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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)M

mirrorwitch

@ mirrorwitch @awful.systems

Posts
3
Comments
149
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026

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  • Generally conspiracy theorists aren't interested in actual things that cause real problems, I think. Air polution and global warming being deliberate decisions by elites who don't care about killing millions, for example. It has to be some wild take like Pokémon child sacrifice or something, so you get to feel like you spotted the secret truth.

    But if you want to see some actual apocalyptic conspiracy against "AI", as in it is literally the manifestation of the body of the Beast and the voice of demons etc., check out Paul Kingsnorth's substack. This is a burned-out environmental activist who radicalised anti-immigration with Brexit, started pushing a narrative of hobbit pastoralism as a justification for racism, and converted to Christianity with that fervour you only find in converts.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026

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  • Seizing "the res novæ of our time" [derogatory] from this

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026

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  • it's hard to explain how wrong this is thing is if you don't already know the books (which is a demonstration of the same principle, it looks too plausible, it's signal-shaped noise). but I'll try.

    Plot errors

    Or, "does this thing even work?" (the answer is no).

    • A bitter 10-year winter: The winter is 1) famously not arrived yet, we're waiting for it to this day, it's not even autumn yet as of book #2; and 2) not 10 years but an unpredictable amount of years, the unpredictability being the worst part of it.

    • The Queen's sons and Robert's brothers battle for control of the realm: The Queen has 2 sons, only one of them is battling and that's debatable as he's a puppet of the Lannisters and their alliances. Robert's brothers are battling, yes, but also, famously, Ned's son the King in the North, and the Reaver-King of the Seastone Chair. It's famously called the War of the Five Kings, not the War Of The Previous King's Brothers And His Sons.

    • Robert's young daughter, Princess Arya Stark: Arya is famously the daughter of Ned Stark and distinctly not a princess.

    • The exiled last heir of the former ruling family tends to his dragons: The bot force-transed Daenerys Targaryen 😔

    • The guardians of the realm's Wall dwindle in numbers as menacing barbarians gather their forces: The guardians have already dwindled in numbers, literally millennia ago, and the actual menace isn't the people beyond the Wall but what they're running away from—viz. winter, a supernatural death force that is, famously, coming. Getting people to focus on the actual menace is the entire point of this sub-setting.

    Synopsis errors

    These are subtler than the funny plot errors but worse, because they defeat the purpose of a synopsis: informing the reader about whether this is their cup of tea, whether it it something they want to commit to right now.

    • "Good and evil content for power": ASoIaF is famously a series whose whole point is to deconstruct simple binaries of good and evil in fantasy, to present multiple perspectives simultaneously, all of them flawed to various degrees but still having valid points.

    • "Menacing barbarians gather their forces": As pointed above, the entire point of the story is that other peoples like the Free Folk aren't actually barbarians, or if they are they're still well justified in the menacing, or sometimes they are truly fucked up but then not any more fucked up than the more State-based societies, etc. Characterising them in this way sets up the reader to expect the wrong kind of novel. A proper synopsis would be to the note of: "Meanwhile, Ned Stark's bastard son Jon Snow struggles to convince the Watchers on the Wall to put aside their prejudices and focus on the common threat, for winter is coming…"

    • "Set in a glittering fantasy world": This one is less wrong than it sounds as, unlike the TV producers, George R R Martin does understand that fantasy is made of glitter and dazzle, azure and carmine, and there's plenty of colour,sparkle and glittering things in here. However, that phrasing doesn't distinguish or characterise the books in contrast to any other conventional fantasy series, to the point of severe mischaracterisation. The distinguishing point of ASoIaF is precisely mixing that glitter and velvet with starving masses and diarrhea epidemics, to juxtapose genuine magic and awe with oppression and horror. "A glittering fantasy world" is like calling Dubai a "glittering urban city" or North Korea a "glittering green farmscape" and leaving it at that.

    • "Deftly realised magic": The series does the "return of magic" trope so there's little magic or supernatural in the first two books, and what there is is very deliberately not "realised"—it's left suggested, ambiguous and incipient, a thing of the shadows, where you don't know if a prophecy is real or not, if a god is a god or a delusion. If you're looking for a detailed and fully realised magic system, you're reading the wrong type of fantasy.

    Silly errors

    • Queen Cerisi: How does a computer misspell Cersei's name? How did capitalists burned billions to invent worse computers that are crappier?

    • George Martin pursues the embattled Seven Kingdoms through a bitter 10-year winter: All by himself, then? Did he bring a cook at least? No wonder the final books are taking so long, the guy is waging a one-man war at his age.

    • enriched by 8000 years of history: 8000 years. Why 8000 years. [untitled goose chasing meme] why 8000 years?!? the Dawn Age was over 12000 years ago, the Age of Heroes >10000, Aegon's Conquest was about 300 years ago and the fall of the Targaryens 16; the relevance and richness of history increases logarithmically with recency, the remote eras are barely sketched, and there's no special relevance to the 8000 mark. Maybe the first Long Night, but its dating is dubious, and there's no reason why you would consider that sketch of lore as particularly "enriching" for the story but disregard the invasion of the First Men and the Pact which likely caused the Long Night in the first place.

    what am I doing with my life why did I set out to do this. I miss wasting precious free time late night because somebody was wrong on the Internet, emphasis on somebody

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026

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  • back when LLMs started to get widespread and it became clear that they always make errors and you can only spot the errors if you're an expert who already knows the answers, because the errors are disguised with plausibility, people would tell me, "oh but they're useful for some things, like making summaries".

    four years and billions of dollars and devastation to "improve" them later, and I see from this Spotify screenshot that "AI summaries" are going well:

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026

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  • Saying a lot of rationalists endorse eugenics is a bit like saying a lot of Nazis endorse white supremacy.

    Rationalism (the online subculture, not the older philosophical meaning of the term) is a subculture predicated on a notion of "general intelligence" which is reified ableism and therefore, necessarily, entails eugenics.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026

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  • They do. Not the booing itself but being an edgy contrarian. Saying "provocative" anti-human hot takes is how you one-up one another inside the cult and prove you're the edgiest, most disruptive, fastest moving breaker of things in the industry.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026

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  • We are going to harvest the entire Sun!! And then eat up the stars themselves!! For profit! Humanity shall be an ever-expanding Empire, grinding resources of the whole universe into shareholder value!!!

    even their conmanship story is a depressing dystopia. have these people ever considering just chilling. get a girlfriend who plays drums, hang out with her jamming with a bass. watch a movie together, then go out for a walk. play boardgames with children. take up embroidery

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026

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  • See, it's a good practice under the principle of charity to read as much fascist propaganda as you can and incorporate it into your worldview. It doesn't matter who said things, but rather whether they're true, and since you're a rational agent you can surely evaluate each claim with perfect objecitivity. Digging a 19th-century eugenics study is expanding your objectivity score.

    Reading polemics from leftists too? lol no what are you talking about, they're all irrational and biased

    /s

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th April 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th April 2026

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  • Critical support for comrade Yudkowsky for getting some nerds to finally engage in direct action and blow up some goddamn datacenters

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th March 2026

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  • When that no-LLM policy hits you like...

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  • Kitty? Back when I tried to use it (uim-xim+anthy), no it didn't, also it broke my xcompose setup. When I asked the devs about it they said they don't care about non-European languages. I do not want to use software where the devs don't even bother to performatively pretend that languages outside of Europe matter. What I am missing is being treated like an equal fucking human being.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th March 2026

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  • Hey, it's not just that, that's unfair to the chatbots. They're also used out of contempt for one's employees

  • When that no-LLM policy hits you like...

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  • Adding to my hall of honour, more suggestions welcome:

    • Alacritty
    • Gentoo
    • GoTo Social
    • Loupe
    • postmarketOS
    • Qemu
    • Servo
    • Zig

  • When that no-LLM policy hits you like...

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  • My problem with kitty is, it didn't work for the languages I use, and when I complained the dev said he doesn't care about non-European languages. Alacritty works well for Japanese for me, including input methods, but sadly not for Arabic or other bidi.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th March 2026

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  • "AI is here to stay" the AI:

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd March 2026

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  • Dans cette vision, la démocratie entendue comme autogouvernement de citoyens égaux est déjà morte — et il ne reste plus que, dans l’obscurité d’un data center, la gestion clinique de son cadavre.

    I'll grant the Holy Inquisition guy something: he really knows how to turn a phrase. the English summaries of this piece really don't do it justice.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th March 2026

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  • It's true that these analogies can be stigmatizing, but they needn't be. As someone with an autoimmune disorder, I am not bothered by people who describe ICE as an autoimmune disorder in which antibodies attack the host, threatening its very life.

    This bothers me more than I can explain.

    ICE as autoimmune disorder presupposes that it's normally a good thing to have ICE around and it's just malfunctioning as an exceptional state of things. If ICE is an immune system (malfunctional or not), what are we immigrants?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th March 2026

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  • Systemd

    Jesus.

    I've been advocating for a hall of fame of projects that explicitly reject LLMs; ctrl+f "Gentoo" on this very comment thread for the few examples I heard about.