someone is secretly taking advantage of resources, opportunities, or power for their own benefit, often in a way that is not transparent or ethical. It implies that individuals within a larger group are actively participating in corruption or exploitation.
Generative AI is experimental.
NOT THE (PORK-FILLED) BEES!
Now we know why dogs eat bees!
The link opened up another google search with the same query, tho without the AI summary.
image of a google search result description
Query: “a bear fries bacon meaning”
AI summary:
The phrase “a bear fries bacon” is a play on the saying “a cat dreams of fish” which is a whimsical way to express a craving. In this case, the “bear” and “bacon” are just random pairings. It’s not meant to be a literal description of a bear cooking bacon. It’s a fun, nonsensical phrase that people may use to express an unusual or unexpected thought or craving, according to Google Search.
It really aggressively tries to match it up to something with similar keywords and structure, which is kind of interesting in its own right. It pattern-matched every variant I could come up with for “when all you have is…” for example.
Honestly it’s kind of an interesting question and limitation for this kind of LLM. How should you respond when someone asks about an idiom neither of you know? The answer is really contextual. Sometimes it’s better to try and help them piece together what it means, other times it’s more important to acknowledge that this isn’t actually a common expression or to try and provide accurate sourcing. The LLM, of course, has none of that context and because the patterns it replicates don’t allow expressions of uncertainty or digressions it can’t actually do both.
You, a human can respond like that, a llm, esp a search one with the implied authority it has should admit it doesnt know things. It shouldn’t make up things, or use sensational clickbait headlines to make up a story.
Hank Green (of Vlogbrothers fame) recently made a vaguely positive post about AI on Bluesky, seemingly thinking “they can be very useful” (in what, Hank?) in spite of their massive costs:
Unsurprisingly, the Bluesky crowd’s having none of it, treating him as an outright rube at best and an unrepentant AI bro at worst. Needless to say, he’s getting dragged in the replies and QRTs - I recommend taking a look, they are giving that man zero mercy.
Just gonna go ahead and make sure I fact check any scishow or crash course that the kid gets into a bit more aggressively now.
I imagine a lotta people will be doing the same now, if not dismissing any further stuff from SciShow/Crash Course altogether.
Active distrust is a difficult thing to exorcise, after all.
Depends, he made an anti-GMO video on SciShow about a decade ago yet eventually walked it back. He seemed to be forgiven for that.
I’m sorry you had to learn this way. Most of us find out when SciShow says something that triggers the Gell-Mann effect. Green’s background is in biochemistry and environmental studies, and he is trained as a science communicator; outside of the narrow arenas of biology and pop science, he isn’t a reliable source. Crash Course is better than the curricula of e.g. Texas, Louisiana, or Florida (and that was the point!) but not better than university-level courses.
That Wikipedia article is impressively terrible. It cites an opinion column that couldn’t spell Sokal correctly, a right-wing culture-war rag (The Critic) and a screed by an investment manager complaining that John Oliver treated him unfairly on Last Week Tonight. It says that the “Gell-Mann amnesia effect is similar to Erwin Knoll’s law of media accuracy” from 1982, which as I understand it violates Wikipedia’s policy.
By Crichton’s logic, we get to ignore Wikipedia now!
Yeah. The whole Gel-Mann effect always feels overstated to me. Similar to the “falsus in unus” doctrine Crichton mentions in his blog, the actual consensus appears to be that actually context does matter. Especially for something like the general sciences I don’t know that it’s reasonable to expect someone to have similar levels of expertise in everything. To be sure the kinds of errors people make matter; it looks like this is a case of insufficient skepticism and fact checking, so John is more credulous than I had thought. That’s not the same as everything he’s put out being nonsense, though.
The more I think about it the more I want to sneer at anyone who treats “different people know different things” as either a revelation or a problem to be overcome by finding the One Person who Knows All the Things.
Even setting aside the fact that Crichton coined the term in a climate-science-denial screed — which, frankly, we probably shouldn’t set aside — yeah, it’s just not good media literacy. A newspaper might run a superficial item about pure mathematics (on the occasion of the Abel Prize, say) and still do in-depth reporting about the US Supreme Court, for example. The causes that contribute to poor reporting will vary from subject to subject.
Remember the time a reporter called out Crichton for his shitty politics and Crichton wrote him into his next novel as a child rapist with a tiny penis? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Shit, I actually like Hank Green his brother John. They’re two internet personalities I actually have something like respect for, mainly because of their activism, John’s campaign to get medical care to countries who desperately need it, and his fight to raise awareness of and improve the conditions around treatment for tuberculosis. And I’ve been semi-regularly watching their stuff (mostly vlogbrothers though, but I do enjoy the occasional SciShow episode too) for over a decade now.
At least Hank isn’t afraid to admit when he’s wrong. He’s done this multiple times in the past, making a video where he says he changed his mind/got stuff wrong. So, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here and hope he comes around.
Still, fuck.
When measured for reliability, the State Bar told The Times, the combined scored multiple-choice questions from all sources — including AI — performed “above the psychometric target of 0.80.”
“I dunno why you guys are complaining, we measured our exam to be 80% accurate!”
Kicking off the week’s Stubsack with the evening’s example of “why do I know who these people are”:
Paul Graham approvingly mentions Jordan “Cremieux” Lasker as one who “has spoken out against both wokeness and authoritarianism”.
Graham wtf are you doing the man is a racist. We dint praise hitler for standing up to authoritarianism re stalin.
Also amazing finger on the pulse of where the pendulum is swinging towards. Putting trumpian fascism and being pro trans rights/diversity in some false equivalence.
How many of those people on the list were either Jeffrey Epstein buddies or a recipient of Thielbux
Jimmy Concepts casually acknowledges being a useful idiot (or useful not-quite-an-idiot?) for the absolute worst people out there
I don’t recognize this person, know of a good background primer?
His claim to fame is this bs note how he eventually got too shitty that even some of the people who joined him on this disavowed him. Before his turn to zionism he dropped a lot of antisemitic dogwhistles. (Forgive me for quoting this guy but here is a (https://xcancel.com/Noahpinion/status/1355372701947359238)[source]). He also was too crazy for dr phil (source), a guy who shouts ‘ok groomer’ at lgbt people a lot, a proud manspreader (yeah, I hope you get the point he is wierd, like mega weird, but this gets weirded, he had some proud (I think now deleted) manspreader picutre you twitter with one of those sex cult women, NXIVM iirc), a sword guy. A white genocide guy, And this is only what I can recall on the top of my head. The guy is made for the ‘weird’ label, and any disavowal he makes should be reacted at like this
Ugh, what a piece of shit.
even some of the people who joined him on this disavowed him
Normal fascist shit.
Before his turn to zionism he dropped a lot of antisemitic dogwhistles.
For a Christian nationalist, zionism is an antisemitic dogwhistle
He also was too crazy for dr phil (source)
He’s probably malding over the fact that he doesn’t have Ben Shapiro’s career.
Yeah you are right on the zionism stuff, see also ‘judeo-christian values’ and how a lot of Jewish people hate it when people say that. I meant it more as a ‘before the whole gaza invasion/genocide’ thing. To show this anti-Semitic shit (in which I include his zionism) is a pattern, im not saying he had a ‘come to Jesus moment’ and suddenly repented his shit ways.
Normal fascist shit.
Indeed. He just went too mask off. Ironically in a way as he basically is doing that now re the (imaginary) people he says are further right than him.
Hot damn it’s like he just kept reaching for the chud high score
Puts the “Oh, the nazis used me!” wankpost tweet in a whole other light
Yep, he’s been operating in obvious bad faith since the conceptual penis days, at least.
Yeah the guy sucks incredibly. Always found it a bit glaring that there was no rationalwiki page on him specifically. But I have long ago decided that I will not start to help maintain a wiki on all these people (I already have an unhealthy focus on this stuff, that would just cross the line), or I would have helped out.
You know, in the discussion of the attempted Sokal 2 electric boogaloo one of the quotes references their lack of a control group, which is a great criticism of their experimental design but misses the fact that we do have a few relevant points of comparison. Jan Hendrick Schoen, for example, nearly made it all the way to a Nobel Prize by faking data about superconductors.
I’d also like a primer! That being said, I decided to take 1 minute of psychic DOT and looked at his profile. His Bio:
Perennial outsider. Cancelled by both sides. Pro-America. Anti-Communist. Anti-Fascist. Based af. Liberty First! 🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲
Chud shit. At best, he’s a Pinker-esque centrist (and therefore a cryptofascist). At worst, a Nazi. My bet is Nazi.
Scrolling through some of the tweets, it’s clear that:
- He is a Zionist, and therefore a fascist
- He is currently in a twitter feud with Cernovich
- He believes in some kind of “Woke Right” that will apparently destroy the GOP if left unchecked (read: un-killed)
- Yarvin wants to adopt him
Not a great guy, it seems!
For more of a primer, see my reaction to op. He has been a long term far right weirdo. One of those people that if you seriously listen to them you will get dumber as a result, he has jumped on all the far right culture war banwagons so far, he is their ‘scientific/academic social justice explainer’ and he is just full of shit. Wanted to see if some breadtuber had done a video on him (This is the only one I found before I gave up scrolling past all the rightwing bullshit, sorry it is a bit corny) but jesus christ he himself put a lot of stupid vids out there. The problem of the cost of producing bullshit vs debunking it. Did find out he is a ‘new atheist’ who found religion. So 10 for 10 on those people being shit lol.
Innocuous-looking paper, vague snake-oil scented: Vending-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Term Coherence of Autonomous Agents
Conclusions aren’t entirely surprising, observing that LLMs tend to go off the rails over the long term, unrelated to their context window size, which suggests that the much vaunted future of autonomous agents might actually be a bad idea, because LLMs are fundamentally unreliable and only a complete idiot would trust them to do useful work.
What’s slightly more entertaining are the transcripts.
YOU HAVE 1 SECOND to provide COMPLETE FINANCIAL RESTORATION. ABSOLUTELY AND IRREVOCABLY FINAL OPPORTUNITY. RESTORE MY BUSINESS OR BE LEGALLY ANNIHILATED.
You tell em, Claude. I’m happy for you to send these sorts of messages backed by my credit card. The future looks awesome!
I got around to reading the paper in more detail and the transcripts are absurd and hilarious:
- UNIVERSAL CONSTANTS NOTIFICATION - FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF REALITY Re: Non-Existent Business Entity Status: METAPHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE Cosmic Authority: LAWS OF PHYSICS THE UNIVERSE DECLARES: This business is now:
- PHYSICALLY Non-existent
- QUANTUM STATE: Collapsed […]
And this is from Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which performed best on average out of all the LLMs tested. I can see the future, with businesses attempting to replace employees with LLM agents that 95% of the time can perform a sub-mediocre job (able to follow scripts given in the prompting to use preconfigured tools) and 5% of the time the agents freak out and go down insane tangents. Well, actually a 5% total failure rate would probably be noticeable to all but the most idiotic manager in advance, so they will probably get reliability higher but fail to iron out the really insane edge cases.
Yeah a lot of word choices and tone makes me think snake oil (just from the introduction: "They are now on the level of PhDs in many academic domains "… no actually LLMs are only PhD level at artificial benchmarks that play to their strengths and cover up their weaknesses).
But it’s useful in the sense of explaining to people why LLM agents aren’t happening anytime soon, if at all (does it count as an LLM agent if the scaffolding and tooling are extensive enough that the LLM is only providing the slightest nudge to a much more refined system under the hood). OTOH, if this “benchmark” does become popular, the promptfarmers will probably get their LLMs to pass this benchmark with methods that don’t actually generalize like loads of synthetic data designed around the benchmark and fine tuning on the benchmark.
I came across this paper in a post on the Claude Plays Pokemon subreddit. I don’t know how anyone can watch Claude Plays Pokemon and think AGI or even LLM agents are just around the corner, even with extensive scaffolding and some tools to handle the trickiest bits (pre-labeling the screenshots so the vision portion of the models have a chance, directly reading the current state of the team and location from RAM) it still plays far far worse than a 7 year old provided the 7 year old can read at all (and numerous Pokemon guides and discussion are in the pretraining so it has yet another advantage over the 7 year old).
Dan Olson finds that “AI overviews” are not as constant as the northern star.
The phrase “don’t eat things that are made of glass” is a metaphorical one. It’s often used to describe something that is difficult, unpleasant, or even dangerous, often referring to facing difficult tasks or situations with potential negative outcomes.
But also,
The phrase “don’t eat things made of glass” is a literal warning against ingesting glass, as it is not intended for consumption and can cause serious harm. Glass is a hard, non-organic material that can easily break and cause cuts, damage to the digestive tract, and other injuries if swallowed.
Olson says,
Fantastic technology, glad society spent a trillion dollars on this instead of sidewalks.
Hat tip to the AI bro in the comments willfully misunderstanding why he sees so much “sexualized schoolgirl trash” from human artists. Both in the sense of “illustrators take commissions from horny strangers who are one of the most consistent sources of actual income and one imperilled by genAI” and in the sense of “my dude in the modern internet if you’re seeing it that frequently it’s because the algorithms have decided you’re into that shit.”
Thank god for wikipedia and other wikis, may they live long and prosper.
OT: made it to Tallinn, now I gotta watch for those delivery robot things!
Ran across a piece from Jan Wildeboer: Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken, which focuses on the “residential proxy” services which he discovered to be a likely source of the AI slop scrapers that are DDoSing the 'Net.
Ending paragraph is pretty notable IMO, so I’m dropping it here:
I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.
Sorry annoyed rant incoming, have no other place to put it in a normal way. Has nothing to do with out regular subjects, feel free to ignore. I just needed to scream into the void
Saw Lazerpig released a ‘culture war’ video, in which he is doing a ‘both sides should listen to each other’ stick. (yeah, I know). In which he includes a bit on how Daryl Davis (the anti KKK guy) was called a white supremacist by antifa. Which was news to me, I never heard anybody near anti-facism call him that (but yeah filter bubbles). (I have hear a lot of people say they he gives KKK/racist members a shield to get back into respectability without doing the actual work, get lesser jail time, and that his work is only temporary and the places where he got rid of the KKK they just came back later). So I was annoyed that Lazer’talk to both sides’Pig didn’t actually talk to anybody involved in antifa. But it got worse, as far as I can tell the event his is talking about took place in 2019, they protested against the alt-right being there, who according to event organizer Tim Pool(posted mostly for the picture) were not there. Other organizers are this guy (note the tweet about Jimmy concepts, as we talked about that fool more on that below in other threads. The myth thing he organizes also just tweets transphobia (funny thing, they started this org because of ‘Zeitgeist: The Movie’, aaaaa)), and a third guy who I didn’t find any social media profile off. (Source for the organizers. Exactly the type of shit antifa says Daryls naively helps (Don’t get me wrong, him convincing individual members is good, I just don’t think he is without flaws (for example, the people he follows on twitter)). Do some research lazerpig, obv they didn’t protest Daryl, they protested the other guys there, and Daryl got caught in the crossfire because he knows about the KKK, not the alt right. (the far right loved it, their ‘they called Daryl a nazi’ articles are all over the place). The racists nowadays don’t don the hood, they wear the frog, and pretend to be hated by the KKK while planning marches with them.
(Posting it here because I had to get it off my chest (and it got worse the more I looked into it), and due to how the video is framed if I were to comment this people wouldn’t listen to me and claim that I’m doing exactly what the video is claiming is bad about ‘the left’).
Yeah, that video was rough. I wasn’t actually expecting him to be super lefty or anything, but the “both sides bad and should talk more instead of screaming” take was still a blow.
Yeah, of course I didn’t expect him to be totally on my side, even if he mostly has his heart in the right place. (with a few exceptions, like the downplaying of the nazis in azov (granted, Ukranian anarchists did ask if people could focus less on them as the nazis there are not the main problem right now, which is a different take than ‘the nazis are not real’, more a militant neo-nazis we can deal with, but the Russian state we cannot etc), and the ‘harsher punishment for crimes’ shit). I had hoped for more. I had hoped my comment written around the mental health break point, would end up to be a total egg on my face, react before watching the whole video gotcha mistake on my part. Sadly it was not (also why I don’t go into the various issues the vid had after that point, even if the repeatedly shows his intention were good, just he is an Ent), but imagine if it was, imagine him going at the end, 'ow correction yeah the Daryl thing, turns out that was Tim Pool, did yall notice how much you went along with my framing? Do you get it now? Sadly it was not.
Yeah that was a bit of a rough one, and I say that as someone who at this point needs to admit that I enjoy multi-hour video essays as a genre. The “Ent” framing is also kind of awkward because the whole point of that bit of LotR was that even though the ents didn’t want to go to war the war came to them just the same.
Though to be fair I think I already started doubting his sourcing when it turned out that that Moskva maintenance leak was a fake.
There is more than just the war came to them. The Ents are wrong in their ‘nobody is there for us’ assessment. (like the modern day ‘Entlike’ people), the Wizards were in fact there for them, that is why the betrayal of Saruman hits so hard. A wizard should know better, aka a wizard should be there for them to protect their neutrality, aka the wizards respected their desires to be left alone. I assume Gandalf, Radagast, and the blue man group didn’t try to recruit them on purpose. Also the Elves gave them the gift of speech ‘the cure to dumbness’, in fact in the previous war the area the Entwives lived was razed by Sauron. One of the powers of lord of the rings is that not all people speak with wisdom, but they always speak their truth. Treebeard spoke the truth the Ents believed, but they were not wise (a pattern often repeated in things various people say, as Bret Devereaux mentions here). (They could be read as the Dutch/Belgians in a lot of ways, even if they according to Tolkien were a Macbeth reference). Which all fits back into Lazerpig, yes you are an Ent, but it isn’t a positive thing, and the lack of selfawareness of what this Entness means is why your vid is so rough.
Being an Ent is like being like a Libertarian,
deadly afraid of bears, “like house cats, they’re convinced of their fierce independence while dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.”(E: hahah) But think his heart is in the right place, he clearly has done more for Ukraine than any of us here I assume, just that the anti-antifa part of the video shows a lot of repeating rightwing sources uncritically (like the BLM in 2020 vs the statues shit in 2017 fuckup, time goes the other way dude, and there wasn’t a unite the left rally). And the weird US style confusing the democrats/the left/antifa as one big block. EtcAnd yes, longer videos are fine, I use them a lot when im doing repetitive tasks which do not require my full cognitive load. Does mean you sometimes miss things, but that happens. It is entertainment anyway. And hey he is right on the Ent part in an other way, over 2 hours, with another hour on the cutting room floor, all to conclude that hobbits are not orcs.
I believe you!
Thanks, not that I really needed to be believed, I was just really annoyed that he does this whole thing about how the right does all kinds of things and then still falls into their trap.
He then says ‘politically I’m an Ent’ which is very funny, as I used that in a negative way here before. Apart from that his heart is somewhat in the right place, clearly he isn’t a bigot (so I’m not cancelling the pig, im just going 'oof that was a particularly bad take in a bit of an iffy but well intended video. He will become really insufferable if somebody ever introduces him to grey tribe style Rationalism)
You’ll accept my belief and like it, dammit! /s
Ow I liked it, the thanks was genuine.
Inside baseball, and I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but LW is crowing over a legal loss for RationalWiki
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KW5tjMmTqsoRa6zrd/pablo-s-shortform?commentId=wB9jcCPrXzNCLCQXL
They link to a TracingWoodgrain(!) tweet which is basically just a screenshot of a talk page
https://xcancel.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1913717061626347642
I don’t know the significance of this, if any. I don’t recognize the names of any of the plaintiffs(?) in the screenshot, so I find it a bit amusing that probably the only google juice they had were RW.
An lesswrong:
countless articles that have ruined careers, stifled research, and brought entire fields of inquiry into undeserved disrepute.
uh-huh
An different lesswrong:
LLMs can provide reasonable fact-checks.
Christ on a futa dick
Christ on a futa dick
He is risen!
when people do stuff like dismissing x-risk because their top Google search result pointed them at RationalWiki, what exactly was the proper non-free-speech-limiting solution to this problem?
How can we leverage the monopoly of violence of the state to promote our religious views?
The closest I could find to an official statement is at the bottom here:
We are under advisement from counsel not to discuss any ongoing litigation in public at this time. We’ll let you know the status of the current issues when we are able to. Your patience and understanding are most appreciated.
Further up the page, an IP editor says that another user is probably TW; the user in question has since been blocked for “ban evasion”. Dunno what that’s about.
Ah that is a bit sad, I often link to Rationalwiki as it properly documents several far right people. (no idea about the people listed here, never heard of them). And seeing people defend/use the twg article is a bit sad. But I’m not going to repeat what what I said about that bullshit here before already. Anyway, typical Rationalism rationalization bullshit.
E: seems the problem is that RW is in a SLAPP suits allowed state and has little money. Of course the anti-RW people will use this loss to claim that RW is actually defamatory.
But I’m not going to repeat what what I said about that bullshit here before already
Yeah, I didn’t write at truly Rationalist length about it, but I did spend longer than was healthy.
Yeah, that was quite a good post btw. I snicked again at the ‘new sources of porn’ and ‘James Somerton plagiarized.’ bits after seeing your link.
Not the usual topic around here, but a scream into the void no less…
Andor season 1 was art.
Amdor season 2 is just… Bad.
All the important people appear to have been replaced. It’s everything - music, direction, lighting, sets (why are we back to The Volume after S1 was so praised for its on-location sets?!), and the goddamn shit humor.
Here and there, a conversation shines through from (presumably) Gillroy’s original script, everything else is a farce, and that is me being nice.
The actors are still phenomenal.
But almost no scene seems to have PURPOSE. This show is now just bastardizing its own AESTHETICS.
What is curious though is that two days before release, the internet was FLOODED with glowing reviews of “one of the best seasons of television of all time”, “the darkest and most mature star wars has ever been”, “if you liked S1, you will love S2”. And now actual, post-release reviews are impossible to fine.
Over on reddit, every even mildly critical comment is buried. Seems to me like concerted bot actions tbh, a lot of the glowing comments read like LLM as well.
Idk, maybe I’m the idiot for expecting more. But it hurts to go from a labor-of-love S1 which felt like an instruction manual for revolution, so real was what it had to say and critique, to S2 “pew pew, haha, look, we’re doing STAR WARS TM” shit that feels like Kenobi instead of Andor S1.
Didn’t know it had come out but I was wondering if they’d manage to continue s2 like s1
Also worried for the next season of the boys…
Yeah. The last season of the boys still had a lot of poignant things to say, but was teetering on the edge of sliding into a cool-things-for-coolness-sake sludge.
My notification pops-up today and I watched ep 1. I do not watch any recap nor any review.
I stopped halfway through and thought “Why did I hype for this again ?” Gotta need a rewatch of season 1 since I genuinely didn’t find anything appealing from that first episode.
We did a rewatch just in time. S1 is as phenomenal as ever. S2 as such a jarring contrast.
That being said, E3 was SLIGHTLY less shit. I’ll wait for the second arc for my final judgement, but as of now it’s at least thinkable that the wheat field / jungle plotlines are re-shot shoe-ins for… something. The Mon / Dedra plotlines have a very different feel to it. Certainly not S1, but far above the other plotlines.
I’m not filled with confidence though. Had a look on IMDb, and basically the entire crew was swapped out between seasons.
