Just two weeks til’ Halloween now.
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.)
“Sigmoids always add to an exponential curve!” is another standard futurist trope from the 1960s and 1970s. Sci fi authors used to share this diagram with a curve fitted to pony express to trains to automobiles to aircraft to chemical rockets. “Nuclear rocket” and “interstellar spacecraft” were helpfully sketched in as the obvious next steps. Needless to say, we did not develop drives which can reach 10^-3 C around the year 2000 and will not reach 10^-2 C (just 430 years to Alpha Centauri) by 2050.
woah damn why does this look exactly like some Kurzweil bullshit
I have not read any Kurzweil for 20 years but I think if you read him most of it will be recycled '50s-'70s tropes. Even nanotech appeared in a Feynmann talk, and Moore’s Law is from 1965. Remember, cranks keep presenting ideas which were refuted long ago as new.