Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)
new odium symposium episode. we examine the foundational TERF text, janice raymond’s “the transexual empire,” which turns out to be about how trans people are a big pharma conspiracy
https://www.patreon.com/posts/12-invasion-of-w-152915964
www.odiumsymposium.com for links to other platforms
Did I mention that one of your more recent eps covered some shit so odious I stress ate a pile of oreos? Keep up the good work
Old by modern standards but this dramatic reading of some shit the suno guy said got me to laugh: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVLmCoNj_PB/
NVidia’s announced an AI filter for PC gaming, calling it “AI-Powered Breakthrough In Visual Fidelity For Games” and hyping the ever-loving shit out of it.
The results are, unsurprisingly, complete garbage, and its already getting ripped apart by the gaming press.
Maybe it’s just me but even the enhanced lighting aspect doesn’t look especially good, at least where faces are concerned; shining a hard light sideways so every facial nook and cranny gets highlighted in excruciating detail looks less natural and more like the old android HDR photo filter, even before you realize it’s giving some characters instagram make-overs.
I mean, some of their before/after images are much more impressive than the RE one, but the general look is less like a revolution in capacity and more like someone took some time to find the right Instagram filter.
Also after taking a look at Starfield’s steam page for comparison I’m pretty sure that all the “before” images were taken on lower settings for existing texture quality and lighting. Like, even in areas where the DLSS gives an improvement the original game doesn’t look as bad as presented here.
Also the discourse has been ongoing since at least Skyrim’s original release whether or not the increasing fidelity of game graphics was actually making games better, or just more expensive to make and play. And that was before transformer models entered the picture and started cooking the world. I’m glad nVidia got some new jerk-off material, but even if it works exactly as advertised that’s all it is at this point.
I’m struck by how much contrast gets blasted into the shadows of every scene, reminiscent of the average RTX “remaster.” Lighting is treated not as a tool for composing scenes and guiding attention, but as a dial to be turned toward “more gooder” wherever possible. Just make everything look like everything else; that’s how you know the technology is getting Better.
increasing fidelity of game graphics was actually making games better, or just more expensive
I really liked what Control did with cranking up the verisimilitude and the photorealism, namely to accentuate the uncanniness and really up the new weird vibe.
An Aella-curious blogger in SoCal has noticed something:
But what I find more interesting than broadly “weird sex” is the specific interest in BDSM, kink and particularly full-contact CNC; a relatively common fantasy in individuals, but one I’ve never seen such widespread community interest in outside the Bay Area.
Kink and power-play are practices of manufactured risk, with CNC clocking at a more intense point on the same spectrum. The idea that many of these people are devoting their 9-5s and beyond to eliminating the ultimate consequence (death), only to go home and collectively play-pretend violence (scaffolded with extensive rules and consent forms) is fascinating, and- to me- makes complete sense.
The rationalist interest in manufacturing risk is the direct byproduct of their commitment to flushing it out.
The blogger attended Aella’s SlutCon. I don’t know if she knows that many of our friends have problems with consent as most of us understand it (their understanding is more “if they are old enough to sign the contract, and they sign, that is on them”).
[Effective Altruism] was originally applied to initiatives like raising money for mosquito netting, but now includes figures like Johnson, who has reframed his blood experiments as a product of his own generosity, set to cure humanity of its greatest ill: death itself.
People keep saying this, so it’s good to have a reminder that the weirdos (derogatory) were there all along.
Gleiberman’s paper on the longtermist foundations of the Effective Altruism movement is great!
I read a post by someone leaving LessWrong-the-site who said that from now on he would only donate to Aubrey de Grey because obviously we are so close to curing aging. Found it http://lesswrong.com/lw/m81/leaving_lesswrong_for_a_more_rational_life/
supremely rational gamblers want to rewrite reality by threatening a journalist, because reporting got in the way of them getting money from polymarket. all while completely unaware that they’re giving him better story than the actual missile impact thing https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-on-polymarket-are-vowing-to-kill-me-if-i-dont-rewrite-an-iran-missile-story/ also https://awful.systems/post/7617781
update: polymarket claims to have banned users involved, not specifying how they found them https://xcancel.com/Polymarket/status/2033635318662860916#m
Polymarket when faced with the oracle problem: “What if we threaten to shoot the oracle?”
the rationalist counterpart to rubber hose cryptanalysis
“So I put an accumulator on Gaelic Warrior to win the Gold Cup, Arsenal to beat Leverkusen in the Champions League, and all-out nuclear conflict by the end of March”
Palmer Lucky Wants YOU 🫵 To Die For His Waifus
Bonus Sneer from Adam Johnson
I also appreciated this followup
isn’t Luckey the dude mostly known for awkwardly and overweightly jumping wearing a VR headset on the cover of Time or something
WTF is this garbage in the Graurdain? “Let’s assume!” is a terrible premise for even an opinion column to begin with, but “let’s assume Musk is right and AI could allow us all to not work” is… bananas for the Guardian to publish. Even before considering that the author’s bio says he’s a business owner of a technology and financial management services company.
The article’s entire premise is Musk saying some random shit. Remember how Musk said that he would land a man on Mars in 10 years 13 years ago? Honestly, I am incensed that people like Musk and Trump can just say shit and many people will just accept it. I can no longer tolerate it.
Putting aside the very real human ability to screw up such a concept and turn any fair system into an unfair one, …
He says this after mentioning UBI. He really doesn’t want to confront the unfortunate fact that UBI is entirely a political issue. Whatever magical beliefs one may have about how AI can create wealth, the question of how to distribute it is a social arrangement. What exactly stops the wealthy from consolidating all that wealth for themselves? The goodness of their hearts? Or is it political pushback (and violence in the bad old days), as demonstrated in every single example we have in history?
I’d say the problem is even worse now. In previous eras, some wealthy people funded libraries and parks. Nowadays we see them donate to weirdo rationalist nonsense that is completely disconnected from reality.
No getting up early and commuting on public transit. …
This is followed by four whole paragraphs about how the office sucks and wouldn’t it be wonderful if AI got rid of all that. Guess what, we have remote work already! Remember how, during COVID, many software engineering jobs went fully remote, and it turned out that the work was perfectly doable and the workers’ lives improved? But then there were so many puff pieces by managers about the wonderful environment of the office, and back to the office they went. Don’t worry, when the magical AI is here, they’ll change their minds.
Yes, there are “mindless, stupid, inane things” like chores that are unavoidable. There are also other mindless, stupid, inane things that are entirely avoidable but exist anyway because some people base their entire lives around number go up.
This was my thought the whole time: if the political will existed, we could probably already do everything that AI is supposed to “enable” here. Some of the work people would choose not to do would end up being actually important, and the market in its infinite power would need to find a way to get that work done, whether that’s paying more to invent new types of automation or compensating people enough that they choose to do it without the threat of starvation and homelessness (or finding new ways to exploit people to do it, but I believe there’s a floor on that at which the other two options become more economically viable), but that’s the whole pitch for having a labor market in the first place. At the same time, absent that political will there’s no reason to expect any change in productivity to change the current arrangement. At best the people working any jobs that get eliminated are discarded as obsolete, lose their ability to participate in the market, and are eventually handled by the criminal justice system or otherwise removed from consideration.
