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.
https://xcancel.com/jrawson/status/1814232925967089808
The fuck.
Reposting this from the last Stubsack here by request.
One, this looks like absolute dogshit. Two, this looks like an ad campaign for a celebrity cloning service for spare organs. Three, with the music it sounds like a drug ad in the US. It just needs a voiceover telling you the monkey paw side effect you’ll inflict upon yourself in return for eternal youth.
Three, with the music it sounds like a drug ad in the US
as I remarked to a friend elsewhere, there’s something I’ve noticed in a couple of these things now, and that’s how “cutesy” they’re made to be
this one for example: it’s so clearly intended to be as unnatural as possible (based on the pairings presented), while trying to sell it as cozy as possible - all the gestures/poses, the music, the lighting, the clothing, the who’s-picked-for-portrayal
obviously there’s going to be some kind of observation bias etc involved here (of however many of these things get created, only some with some x property end up crossing my feed/radar somehow) but still. it doesn’t even have artistic shock dimensions value - it’s just creepycopy.
which has led me to wonder: what is it about genml tech specifically that makes this kind of bullshit the thing produced so frequently?
One answer perhaps would be that anyone who thinks AI art is good probably lacks the taste to appreciate anything beyond the generic, and the discernment to tell that it is submerged in the depths of uncanny valley. So you have a bunch of AI chuds sharing this creep shit without realising it’s creepy and that it looks terrible.
Jeremy Keith on the bullshit “privacy sandbox” in chrome and firefox: https://adactio.com/journal/21285
I like Jeremy because he is an OG, but I think his requirement for proof that targeted advertising “works” before the browsers implement these features is off the mark for me. He’s an agency guy, a bit like Andy Budd, so they tend to have these really visceral takes about the state of the web but with this skewed perspective of best interests
There was no technical reason why we couldn’t have web fonts. The reason why we didn’t get web fonts for years and years was because browser makers were concerned about piracy and type foundries.
I was a bit surprised when I learned fonts are CORSd at least party as a sort of primitive DRM so that font companies would buy into the webfont spec (that’s how I remember it anyway, it’s been awhile since I dug up the relevant mailing list messages)
Google just announced they’re not getting rid of third party cookies after all. They announced this in a wordy blog post with so much spin as to be confusing (as is tradition): https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-update/
We developed the Privacy Sandbox with the goal of finding innovative solutions that meaningfully improve online privacy while preserving an ad-supported internet that supports a vibrant ecosystem of publishers, connects businesses with customers, and offers all of us free access to a wide range of content.
god, the opening paragraph made my head spin with tech pr copy
could you imagine what web development would be like in a world where browser standards, features, and sandboxes weren’t firmly in the grips of these marketing chucklefucks?
like, I’ve mentioned to coworkers “hey isn’t the browser sandbox kind of bullshit? there’s so many parts of it that don’t do anything for security, but they make things harder for developers and easier for advertisers” and I don’t think a single one knew what I was talking about, because web development as a field has been captured by ad agencies. shit, find me one web development reference that isn’t owned by an ad agency.
and now they’re secure enough in that control that they do this fully mask-off shit, confident they’ll get away with it, cause who’s gonna stop them? bets on Mozilla reversing course on blocking third-party cookies now that google’s gone in this direction
No idea how true it is but apparently crowdstrike fired some of their QA and replaced it with AI, anybody heard about this? (source bsky) (Also ‘AI’ is doing a lot of work here, that could be anything)
I am attempting to track down this precise story.
- They are gung ho on AI
- They laid off a pile of their QA
- They have a “virtual security analyst” which is an LLM
iirc Crowdstrike does use regular ML for security, or at least a lot of security companies, I think they might have talked about it on the risky business podcast, so you might want to look at their (many iirc) crowdstrike sponsored parts. No episode directly springs to mind however.
This can also be an area where ML is an appropriate and useful tool. You’ll see it used to establish a statistical baseline for what traffic should look like and then it can flag when it detects something that doesn’t match that as suspicious and worth further investigation. In this space there is actually a lot of value in some of the statistical modeling techniques, though generative AI is obviously a very different and less useful beast.
Have not read it yet, but seems relevant to our collective interests. NSFW due to NASB. Accelerationism, amphetamine philosophy, and the Death Trip. (A long post about Nick Land).
you know, I’d wondered previously about the higher-than-average divinity-and-spirits obsession among TPOT. between some of the history of land/ccru there, the other shit previously observed in the stubsack (iirc?) about rightoids and aliens/fairies (and ofc the nazi history of occultism)… what a fucking faith to make
Truly the weirdest consequence of crank magnetism and conspiracy syncretism is the kinds of bedfellows you find. UFO cults align with Christian dominionists because the aliens are actually demons (or vice versa - which direction isn’t important).
It feels like modern fascism is less driven by orthodoxy (right belief) than they are by orthopraxy (right action) to the degree that as long as they aren’t actually in power anyone who hates on the right people and rejects the right facts can join the same club regardless of what they actually think. The weirdo occultism of the Nazis was largely tied to the project of reifying their racial hierarchy in all aspects of society by establishing that the Aryan race had the best religion and the best history in addition to the best genes and the best country. The weirdo occultism of modern fascism doesn’t have that kind of thread to it that I can see, and I don’t know what that means for ongoing development. Does it turn into a source of internal strife as they get closer to having actual influence? Do they settle into a more specific doctrine and cull the ranks of those who don’t adopt it? Or is accepting a consensus reality actually the optional part here as long as the group can broadly agree on what to do?
Helena Blavatsky and Rudolph Steiner made up much of what went on to constitute esoteric Hilterism ab nihilo.
Blavatsky, in particular, was a prolific bullshitter in the Frankfurtian sense. She invented the notion of the Aryan master race as a thing that exists in the future, which white europeans should strive to bring into the world.
Great article. It’s always fun to read about smart people lionizing a terrible person like Aleister Crowley and inevitably going insane (or dead, in Jack Parson’s case).
The article never discussed the topic directly, but for others interested in esoterica would probably enjoy reading about the concept of egregores.
terrible person like Aleister Crowley
Wait, why is Crowley terrible? Wasn’t he basically an overly enthusiastic cosplayer that did all the drugs and all the sex? So basically an occult hippy? Am I just unaware of him abusing people or some other dark shit?
I read his Wikipedia recently and he just seemed like a user who was careless with the people in his life. His philosophy was “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”, which is obviously open to abuse and exploitation.
I mean, I really don’t think you can have a sex cult without at the very least some abuse. It’s also good practice to treat occultism as weirdo fascism.