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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 21 April 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 8 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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.

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (16 children)

Is artificial intelligence the great filter that makes advanced technical civilisations rare in the universe?

This professor is arguing we need to regulate AI because we haven't found any space aliens yet and the most conceivably explanation why is that they all wiped themselves out with killer AIs.

And hits some of the greatest hits:

AI will nuke us all because the nuclear powers are so incompetent they'd hook the bombs up to Chat-GPT.
AI will wipe us out with a killer virus for reasons
We may not be adorable enough towards AI to prevent being vaporized even if we become cyborgs 🥺
AI will wipe out an entire planet. Solution: we need people on a bunch of different planets and space-stations to study it "safely"
Um actually space aliens would all be robots. Be free from your flesh prisons!

Zero mentions of global warming of course.

I kinda want to think that the author has just been reading some weird ideas. At least he put himself out there and wrote a paper with human sentences! It's all aboard the AI hype train for sure, and constantly makes huge logical leaps, but it somehow doesn't make me feel as skeezy as some of the other stuff on here.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 8 months ago (5 children)

If only the “Dark Forest” hypothesis of human-extraterrestrial interaction would enter the public consciousness any sooner. We’d at least have more interesting ideas than this shit.

NB: I have not watched the 3BP adaptation yet, tho I have heard it is good. I have listened to the first two books as audiobooks and am tickled by Bruno Roubicek’s mildly (three body) problematic accent-work.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 12 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Both Lovecraft and Reynolds play with the idea that sentience, when discovered, is hunted down and exterminated by hostile entities. Scalzi’s Old Man’s War universe is somewhere where alien species are in ruthless competition.

All of it is a deflection of the possible and frankly terrifying possibility that we are alone (at least in this galaxy)

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

The exo-galactic searches haven’t found anything either…

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Having a bit of eye trouble, so please ignore any typos. Weird scratching feeling behind the eye, trying not to touch it.

But yeah, isn't that odd that we have not found any? Perhaps it is that if we see them they also see us ba... jesus my eye, fuck. Sorry. But yeah perhaps seeing goes both ways? And perhaps this is why we have not 'found' anything in exo-galactic searches, perhaps it is all a coverup, because we do not want to be seen in return.

I mean, isn't it also odd how important aliens, and the search of extraterrestrial life are in our culture but how few resources we actually put in finding them? Perhaps as soon as we spot something the searchers get shut down, or worse!

(Don't worry my eye is fine, I'm also not being serious, I was doing a bit inspired by the There is no Antimemetics Division SCP series. Now also in short clip form. CW a certain type of lovecraftian horror + memetics. Might not want to read it if you got freaked out by Rokos B, or weird horror in general).

[–] 200fifty@awful.systems 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I have never been a huge fan of most of the scp stuff (not that it's bad, it's just not really my thing), but I have reread that series several times at this point, it's so good!

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 8 months ago

This story series has a lot more focus on people vs a dry procedural things focus as the normal scp stuff has, so not strange that this hits differently.

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