TechTakes

BRING IT ON NITPICKY NUKE NERDS

archive: https://archive.is/cxAl8

Gonna add the opening quote, because it is glorious:

You cannot make friends with the rock stars...if you're going to be a true journalist, you know, a rock journalist. First, you never get paid much, but you will get free records from the record company.

[There’s] fuckin’ nothin' about you that is controversial. God, it's gonna get ugly. And they're gonna buy you drinks, you're gonna meet girls, they're gonna try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs. I know, it sounds great, but these people are not your friends. You know, these are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of the rock stars and they will ruin rock 'n' roll and strangle everything we love about it.

Because they're trying to buy respectability for a form that's gloriously and righteously dumb.

Lester Bangs, Almost Famous (2000)

EDITED TO ADD: If you want a good companion piece to this, Devs and the Culture of Tech by @UnseriousAcademic is a damn good read, going deep into the cultural issues which leads to the fawning tech press Zitron so thoroughly tears into.

archive: https://archive.ph/n2Jwi

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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

John Mulaney gets paid by prompt fondlers to tell jokes at a party. He spends 45 minutes telling them that they are idiots, which is nice.

daniellamyoung_3h

Unpopular opinion: you only hate chat gpt because it makes it harder to stack rank and discriminate against people.

So what everyone can write well now? great it's a tool! Just like moving faster because you drive a car.

The good news is you'll be easily able to hire for that writing job you need. The bad news is you won't be able to discriminate against candidates who are not as good with the written word.

Also, an obsession with the written word is a tenant of white supremacy [salute emoji]

Ian Rennie
‪@theangelremiel.bsky.social‬

Man, this probably hits really hard if you're fuckin stupid.

Bro really tried to sell his subscribers a "50$ a year" subscription to a "wallpaper" app.

Interesting points about the "app":

• the app has premium and free wallpapers
• the free wallpapers are only available in sd quality and if you want hd youd have to subscribe
• in order to unlock the sd quality you have to watch two 30 second ads.
• theres a wallpaper called "orange" thats just the color orange

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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

Do you look at the possibility of political turbulence ahead of November’s US presidential election and think: democracy could be in trouble? So does a group of tech entrepreneurs backed by big Silicon Valley money. And they love it.

Imagine if you could choose your citizenship the same way you choose your gym membership. That’s a vision of the not-too-distant future put forward by Balaji Srinivasan. Balaji – who, like Madonna, is mostly just known by his first name – is a rockstar in the world of crypto. A serial tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist who believes that pretty much everything governments currently do, tech can do better.

...

Silicon Valley loves “disruption”. Tech startups have been disrupting traditional media for years; now they are making inroads into other areas too: education, finance, space travel. “Imagine a thousand different startups, each of them replacing a different legacy institution,” Balaji told the audience. “They exist alongside the establishment in parallel, they’re pulling away users, they’re gaining strength, until they become the new thing.”

If startups could replace all these different institutions, Balaji reasoned, they could replace countries too. He calls his idea the “network state”: startup nations. Here’s how it would work: communities form – on the internet initially – around a set of shared interests or values. Then they acquire land, becoming physical “countries” with their own laws. These would exist alongside existing nation states, and eventually, replace them altogether.

You would choose your nationality like you choose your broadband provider. You would become a citizen of the franchised cyber statelet of your choice.

There is nothing new about corporations having undue influence in the affairs of nation states. The term "banana republic" derives from the fact that a US company, United Fruit, effectively ruled Guatemala for decades beginning in the 1930s. Apart from owning the majority of the land, they ran the railways, the postal service, the telegraph. When the Guatemalan government tried to push back, the CIA helped United Fruit out by instigating a coup.

But the network state movement appears to have greater ambitions still. It doesn’t just want pliant existing governments so that companies can run their own affairs. It wants to replace governments with companies.

None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom — is (as I've said before) unsustainable, and will ultimately collapse. I also fear that said collapse could be ruinous to big tech, deeply damaging to the startup ecosystem, and will further sour public support for the tech industry.

Can't blame Zitron for being pretty downbeat in this - given the AI bubble's size and side-effects, its easy to see how its bursting can have some cataclysmic effects.

(Shameless self-promo: I ended up writing a bit about the potential aftermath as well)

I will say I'm not much of a fan of mysqls but uhhhhh this seems bad

this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:

Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.

I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.

The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.