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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this - gonna try posting last week’s thread a different way this time)
Sometimes I browse Japanese news aggregators because trash is interesting to read from a different cultural perspective. This very short article caught my attention, it’s in Japanese only but the automatic translation gives you the gist of the absurdity.
小坂興道住職（48）は法話で、人が心を預けられる身近な存在として仏をあげ、「私たちはこれまでも自宅で仏壇に今日あったことを話しかけるなどしてきた」と説明。その上で「生身の人間は思った反応を返してくれなかったり、不要なことを言ったりするが、ロボットはしないのがいい」と指摘した。理事を務めるNPO法人「京都自死・自殺相談センターSotto」の活動を踏まえ、「死にたいという相談に誰もが対応できるわけではないが、ロボットは何を言っても受け止められる」と語りかけた。
In his sermon, the head priest Kodo Okimichi (48) spoke of Buddha as a familiar presence that people can entrust their hearts to, explaining, “We’ve always talked to a Buddhist altar at home about what happened today.” Furthermore, “A living human being may not respond in the way you expect, or may say unnecessary things, but a robot shouldn’t do that.” Referring to the activities of the NPO “Kyoto Suicide Counseling Center Sotto,” of which he serves as a director, he said, “Not everyone can respond to consultations about wanting to die, but a robot can accept anything you say.”
Extra context: Japan uses emperor reign for years, Reiwa is the current era. The article is clearly an ad for “LOVOT”, but the whole religious angle is certainly something. The New LOVOT 3.0 is around US $3850 for the cheapest model and $65 per month minimum subscription cost, at current exchange rates.
Not everyone can respond to consultations about wanting to die, but a robot can accept anything you say.
I didn’t really understand just how absurd this is before looking up the robot.
It is essentially Furby on wheels. It has extremely slick marketing, makes weird cooing sounds, has a weird camera sprouting out of it’s head like a fungus, has big LED eyes, scoots around randomly, stores your face on the cloud “remembers up to 1000 people”, and you can (as the kids say) boop the snoot. That’s about it.
I’m trying to imagine someone going “Lovot, sometimes I don’t want to go on. I’m sorry I didn’t mean that. Thank you for always listening” and it being all “coo chirp gigigi tweeeee” while wiggling it’s stupid little Lovot arms… and I just can’t.
That chirping, scooting and flapping is bafflingly expensive for furby-level engagement too. This video on their official YouTube account speaks better to that evaluation than I think it intends. Video description: A man is busy working and doing chores while mostly ignoring his Lovot. (Currently working invidious link)
1024 GPU cores, 32 Tensor cores and 8 CPU cores (from their product description) to power that. Resources well spent. /s
A two-part lecture and discussion series that may be of interest to techsneerers:
This workshop is a two-part lecture and discussion series addressing urgent issues in space and how they relate to Earth. What does ethics mean in the context of space? Is it possible to explore space ethically? How do military interests drive Mars exploration? Led by multi-disciplinary researchers and organizers Dr. C. Adeene Denton and Dr. Divya M. Persaud, this series will provide an overview of how space is grounded in real-world oppression, colonialism, and genocide and a chance to discuss together how this could be changed.
Runs on January 11th and 12th.
Sundar Pichai says Google Search will ‘enshittify profoundly’ in 2025 [paraphrasing]
We will say absolutely nothing about what kind of changes we mean, and the reporting of these comments won’t even speculate, much less ask. But you should definitely buy our stock now in anticipation.
What does Jerry at Android Trends think Pichai’s job is if not making number go up? Trying to act like there’s any substance here is laughable.
also, tech billionaires terrified of a peasant uprising can turn their homes into fucking military bases with a home security system named (of course) Sauron
Ah Lyta Gold, one of the enjoyable writers from current affairs before Nathan went all “call an ambulance! I think I’m having a moment of class consciousness! But just for me!” Starts firing everybody. And I realized that vague socialist left libertarians suck. (In a just world he would languish alone on his site, with only the email replies he gets from Noam Chomsky to keep him warm. But it isn’t a just world, so he just replaced his writers, like a proper capitalist owner).
But turns out Gold (I had lost sight of her) has a book “Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality” out which might be relevant to us. And she also blogs on substack, with relevant to out interest posts like “what ever happened to right-wing art?” (Moldbug mentioned, drink!), and a look at conservative masculinity “What if we treated men like adults?”.
In the aftermath of an LGBT hate incident, the then-CEO of cloud computing giant Digital Ocean told upset staff his mentor was a member of the KKK as an attempt to explain why they must bend their values because “we love the company”
presented without comment
Asking employees to “bend” their perfectly sensible values like “I don’t like homophobes” or “members of the KKK suck” is insane to me, but exactly the sort of thing a tech CEO would think would resonate with his workers.
I stay at my job not because I have molded my soul into a perfect vessel for my companies values (which, TBH, kind of suck), but because I have a mortgage payment.
(Also as the header graphic points out, “love is at our core” and “inclusive environment” are apparently some of their values so maybe it’s Digital Ocean which needs to bend to Digital Ocean’s values).
At least there’s a happy ending:
A month after the all-hands meeting, in August 2023, DigitalOcean announced that it was conducting a search for a new CEO, but did not say why.
