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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Palmer Lucky Wants YOU š«µ To Die For His Waifus
Bonus Sneer from Adam Johnson
WTF is this garbage in the Graurdain? āLetās assume!ā is a terrible premise for even an opinion column to begin with, but āletās assume Musk is right and AI could allow us all to not workā isā¦ bananas for the Guardian to publish. Even before considering that the authorās bio says heās a business owner of a technology and financial management services company.
The articleās 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, ā¦
He says this after mentioning UBI. He really doesnāt 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?
Iād 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. ā¦
This is followed by four whole paragraphs about how the office sucks and wouldnāt 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 workersā 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. Donāt worry, when the magical AI is here, theyāll change their minds.
Yes, there are āmindless, stupid, inane thingsā 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 āenableā 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 thatās 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 thereās a floor on that at which the other two options become more economically viable), but thatās the whole pitch for having a labor market in the first place. At the same time, absent that political will thereās 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.