Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
Behold
Motion capture, but worse - brought to you by AI
(seriously, I saw random Youtubers do better shit than this eight years ago and that is not hyperbole)
wow, that side-by-side is so obviously bad i’m surprised it even got posted. usually AI bros try to hide the worst of the tech, or at the very least, say shit like “this is only the beginning!!”
also, was not expecting to click that link and see FUNKe. good nostalgia
it ignores her eyes THE WHOLE TIME!
I’d sure love to “gamify” my health for $10 a month 🥴
This is just the Glucoboy but worse
When I eventually shuffle off this mortal coil (not any time soon don’t worry!) I’ll do so with a cell-phone in my hand, open to whatever god-forsaken replacement for the American healthcare system Silicon Valley dreams up.
My family would find me lying there unconscious. The animated corporate mascot, looking slightly uncertain but still happy, would just repeat in a sing-song cartoonish voice “You might want to check your blood pressure!” and “you still haven’t completed today’s tasks for Health+ points! But don’t worry, there’s still time!”
Eventually they manage to shut Healthy Bob up; but continue to receive birthday reminders from Pinstagrambook long after my passing, with no setting to turn it off.
Thanks I hate it
When my local civilians get drawn into the conflict
via Little Bubby Child
I could hear this while reading it ahaha
Right?!
Being far from home at the moment, I really appreciate Bubby’s mountain vibes. Feels like a trip to Granny’s house.
Dan Luu’s “A discussion of discussions on AI bias”, about techbros trying to gaslight the rest of the world into thinking ML models don’t have problems
god damn those recasting images
it will never not be hilarious how pathetic this technology/approach is
Another example which doesn’t make a good viral news story is my not being able to put my Vietnamese name in the title of my blog and have my blog indexed by Google outside of Vietnamese-language Google — I tried that when I started my blog and it caused my blog to immediately stop showing up in Google searches unless you were in Vietnam. It’s just assumed that the default is that people want English language search results and, presumably, someone created a heuristic that would trigger if you have two characters with Vietnamese diacritics on a page that would effectively mark the page as too Asian and therefore not of interest to anyone in the world except in one country.
the entire post is very good, but my brain zeroed in on this as both a perfect example of why search was absolutely fucked even before LLMs (who in fuck deploys a language heuristic that doesn’t take the content of the page into account? who asked for this?) and of the engineering attitudes that feed into LLMs and generative AI having unevaluated biases and defenders that insist those biases can’t be real
I run into this exact problem so often with music: it’s extremely fucking annoying to convince search engines or other kinds of things that, yes, I do in fact want that turkish/finnish/russian/brazilian/thai/irish/…… result set from this english query, and there’s just almost zero affordance for it
they segment things into de facto silos and if you don’t already happen to have some way in which to pull on a string to lead the way there (or can input the desired query in the applicable language and spelling) you’ll have a bitch of a time. check a couple of those items from my entries on the music thread a while back for references to test with
we finally posted Diz’s LLM logic puzzle post to Pivot to AI! Let’s see if this draws flocks of excited new users to awful.systems … we’re doing Ray Kurzweil tomorrow, lol.
There was a warcraft 3 pro who played build orders created by Chat-GPT and it was fascinating the degree to which it was able to perfectly imitate the form of the kind of thing you’d find on liquidpedia or some other guide but simultaneously make nonsensical errors that betrayed that it had no awareness. Like, telling you to build a unit of a different race or build without meeting prerequisites.
lol, amazing. and I recall this was one of the areas where people fairly successfully (iirc?) applied GAs to synthesising strategy and build order
(think it was for Starcraft 2 not WC3, but domains very similar)
I’ve definitely seen some impressive machine learning-based outcomes (definitely fucking up the technical details here) but there’s a world of difference between a system trained to play StarCraft and a system trained to predict the next bit of text.
oh absolutely - part of what’s entertaining is that the dipshits don’t even seem to realize that (or don’t admit it?)
Tweet (Xcancel) from Ed Zitron: “This report is damning. Goldman Sachs’s Head of Global Equity Research doesn’t believe that generative AI is capable of solving complex problems, and says the tech industry “is too complacent in its assumptions that costs will decline substantially””, more in the quote tweet.
Expect promptheads to dismiss this as being the ramblings of a “DEI hire” because they’re confused by the dual use of “equity” in their title.
Not just promptheads but the entire conspiratorial right is already way into not understanding how these functions and organizations work. There is a weird group of them who thinks that blackrock is a group of woke people (some of them are even saying it is ‘THEM’) behind everything. Because they confused a talk about ‘we need to tell organisations to focus more on diversity’ as a pro-diversity stance and not a ‘we need to make sure the companies we invest in don’t get sued, which causes a drop in share price’.
the fuck
the only other thing on there is also confusing as fuck:
”Mirrors” is one of our services that developers and non-developers could use on their websites or in their favorite web browsers. It can reduce server load by acting as an extra caching layer for every direct link available on your website.
All data will be cached for 86400 seconds or 1.00 day(s), and distributed globally, effectively increasing performance and reliability, which will lead to an improved user experience.
so, ah, essentially a demo web app supposedly running at CDN scale, and supposedly powered by AI (to do what? this is not answered, of course). this is almost definitely just some basic cloud shit someone spun up, but like, why? there’s money in it if all this shit is logging DNS queries and web site accesses to sell to advertisers or for other much more nefarious purposes (or they’re doing injection on high value targets), but surely people who change their DNS settings and developers aren’t stupid enough to fall for this just cause it says it’s AI… right?
Q: Is this really free?
A: If it’s not, you should already see a Pricing page.
this really is the slimiest way to avoid saying “it’s free until we say it isn’t”
wonder if it’s white-label Cloudflare
I got curious and looked up both IPs associated with the domain name and it is in fact just CloudFlare
also, their DNS-over-HTTPS (this is new to me but I stay the fuck away from cloudflare and it looks like a standard they’ve pushed for) endpoint is just the 1.1.1.1 one with the domain name changed, but the AdGuard and Accelerator ones basically confirm they’re analyzing traffic before passing it off to cloudflare
a quick check using a canary. test command:
curl -H 'accept: application/dns-json' 'https://0ms.dev/dns-query?name={snip}.canarytokens.com'canary trigger:
geo_info: {'loc': '51.5085,-0.1257', 'org': 'AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.', 'city': 'London', 'country': 'GB', 'region': 'England', 'ip': '141.101.70.74', 'timezone': 'Europe/London', 'postal': 'E1W', 'asn': {'route': '141.101.70.0/24', 'type': 'hosting', 'asn': 'AS13335', 'domain': 'cloudflare.com', 'name': 'Cloudflare, Inc.'}}so, yeah, the actual resolve is being done by cloudflare servers too - it’s not even just a cf frontproxy to a different backend service. could be done with cf workers or something, I imagine, would need to test a bit further to know/try see
that’s fabulously odious!
yeah, think i’ll be writing this one up for the weekend
this sort of thing does not help me have an anti-carceral attitude
This is slightly weird. There’s a company called “DNSfilter” that’s been advertising itself for a few years as an “AI-powered DNS resolver” - since well before the present hype. I suspect their “AI” bit is threat detection with machine learning in. They appear to be going for the lucrative boring enterprise market.
This thread suspects the whole 0ms.dev thing was written with LLMs and the “mirrors” bit is basically an open proxy.
You sure they’re skimming results? I saw what looks like a filter to add to an adblocker …
and the “mirrors” bit is basically an open proxy
could test this by setting up a simple example page and seeing the originating source for the traffic
same technique as previous, using an http (not https) canary:
geo_info: {'loc': '51.5085,-0.1257', 'org': 'AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.', 'city': 'London', 'country': 'GB', 'region': 'England', 'ip': '141.101.98.196', 'timezone': 'Europe/London', 'postal': 'E1W', 'asn': {'route': '141.101.98.0/24', 'type': 'hosting', 'asn': 'AS13335', 'domain': 'cloudflare.com', 'name': 'Cloudflare, Inc.'}} useragent: (no user-agent specified) request_headers: {'Host': 'canarytokens.com', 'X-Real-Ip': '141.101.98.196', 'X-Forwarded-For': '2a06:98c0:3600::103, 141.101.98.196', 'X-Forwarded-Host': 'canarytokens.org', 'Connection': 'close', 'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip', 'Cf-Ray': '89f1a3a114752508-LHR', 'X-Forwarded-Proto': 'https', 'Cf-Visitor': '{"scheme":"https"}', 'Cf-Ew-Via': '15', 'Cdn-Loop': 'cloudflare; subreqs=1', 'Cf-Connecting-Ip': '2a06:98c0:3600::103'} request_args: {}idle thought: since this is (as @self highlighted) effectively an open proxy, you could also just resource-bomb it quite easily
not that I’m planning to, but it’d be dirt bloody easy and it would be a very quick test as to the claims on the site
while looking into this I was surprised to find that hickory doesn’t seem to have a cli binary in its crates. did find crab-hole and adguardian in the process though, gonna have to play with those later
You sure they’re skimming results? I saw what looks like a filter to add to an adblocker …
see I don’t have a smoking gun on this, but if it is a garden variety adblocker and whatever the accelerator does (it’s extremely unclear) running on cloudflare workers, they at least have the ability to MiTM and modify DNS queries, and open proxies are always a security nightmare. my impression is the filter list they link is either what that endpoint uses to filter, or it’s LLM vomit they kept in because it felt more legitimate.
this might be worth poking at more in a controlled setting — a command line DNS-over-HTTP client using their endpoints and some exploration of the open proxy with curl (especially with sites that utilize credentials, with great care taken to use disposable accounts for this) might be illuminating
the faster training data gets polluted the faster ai companies get fucked. therefore, I propose the deliberate creation of unmarked ai compost piles on reddit and discord: “communities” managed so as to minimize visibility to humans while generating large quantities of shit data
We could just mix corporate and bot responses to all content at a 99:1 ratio so the AI companies struggle to tell the difference. Also no need to do anything, as this is running on reddit right now.
if this were running you would be unlikely to know about it. the novel part is not spamming reddit, it’s trying to do so strictly to target ai companies, without humans ever seeing the result
Not sure which sub a heartwarming story of Nazis shooting their own dicks off goes under, but: Nina Power of Compact gets called a nazi. Sues for defamation. In discovery, produces extensive facts not just supporting Nazi ideas but calling herself a Nazi. Loses so hard she just declared bankruptcy.
there has been no media coverage of this, but hoo boy does there need to be
EDIT: ohhh it’s the fuckin LD50 gallery, straight up NRX. Judgement, PDF
ah yes, a good ole
we have scientifically ascertained that this is in fact that rare correct use case for the following emoji sequence: 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
hahahaha happy garbage day everybody
The logs also show Ms Power claiming that “the social disapproval for ‘racism’ is a psyop to stop people realising that there are alien and fairy races”, and that “black and white were alien races and very different”.
wait, is believing in fairies as an adult a weird racist thing? fuck, it’d kind of make sense if the people I’ve known who just causally slipped “by the way fairies are real” into casual conversation were doing a dogwhistle I didn’t pick up on
one day I’ll find a way to shoehorn our experience with a Waldorf School into a sneer.
In summary, fairy-themed fascism can be tied back into the whole Helena Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, esoteric Hitlerism shtick. You most commonly get ambushed with it when dealing with fallen hippies, but it is diffusing into the wider online right via weird 4chan things.
causally slipped “by the way fairies are real”
wait, what? What sort of context? Multiple people? FFS TELL
so I think I must just have one of those faces cause it’s been something that multiple former friends have revealed to me, and it’s usually a weird show of trust? and it’s always something like “you know, I just think fairies must be real, like they’ve got to be out there? you know?”
and in all cases I’ve gone “…oh that’s cool” and mentally earmarked that person as “do not trust with heavy machinery”
i mean, i have a friend who is literally a UFO religion believer, but they’re decent and politically good and trustworthy and present as normal-English, so
see occasionally you meet a UFO person and they’re normal and you only find out about their interest in UFOs because it’s the reason they want to get into radio or whatever and they want to see if you can recommend them a setup to communicate with satellites and other stuff in orbit. in effect, their UFO hobby is essentially a modified radio/birdwatching hobby that’s hopefully driving them to learn more about the world around them
but much more often you meet a UFO person and hear the absolute worst thing you’ve heard all month while looking for an escape route, without making it too obvious because you’re fairly certain they’re armed. they will later go on the internet and call you an NPC who refuses to wake up because you wouldn’t discuss lizard people with them.
:<
you only find out about their interest in UFOs because it’s the reason they want to get into radio or whatever and they want to see if you can recommend them a setup to communicate with satellites and other stuff in orbit
you know, I don’t know if I’ve actually run into this kind of conversation. I don’t think I have. or if I almost did, I fairly likely applied a conversation logic-shortcircuit way before it got there (because of ambient red flag count). but fuck me, if I don’t know exactly the kind of person you’re referring to… :|
also
without making it too obvious because you’re fairly certain they’re armed. they will later go on the internet and call you an NPC who refuses to wake up
ZA has many problems (and oh christ could I wax lyrical), but thank fuck I do not live in fucking eaglecountry
it’s a whole fucked-up 'ole dynamic when you need to “watch your back” in the most very literal sense because you didn’t eat some bozo’s shit :|
just remembered someone i met decades ago going on and on about spiritualism and ESP and just happened to drop in their own massive racism, there’s definitely a type
The crystals to anti-vaxx to full-blown fascism pipeline is real and I have more than a few cousins deep in that KKK hole. Hate to be a science brodude, but all the spiritualism stuff can be a gullibility magnet for those prone to self radicalisation (the bad type)
yeah i have one of those faces too (tall, blue eyes, Danish cheekbones), disconcerting number of nazis who wanted me to be in with them
I get the club invite most times I speak afrikaans in pretoria
in australia the club invite is just a way of saying “hi” to your fellow white person
ja that can happen/s here too
presumably your bones comprehend all the non-weather reasons that .au is such a popular za expat destination
I’ve never had the full on “let’s be nazis together” invite but I’ve had several people launch unprompted into “now that it’s just us white folks we can talk for real” mode. internally they must have been like “I see white skin, we are clear for takeoff, 54321”
funnily enough it hasn’t happened since I became visibly trans
I know someone who’s a practicing christian and has said they’ve seen angels
technical, intelligent person on all fronts otherwise. I have … not pushed matters
(e: not claiming this person I reference is racist, more that I’ve heard some really fucking kooky shit in many spectra, so I don’t know how much of a heuristic that sort of thing is by itself. the fairies thing may be a bit more concrete/direct - gonna have to try test it on some flaming racists sometime)
I think the connection isn’t with belief in the supernatural, but with the specific belief that there are things around us that look like people but aren’t people. I can easily see how the latter at minimum makes one very susceptible for racism.
If people start believing that androids are a real thing (not the OS, human like robots), it’s only a matter of time before people will be accused of being androids.
@mountainriver @froztbyte The NPC meme says hi.
@hirvox @mountainriver @froztbyte Like a lot of other things that were funny in the late 80s and early 90s, the NPC meme has lost its shine …
@cstross @mountainriver @froztbyte What’s old is new again. I hear even phrenology is making a comeback.
agreed, far too much chan shittery attached to it
I thought that was Hirvox point, that the NPC meme now goes hand in hand with Chan shittery because the NPC meme allows for an easy format to say that other people are not real people. With the added bonus of a built-in “just joking” defence.
the original recipe nazis were deep into occultism so maybe
see also all the TERFs yesterday loudly coming out in support of Power and her Nazi revelation
the TERF to nazi pipeline is a doorway, or perhaps just walking over to the other side of the same room
the TERF to nazi pipeline is a doorway,
It is funny how mad TERFs get when you mention they are saying the same things as neo-nazis, and then a few days later another TERF who is also a natzi is revealed again.
This is one of those David Icke things where you’re not sure if reptilians/fairies/aliens mean reptilians/fairies/aliens or if they’re some kind of code or euphemism.
having unfortunately known several David Icke fans: it’s always veiled antisemitism, and the veil gradually disappears the more you let them talk
e: yes, the area I live in is teeming with various flavors of conspiracy nut, why do you ask
I vaguely remember his original car crash on Wogan after he went loopy and it was barely veiled antisemitism even then - lizard people and the like
“ah ah but he wrote books - that surely can’t be the works of a person frothing in racism!” is something I’ve heard from a surprising number of people I’ve met
if racism made people illiterate every facebook group and every youtube comment section would look completely different
the answer is “both”
If you always bet on “everything confusing that weirdos say is a euphemism or proxy for Jews or Black people”, you will beat the house. Canadians, lizards, trans people, common punctuation marks, apparently also the seelie court I guess.
Have to wonder what happened to her brain since the days when she had stuff published at the Guardian.
given some of the other things I’ve seen from the guardian, not sure that would’ve necessarily been a contraindicator
I mean they didn’t seem very fashy at first. The later ones (2018, when she was fashy on the down-low ) started to get TERFy but earlier (2010-2014) it was all "the police aren’t your friend” and stuff about government trying to restrict the right to protest, etc.
(I looked over her Guardian contributions after reading about the bankruptcy etc in this thread.)
I guess that is the same duration/timeline as the guardian downslope arc
The guardian is kind of irrelevant to what I was getting at.
she had a piece in The Quietus in 2018, but by 2020 they had kicked a writer out for being pals with DC Miller, her co-plaintiff in this case
(just for confusion one of the Quietus guys is a different Luke Turner)
Wonder how the lawyers reacted when they got that treasure trove filled with stolen nazi gold during discovery.
Wonder how Power and Miller’s lawyers reacted, lol
They will certainly win a lot of drinks in any ‘who has had the dumbest clients’ contests.
‘And then we found the “I’m definitely a Nazi now lol” message’ is a great punchline for a dumbest client ever joke
I read the judgement quite carefully and it makes no reference at all to the discovery material. the only evidence it demonstrates awareness of is public or is testimony
there are some phenomenal whoppers just in the opening paragraphs of that article, holy shit
this is gonna make great piecemeal reading today!
discovery as humiliation conga line of “fairy alien nazi racism is totally my bag baby”
“fairy alien nazi”? What kind of a multiclass is this
Two tweets and I can tell you at least 5 substacks he subscribes to
PrimalPoly was a sort of semi regular of the old sneerclub, so I can tell you a lot more than that.
Fr? What’s his deal?
both him and his wife are quite the pieces of work
I have such sights to show you And more
About half of evopsychgoogle’s tweets are also about him and his wife.
He and his wife (also a piece of work) have a very strange poly relationship btw, it seems to be more a constant dominance struggle than a loving poly relationship.
And you know how a lot of these people when faced with the slightest pushback turn further and further right. 2013
90% of the weird evo psych women on their period things you ever heard about, also him. (And while I don’t get the American fascination with strippers/strip clubs, I do get it is an important macho man culture thing for American men to do things with/around strip clubs so cudos for him that he managed to trick the university into sponsoring his visits).
long term Evolutionary Psychology race scientists
also hang out in Effective Altruism, of course
I think there’s a bug with your post button, it sent the same message twice
he’s also figured here a couple of times too
Dan Hendrycks wants us all to know it’s imperative his AI kill switch bill is passed- after all, the cosmos are at stake here!
https://xcancel.com/DrTechlash/status/1805448100712267960#m
Super weird that despite receiving 20 million dollars in funding from SBF & co. and not being able to shut the fuck up about 10^^^10 future human lives the moment he goes on a podcast, Danny boy insists that any allegations that he is lobbying on behalf of the EAs are simply preposterous.
Now please hand over your gpus uwu, it’s for your safety 🤗 we don’t allow people to have fissile material, so why would we allow them to multiply matrices?
Ex-evangelical spotted!
What is it about growing up in insular fundamentalist communities that drives peeps straight into the basilisk’s scaly embrace?
Theres a specific word for that phenomena I believe, I just can’t remember at the moment. It certainly is a thing with all the high control group cults, say ex-JW’s.
Crank magnetism?
Tired: The earth is doomed due to climate change :(
Wired: Ignore that stuff; the cosmos are at stake unless we burn our planet generating bad AI generated “poetry”
Inspired: Oh wait oh no, Oh no. this is where Vogon Poetry came from isn’t it? Burn it all down.
turns out there was a good reason they wanted to turf us, we just didn’t know it yet
YouGov just asked me “if there were a general election tomorrow which way would you vote” and I felt sad that the question machine had been working towards this moment all its life and then didn’t have the sentience to know it had finally made it.
Took me a moment.
(I’m still in the moment, please explain?)
The automated hypothetical question re-iterated for years now was at last true.
OH got it. Thanks dawg. The automated hypothetical question bot is right once every 5 years
never really seen ludicity blog before, now that i read up ten posts on so in a single sitting i lowkey want to fuck off to live in a cabin in the woods
the sheer wastefulness of it all, bubbleness of its economics, piling technical debt, institutional stupidity, and the man also feels off in a way that i can’t put my finger on (maybe just by association)
ludic be like: this industry makes no sense and causes untold suffering, but if you emit right vibes you can get by and make a pile of cash. Let me help you make a bank off those rubes
I’ve noticed something similar with a lot of folks on the younger side in tech, although I haven’t had the headspace to dig into it. the thing I noticed is a lot of folks still willing to go into this dysfunctional shit getting highly paid because of knowing how bad things are elsewhere. afaict it’s not quite so much fygm as “just” trying to hoarde in the wake of 2+ decades of multiple world once-in-a-lifetime economic clusterfuck, as well as in the face of the total existential disaster that exists otherwise
(this is the impression I get in a wider sense. I’m not sure if it’s right, or applicable particularly here)
(there’s also a form of that which is quite strong in USA-based folks, but I don’t think ludic hails from the states)
Well, there is no ethical work under capitalism.
Also he clearly has good intentions when it comes to what jobs he seeks.
what i mean, he comes off as a benevolent grifter and i think it’s sleazy
Posted the Ray Kurzweil thing on Pivot To AI. Let’s see how many comments we get that won’t be posted.
Couldn’t find the way to turn this into a pithy blog post so just dumping it here:
does anyone else feel that the rationalists want a future of a billion trillion virtual humans, each and every one with an immutable gender bit set?
Case in point, or the exception that proves the rule: Is being a trans woman (or just low-T) +20 IQ?
Warning: This post might be depressing to read for everyone except trans women.
Actual warning: This post and the comments is a particularly bad example of rationalists being red-pilled sexists. Even by rationalist standards. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
But yeah this goes way back and is really enmeshed in their worldview. Robin Hanson has been blogging terrible takes about gender for almost 20 years on Overcoming Bias, which Lesswrong split off from.
It’s so cute (euphemism for concerning) how their image of the average trans woman is a white computer science rationalist poster and not, like, a South American sex worker or something.
Why didn’t evolution give females big heads if it would make them all geniuses? Another anecdote. My sister has a big head. She was valedictorian in high school I think. She hit her head one day in middle school during gym class by running into a wall. She also fell off a bike and hit her head in high school. I have never hit my head and I think the main reason is that my arms are strong enough to catch myself. So maybe the big headed women would-be-ancestors fell and hit their heads.[1]
Classics of Reason
don’t mention skull sizes for 5 minutes challenge
Yeah, in my opinion Slatestarcodex also said something like that, that the idea of Rationalism lead to transphobia. (others read that part as being more anti-transphobia, or with a more positive slant re Rationalism/Scott).
Not a huge surprise if you fetishise math and numbers, and miss the point of seeing like a state.
it is a little entertaining to hear them do extended pontifications on what society would look like if we had pocket-size AGI, life-extension or immortality tech, total-immersion VR, actually-good brain-computer interfaces, mind uploading, etc. etc. and then turn around and pitch a fit when someone says “okay so imagine if there were a type of person that wasn’t a guy or a girl”
Shouldn’t they be fans of The Culture? And didn’t The Culture have people changing gender for any reason (including curiosity), and it was accepted?
(It was years since I read those books, so I could confuse it with something else.)
Shouldn’t they be fans of The Culture?
I always assume that a large part of Rationalism is intellectual masturbatory contrarianism. (Aka contrarianism to make yourself feel smarter and better. See also how important it is for some of them that Sneerclub is a bunch of losers with no accomplisments (We don’t even blog!)). So I doubt it.
Hey! I blog!
Seldom more than a couple paras tho.
Sorry, if you can read a blog post in less than 30 minutes it is a Rationalist footnote. ;)
the Culture humans accepted being subsumed into a Mind after 400 years, so Yudkowsky disapproves. He also dislikes The Minds.
holy fuck, Yud criticizing Banks is fucking exhausting, and I keep getting angry seeing this barely readable shithead try to tear down the work of a sci-fi author he clearly doesn’t like because people keep bringing up the Culture novels as a counter to his horseshit, and because they’re more fun and fulfilling to read than Yud’s nonsense ever will be
so I tapped out early and quote mined the 400 years part:
They live, in perfect health, for generally around four hundred years before choosing to die (I don’t quite understand why they would, but this is low-grade transhumanism we’re talking about).
yud. buddy. that novel explains why they would in the same chapter that describes a Culture citizen going through with the voluntary decision to die. it’s boredom. the major motive force behind almost everything the Culture does is boredom, because its constituent beings want for nothing. the civilization as a whole knows that existence for human-like beings becomes intensely, painfully boring (just like reading yud’s output!) around the 400 year mark, and the Culture has both removed any stigma around voluntarily ending a painful existence and any reason to prolong it past your own comfort. after that, you can enjoy an afterlife of being acausally pampered by every networked Culture Mind.
there’s even a version of the voluntary death and afterlife process for entire galactic civilizations called Subliming, where every natural and artificial lifeform in your civilization becomes a singular being of pure energy and transitions into another dimension. just like with uploaded organic beings, Sublimed civilizations can still influence our dimension, but almost always don’t care to. the Culture is actually considered somewhat tacky by other galactic civilizations for being at a fairly late stage in its development without Subliming. they know how to do it, so chances are they just aren’t bored enough yet.
yud omits this (probably, I’m not gonna go back and check), but anyone who chooses an infinite existence at the cost of their own sanity is considered a fucking weirdo who should be sneered at. the Culture isn’t gonna end your existence (they don’t do murder, and there’s a possibly even bigger stigma against forcibly altering a sentient being’s mind) but they’re also not gonna actively enable you to self-harm.
Subliming
Somebody in the comments points this out and he gets annoyed with this as some sort of literary device to not do the hard transhumanist work or something.
Which is odd, as subliming is fine as if this wasn’t there humans minds and mind minds could do a singularity style intelligence explosion afterwards you couldn’t describe things because of the singularity style event. And Banks wrote science fiction which is always about humans, and not ‘the period after beings become so powerful we cannot really tell what is going on anymore as the increase of intelligence has reached infinity’
Subliming sidesteps this problem because it wants to be interesting fiction, and not weird gobbledygook of incomprehensible alien minds. Yud basically forgets that The Culture is science fiction written for real human beings who live now.
But even that was optional right, it was just the cultural standard, nobody forced them to do it.
It gets even odder in a way, iirc the more destructive megolomaniacs (or cult leaders or whatever) who couldn’t really accept that they are not allowed to use up massive amounts of resources/lives of other people were kindly suggested to play out these fantasies in VR, which I assume works on standard science fiction logic that it can be sped up, so those 400 years can stretch a long time in the computonium. (So the culture includes the LW virtual lives fantasy).
(I’m also pretty sure Yud is wrong about the Culture, iirc living by your strength certainly is a thing, it just has a fallback where you don’t die if you fail via the robots etc of the Culture (And I think even that could be turned off in most cases)).
Anyway the article linked, and the conversation with the straw SF fan (who is heated while he stays calm) says more about Yud than the Culture.
What is it with Rats extolling The Player of Games above other Culture novels? It’s the one HN likes best too. It’s probably the only one I’ve not re-read. Maybe it’s how the main character is kinda seduced by the parody of patriarchal capitalism in the culture he’s coerced to infiltrate.
Personally I think Use of Weapons is the best one.
i would think they didn’t read it carefully, and/or until the end, and don’t realise that ultimately it’s gurgeh’s revulsion at azad’s societal rules, and him fully embracing the culture’s values, that allows him to win and burn the empire to pieces.
Obvsly you’ve read the novel more than I have considering your nick… I might have to give it another go.
OTOH I’d rather re-read the non-M novels first, especially Espedair Street.
tbh i used mawhrin-skel just because i needed a new drone, and twitter (at the time) bonked my skaffen-amtiskaw persona – i named the murdering british soldier that cannot be named in the united kingdom (david james cleary); i definitely value other culture books more than player of games. :-)
@gerikson I second Use of Weapons, but I also like Excession and the Hydrogen Sonata, where the Culture has to do some self-reflection.
I honestly went off M-Banks after finding out Bezos and Musk were huge fans. Bit unfair Banks is dead so he can’t rip those assholes a new one. (wonder if Veppers in Surface Detail is inspired by one of them)
edit it’s been ages since I’ve read this books so I’ve been checking the plots on Wikipedia. For Surface Detail we get
On an episode of Lex Fridman’s podcast released on April 29, 2022, the artist Grimes said that Surface Detail of the Culture series is the greatest science fiction book ever written.
🤮
@gerikson Veppers was *totally* a vicious parody of Elon Musk. (Iain despised billionaires—in American political terms he was an unabashed communist.)
select the Banks extract, pass through wc:
1677select the yud…emanation, do same:
13442at this stage it’s likely the basilisk will torture him purely for entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.
entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.
There’s a metal ballad in there, I swear.
other album track titles:
- cascading infinity
- which mirror is me? [am I? - interlude]
- the quintillionth heartbreak
- lies of being
