Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 11 August 2024
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.
To be fair, it's hard to really internalize that all these rich and powerful techbros are actually morons after all these years of journalists like Ezra Klein breathlessly reporting their weird ideas and baseless claims about what they were going to be able to do in the next couple of years.
There's something of a paradox that has defined my experience with artificial intelligence in this particular moment. It's clear we're witnessing the advent of a wilfully stupid fart machine, one that could transform the atmosphere into farts and the way we think about farts and creating farts and the value of human farts itself. At the same time, I can't for the life of me figure out why I'd want to sit in a room filled with my own farts.
So I wanted to understand what I'm missing and get some tips for how I could incorporate farts better into my life right now. And Eating Mollusks is the perfect guide: He's a pro-fartor at the Fartin' School at the University of Farts
the nuanced take nobody wants to hear: farts are a tool, and like any tool they can be used for good or bad. that's what progress is. we can't let the possibility of a few bad uses of farts overshadow how farts can unleash the futures of truly creative individuals, businesses and societies.
to address another common point: yes, there are kinks to be worked out. sometimes farted information can be wrong. farted music doesn't always come out with the clarity we want. farted art is sometimes missing details. but farts are already revolutionizing and democratizing the arts, science, and even the concept of human interaction. we can't lose sight of the great potential of farting - just like the early days of the internet, we don't know what amazing things we'll end up with because of it.
I guess it does, in the sense that I have asked "who tf is Matt Yglessias and why does anyone listen to him" many times and received no satisfactory explanation either