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 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 soo 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. Also, happy 4th July in advanceā¦I guess.)
Another winner from Zitron. One of the things I learned working in tech support is that a lot of people tend to assume the computer is a magic black box that relies on terrible, secret magicks to perform itās dark alchemy. And while itās not that the rabbit hole doesnāt go deep, there is a huge difference between the level of information needed to do what I did and the level of information needed to understand what I was doing.
Iām not entirely surprised that business is the same way, and I hope that in the next few years we have the same epiphany about government. These people want you to believe that you canāt do what they do so that you donāt ask the incredibly obvious questions about why itās so dumb. At least in tech support I could usually attribute the stupidity to the limitations of computers and misunderstandings from the users. I donāt know what kinda excuse the business idiots and political bullshitters are going to come up with.
Youāre absolutely right that the computer is still a black box to a lot of people, but throughout the personal computing era, there has at least been a pathway to mastery for the tools it offers. Furthermore, the touchscreen/smartphone era has roped in mechanisms of touch and proprioception that make the devices a more intimate, if deeply imperfect, extension of the self. Up until sometime late last decade, the Steve Jobs ābicycle of the mindā concept was still a driving force in the field.
I still donāt think most people grasp what a subtle, but fundamental, break it is that these AI products demand you confront them as a wholly separate entity from yourself. The path to mastery, and the feedback loop that builds that path, is so obscure it may as well not exist. If you wish to retrain a model, youāve got to invest huge amounts of time and resources, as well as what remains a specialized (and not well-specified, as Ed highlights) skillsetā¦ and since itās a probabilistic process, youāre still not going to get consistent results.
I am more and more convinced that one of the damning core flaws of the current crop of AI technologies is that they are designed to incentivize use of centralized computing resources. Their designers are simply asking completely the wrong questions for the people the technologies are being imposed upon. But you canāt say that someplace like HN, or even some parts of Bluesky, because so many peopleās salaries still depend on the rents from centralized computing.