The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.
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.)
bow before the true champion of the working class, s e gyges:
between him saying this, and other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious and being enslaved (and being actually fine with helping promulgating what they truly believe is slavery, because hey, you need to pay the rent), i am afraid something worse than usual entered the californian drinking water.
(not linking to the skeet on purpose).
I just remembered what his slopstack is called. My “Very Sane AI Newsletter” has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the name of my newsletter.
Hey now, segyges has had his own whinging multithousand word blogpost on model consciousness out since early spring (tldr: currently not really conscious, but it’s inevitable because I really want it to, so don’t be on the wrong side of history when it happens).
He seems to be angling for the role of TPOT scott alexander, except instead of gradually cultivating a consensus in favor of eugenics and being ruled by high IQ overmen his long term thing is establishing any perceived anti-AI stance as an unforgivable moral failing.
just yesterday that motherfucker posted allegation that “slop” is a word from nazi vocabulary. so that bitch says that any criticism of ai is far right signifier actually. as in, the product being sold on a promise of displacing all labour and redirecting all wealth to five sfba dipshits, and cooking brains of maga boomers worldwide as we speak
Really hope the people outside of our little forum paid attention when warned Gyges was also an AI doomer.
Ah yes, Nazis, well known for speaking english
Ah yes, Nazis, well known for using slop jar to mean the vessel into which chamber pots are poured, in 1855
“Slop” as we use it to describe AI outputs came into the discourse via left-wing twitter and podcasts using “slop” as a term for mass entertainment media (like Marvel movies — cape slop). Used negatively but also self deprecatingly: I can’t wait for the new episode of “Stranger Things”, because I need my slop. The explicit metaphor is pigs happily eating buckets of food waste from a trough. It’s just slop. Nothing nefarious.
I think this may have been a case of the “dirtbag left” types using slang that originated on 4chan, I did a search with date restrictions on the 4plebs archive site and found posts using it for mindless entertainment going back to 2012 at least
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73708#comment-1642217
Sadly I think the popularization does owe a lot to the intermediate stage where 4chan started calling mass entertainment media “goyslop,” but even the Protocols types switched to tacking on specific descriptors before it made it out into the mainstream and got picked up as a term for genAI output.
they’re collectively spiraling.
TFG: Everything I don’t like is rent seeking. Checkmate, anyone ideologically to the left of me
Look he is right, if you redefine ‘rent’ to mean something totally else that includes people being paid for their labour.
In the same way that telling people they should pay their fair share of taxes is actually saying you want to murder them. (Sorry crazy libertarian logic is the only way I can make sense of this).
He points out that mathematicians are also rent-seekers (though only 20% rent-seeking). You know, those famously capital-extractive mathematicians.
Oh my god he’s doing fandom gatekeeping discourse
https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3my3letkpbc2b
Lol dorkus
It’s “fully automated luxury gay space communism”, and every adjective is a pithy critique of the past.
what never having seen a left-wing person in real life does to a slopper
The “vicious traditionalism” that develops among his fellow travelers, who insist that some form of autonomous, inscrutable AI has to be the next step in technological progress, will be something to see. Religious movements don’t just stop when their central prophecy disappoints.
“Lol dorkus” is an idiomatic translation of Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur (more literally “What is freely asserted is freely denied”), and if you call that “Hitchens’s razor” I will fucking cut you.
I just wonder if he means ‘they are looking to pay their rent’ or ‘they are holding on the ‘capital of being able to do math’ and want to be paid for it’.
Damn, I was raking in so much cash from my mathematical theorems. Pretty good source of passive income, came with nice tax benefits too. Too bad it’s all gone now. Maybe I should put my money in REITs.
… the fuck?
Yeah this is literally pants-on-head crazy. The explicit business model of the AI companies is rent-seeking on as much human activity as they can figure out how to intermediate. I suspect our friend is having a bit of a dark night of the soul, and trying to cope with it by turning his opposition’s obviously correct argument back on them in slipshod fashion. Dare I say, a typical Republican tactic?
I tried coming up with a good interpretation of what he said and I came up empty handed. I’m sure he will write a very helpful 5 part 20000 word blog post explaining exactly what he means.
So far I’ve come up with this: the AI can supposedly do jobs faster and better than any human, so if we try to stop that, we are destroying economic value and “rent seeking”. If a thief goes to my house, steals one of my own drawings, scribbles on it himself to make it “better”, and sells it for 5 cents, I shouldn’t stop him because I will be destroying the economic value that he is creating. Oh yeah and this leads to fascism for some reason.
And pro-AI people are not rent seeking at all. They just want to transfer the economic value of labor, knowledge, and expertise to whoever happens to own data centers.
Yeah, I mean you could twist it to say labour unions do nothing but let workers rent-seek on their human capital instead of getting paid the only true god-given market rate. USian brainworms all the way.
another ai pusher recently generated a slop image, where she and the chairman xi are fighting the united forces of darkness, which include the ai companies, people opposing the LLM embrace and american conservatives. the thing they’re fighting over? “open technology”.
say hello to the TankAIs
…and all of them are working for one or another californian ai company or a slopware house.
q: is an image derivative of a slop image still a slop image if the process of creating the derivative did not involve Sloppy Babobots? Asking for a friend, who is me, also this question is not intended to be philosophical.
What do you have in mind specifically? Parody? It depends a little on intent but I would say not a problem at all, others might disagree.