Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
transcript
Graham Linehan is a normal and well man.
A few hours later, he sends me an example of how he’s been using AI. It’s a “hidden role deduction” game he’s working on. At the top is the prompt he put into ChatGPT: “You are five blind lesbian adventurers out for a good night out. Slaying dragons and whatnot. But one of your number is a hulking great troll pretending to be a woman. Find the troll lesbian and then devise an amusing punishment without giving him an erection.
The CIA wouldn’t be able to torture this kinda shit out of me. Jesus, Linehan.
most well adjusted terf
TIL I take the same medicine as Glinner
What the fuck
Yeah thats a kink. There prob are a bunch of sex workers he could hire who could help him with that.
E: forgot to mention, a sex worker even confirmed this is a kink.
I don’t think sex workers should be tasked with society offloading glinner
glinner should fucking suck less
Certainly. Some might want to take his service however, not going to speak for them. But doubt he would be a good client, nor that he would pass the vibe check for any who didn’t already knew who he was. So not sure if he is even able (also doubt he is mentally able as he sees women too much as objects to he saved/protected vs actual people).
But yes sorry if that came off as offloading societies problems on sex workers.
oh no
He followed his friends Andrew Doyle and Martin Gourlay, formerly of GB News, over here. They were hired by US comic actor Rob Schneider’s production company and put in a word for Linehan. He moved in March and works for Schneider too. Having co-created Father Ted in the 1990s and created The IT Crowd in the 00s, Linehan is co-creating a sitcom called Tenure – “Our academics are like Father Ted academics: they’re very old and musty” – with Doyle, Gourlay and British comedian Jonathan Kogan. They’ve written eight episodes.
coming soon to whatever remains of CBS with an introductory 1 hour lecture by Bari Weiss
Neal Stephenson comes out strong and funny against GenAI here:
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/a-remarkable-assertion-from-a16z
“Hypothesis 1: it was written by a clanker”
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 Sub-hypothesis 1B: the AI was fed the whole book but the input was truncated because whatever toolchain they used wasn’t made to handle 160k words at a time.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 The only thing that could have made that article better is if he’d literally ended it mid-sentence.
Lmao imagine reading a Stephenson book and being peeved that it ends
(His sex scenes are far far far worse than his endings, those are a mercy)
oh yeah the relationship between the fusion-device wielding 30-something Aluetian freedom fighter and the 16 year old skateboard courier in Snow Crash is… of its time
Yup that’s one of them. The cryptonomicon protagonist no-nut-Novembering all the way to the ww2 treasure is another special fave
We were reading through various classics for bookclub and we noticed how many books had a ~14 year old girl has romantic/sexual relationship/gets abused by 30+ year old man. Snow Crash was one of those. I know popular thinking on this has changed a lot the past 20+ years but still always a shock, esp when you realize how much you didnt notice it.
Also a reason why the first evil dead aged very badly. Dont show that to people without warning them unless you want them to leaf.
Years ago, I said, “I’ve never finished a Stephenson novel.” Someone replied, “Neither has he.”
Best part is the footnote:
About 20 years ago, some spammers came up with a bright idea for circumventing spam filters: they took a bootleg copy of my book Cryptonomicon and chopped it up into paragraph-length fragments, then randomly appended one such fragment to the end of each spam email they sent out. As you can imagine, this was surreal and disorienting for me when pitches for herbal Viagra and the like started landing in my Inbox with chunks of my own literary output stuck onto the ends. Come to think of it, most of those fragments actually did stop in mid-sentence, so I guess if today’s LLMs trained on old email archives it would explain why they “think” I write that way.
Stephenson knows how computers work.
@dgerard he does, looks like
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 please do not insult the noble machine consciousnesses thus. It was probably written by a venture capitalist.
Someone in the comments found the github (??) where they made the site or something, and it def was generated initially, but it used heavy nerd speak so it was translated.
“Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function.”
Hypothesis 3: As some people seem to insist, “literally” has recently morphed into a contronym, and now it figuratively also means “figuratively”.
…sorry, I meant it literally also means “figuratively”.
…no, wait, that’s just the same thing. 🙄 It *actually* also means “figuratively”.
(Really? People couldn’t find a better new word to provide emphasis than “literally”? What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now? Do they care? Ugh…)
What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now?
“Literally, not figuratively”, said in a Sterling Archer voice.
The use of literally in a fashion that is hyperbolic or metaphoric is not new—evidence of this use dates back to 1769. Its inclusion in a dictionary isn’t new either; the entry for literally in our 1909 unabridged dictionary states that the word is “often used hyperbolically; as, he literally flew.”
It seems really common for words for factuality to become intensifiers. I just used the word “really” as an intensifier, thought it really means things occurring in reality. “Very” had the same thing happen to it, as it originally meant “truthfully” (as in “verify” or “verity”). If I say something is “truly massive”, am I likely specifying the massiveness is not imaginary in some sense, or am I trying to convey massiveness beyond the lower bounds of “massive”? Is a “proper banger” of a tune distinct from an improper banger or is it just a highly bangerful banger?
truly massive
fuzzy logic says this thing has mass most of the time, ish
english is a fuck
(Really? People couldn’t find a better new word to provide emphasis than “literally”? What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now? Do they care? Ugh…)
Bit late to tilt at this windmill tbh. Prescriptivist pedantry is prohibited past puberty. This was decreed by Maximilian D. English (the D stands for dictionary) in 1727. I don’t make the rules (MDE does)
