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)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      18 days ago

      Think this might be the first tweet of Roko I somewhat agree with. At least Roko did something somewhat intellectual in creating pascals wager for nerds. Musks intellectual accomplishments are worse. He thinks the derivative function is some sort of glorious masterpiece of math, and he doesn’t seem to understand chess. I think the only things he really created was the handle that sinks into the car, and the look of the cybertruck.

      Funny to see the Rationalists start to turn on their glorious savior from AGI doom. (Which has been happening for a while now it seems, some even argue he never actually interacted with anybody from the Rationality community (btw before he blocked people being able to see all people you follow on twitter he followed slatestarcodex)))

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        18 days ago

        Okay but “Elon is not smarter than me” is a universally true statement in the exact same way as “dumb as a rock” is a universally applicable idiom.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        18 days ago

        That launch happened Feb 2018. By that time, I was already solidified as a musk sceptic and didn’t pay attention to the hubbub. Thinking back on it:

        1. Why was this a thing?
        2. per wikipedia:

        Musk explained he wanted to inspire the public about the “possibility of something new happening in space” as part of his larger vision for spreading humanity to other planets.’

        What I like about the phrasing “possibility of something new” is that nothing new really happened with that launch. We’ve already sent all kinds of junk into space in configurations varying in impressiveness.

        1. Naming the mannequin Starman falls apart since the eponymous starman is an extra terrestrial. Just goes to show that Musk is not a Real NerdTM and just makes surface level references to look cool.
        • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
          13·
          18 days ago

          I was also a Elon skeptic back-then, but I’ll admit I did get a kick out of the “don’t panic” dashboard.

          But golly does he read H2G2 completely wrong (transcript):

          I think and it highlighted an important point which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask. Then whatever the question is that most approximates: what’s the meaning of life? That’s the question we can ultimately get closer to understanding. And so I thought to the degree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge, then that would be a good thing.

          It’s backwards! It misses the joke! It took thousands of years and they got a nonsensical answer before any question! It took a thousand more and they got a nonsensical—incompatible—question! It has been theorized that should someone understand the universe it would be replaced by something more complicated! It has also been theorized this has already happened! Also regarding scale of knowledge, Trin Tragula definetly showed that the One thing you can’t afford to have in this universe, is a sense of perspective!

          Surely his reading comprehension isn’t actually this bad, and he only got a bad meme-cliffnotes version of the radio-series/books/movies!?!

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            10·
            18 days ago

            Surely his reading comprehension isn’t actually this bad, and he only got a bad meme-cliffnotes version of the radio-series/books/movies!?!

            Ow boy do I have some stories for you about his takeaways from other media he consumed. For example, and a worse take.

            (There was also a take which I remember where he mentioned that in the Culture humans are basically pets of the AIs (which is mentioned in the books yes, but only by the people who are anti/sceptical of The Culture, The Culture itself makes it pretty clear they are not pets. (In the last book they even seem to fulfill some more vital role in keeping the AIs sane, and people have full autonomy in a way that pets never do)). Couldn’t find this take sadly. As everything is now about the Haitian pets thing (erugh, racist shits), and also this ‘humans are pets’ thing is an not uncommon misreading of people reading the culture novels).

              • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
                7·
                18 days ago

                Nah, his ego is big enough that he’s probably some version of the an-cap, with a personal political based in “I could give everyone this utopian world if the government and the ‘woke mob’ and the labor organizers would just get out of my way.”

            • self@awful.systemsEnglish
              7·
              18 days ago

              fucking hell how are Musk’s Banks takes even worse than I remember? that was the point where I realized I hated the fucker so you’d think there’d be nothing left to feel rage over but no, Musk corpsefucking Iain’s memory once he was too dead to tell Musk to go fuck himself is absolutely doing it

        • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          18 days ago

          Why was this a thing?

          Publicity stunt for both SpaceX and Tesla, as well as Musk himself, and a successful one at that.

          • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
            10·
            18 days ago

            🙄🙄🙄

            Hope Musk’s existence and influence today was worth it, nerds from 2018!

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      7·
      18 days ago

      Quick sidenote, you cocked up the formatting on the hyperlink - you’re supposed to put [text in square brackets and](the link in circle brackets) like this

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        18 days ago

        I suspect it’s the frontend on awful that fucked this up, viewing their post in plain/preview shows the correct formatting

        placing my bet on the trailing .

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        18 days ago

        it may be helpful to know that, at least on the platforms I have tried, you can highlight text and paste a link, and the awful.systems will handle the bracketing for you.