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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
So, today MS publishes this blog post about something with AI. It starts with āWeāre living through a technological paradigm shift.āā¦ and right there I didnāt bother reading the rest of it because I donāt want to expose my brain to it further.
But what I found funny is that also today, thereās this news: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-hololens-2-discontinuation-support
So Hololens is discontinuedā¦ you knowā¦ ARā¦ the last supposedly big paradigm shift that was supposedly going to change everything.
Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.
Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!
(Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)
Itās interesting that someone thought āsmoothing lifeās complexitiesā is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.
Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out lifeās complexities without smoothing out peopleās complexities, but itās not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and thatās if it actually worked, which it doesnāt).
Iāve felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole itās hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but itās a shame we couldnāt as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).
Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.
call me when I can actually tange them
@V0ldek @sailor_sega_saturn sorry, these are Non-Tangible Tokens
Load bearing words!
I donāt think thereās an interpretation of this phrase in which AI actually helps.
āLifeās complexitiesā sounds like an adam curtis bit.
re: how can a chatbot help with life?
This just their brains on science fiction, they think chatbot can help like the independent AI agents could in the science fiction they half remember. Or at least they think marketing it like that will appeal to people.
A lot less, āCopilot make this list of bullet points into an emailā and more āCopilot, lock on to the intruder, close the bulkheads after them and flush it to the nearest trash compactorā.
I think that āgiving microsoft the power to do things in my behalfā is quite an iffy decision to make, but that is just me. Ow look it autorenewed your licenses for you, and bought a subscription Copaint, it even got you a deal not 240 dollars per year, but 120, a steal!
E: I saw this image and because cursed eyeballs is the gift that keeps on giving, I will link it to yall as well, nsfw warning. This is the AI future microsoft wants
I think itās also a case of thinking about form before function. Itās not quite as bad a case as the metaverse nonsense was, but thereās still a lack of curiosity about the sci-fi they read. In most stories that treat AI as anything less than a god, the replacement of people with artificial tools is about either what gets lost (the I, Robot movie, Wall-E) or the fact that effectively replacing people requires creating something with the same moral worth (Blade Runner, I, Robot, the Aasimov collection, etc).
I am neutral on MSFT - to me itās a bog standard transnational company with better than most working conditions because itās not making stuff you can make in sweatshops. But itās really impressive how theyāve gone from the beige-box tyranny of Appleās 1984 ad, via the āHalloween Papersā era where they were every Linux weenieās biggest boogeyman, to todayās bland backer of OpenAI. Note that theyāre not really advertising it. How many people who are horrified by Copilotās Recall feature also know theyāre the biggest investor in the company that makes ChatGPT?
From a corporate governance perspective, being so central to the tech industry for so long is kinda impressive.
this is why i keep hammering on how, functionally, OpenAI is a branch of MS and theyāre only separate so OpenAIās reputation doesnāt stain MS.
Despite the industryās deeply ingrained neophilia, I think it speaks to the importance of backwards compatibility and legacy systems.
I canāt help but think that the genAI craze will end up being a regrettable side-quest along the path to ācoding for non-programmersā akin to Visual Basic. But hey, I bet thereās a lot more legacy VB apps being kept alive out there than anyone would be comfortable with.
Despite having been one of those Linux weenies back in the day I have a lot of respect for the amount of work MS puts into backwards compatibility, dev tool upkeep, etc. And now theyāre actually Open Source! Hell hath frozen over (or they realized no universities wanted to pay Visual Studio licenses and lost a couple of generations of coders to Linux)
Eh, kind of but also not. VS Code is proprietary, but you have the vscode:vscodium::chrome:chromium thing. Unlike in Chromiumās case, the proprietary version actually comes with some amenities one might actually care about (mainly in the plugin repository).
You could say Open Source got some big wins in 2010s, leading to MSFT doing their fair share of contributions to Free software and openwashing as much of the rest as they can manage, but letās not kid ourselves. They wouldnāt need to openwash if most of their stuff werenāt still proprietary. Last I checked MSVC, SQL Server, Azure, Copilot, IIS, Power BI, and the DirectX SDKs were all totally closed and jealously guarded.
sorta, but itās a veneer in furtherance of other goals (telemetry, market dominance, and control)
one of the things I do with my computers is run LittleSnitch in always-prompt mode (LS is an app-level firewalling solution on macos), and hooo boy do I hate it when I end up having to open/touch vscode for some reason. the last time I did, I spent most of the first 5 minutes being prompted for (undeclared!) connections vscode attempted to make in the name of telemetry. similar experience with vscodium interacting with packages, and a bunch of their toolchains