• 3 Posts
  • 149 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: August 29th, 2024
  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026English
    8·
    2 days ago

    As intelligence becomes abundant, the most important question will be how we direct it. Some argue that superintelligence itself, or a small set of experts who control it, should decide what is best for humanity. I disagree. The history of democracy and economics has shown that there is no single objective answer to how people define the best life, and therefore the best approach is letting people decide what matters to them. Rather than centralizing this power, we believe that delivering personal superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question.

    Healthy societies also recognize that safety requires checks and balances. If only a handful of institutions have superintelligence, they will inevitably exercise a controlling influence over economics, science and politics. Even with the best intentions, that concentration would limit people’s ability to choose their own future.

    Famous enemy of software monopolies and tech oligarchies that have an outsized influence over politics, champion of distributed ownership of the means of computation Mark Zuckerberg

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026English
    7·
    7 days ago

    It’s as if, practically overnight, everyone went from, “we need to do everything we can to reduce our demands on the environment or we’re cooked” to “oooh, shiny new toy, and it only ruins everything around it, cool!”

    Definitely this one for me. I can only describe it as some fucked up denial psychology, the way people are pretending the environment isn’t collapsing, and the LLM boom on top of that is like a bad joke. Even in discussions critical of the tech sector this is treated as almost an afterthought—the very real, very violent damage done to all of us from poor countries by people in rich countries to prop up their toy fantasy schemes. Even if LLMs did everything they claim to do, it would still be a moral imperative to form insurgent guerillas to blow up these datacentres, on the environmental damage they do alone which is not a minor detail Karen it’s kind of a big deal

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026English
    4·
    9 days ago

    First impressions on this because I don’t have anyone else to talk about it and you pointed me to it,

    spoilers for uh the first 20 or so pages of Fairmeadow ig, click to open:
    • Who would win: 1 presumably lesbian orc, or a non-evil, not particularly terrifying cow
    • I like what the artist did with visual storytelling here: Goma confused Sanctuary with the cow because of his horns, and afterwards she still threatened Sanctuary, for the same reason she threatened the cow: she’s treating him as meat. Alas, Sanctuary utterly defeats her, in the same way that the cow did: by caring about her state and not responding to her violence at all.
    • What Sanctuary did by force-kidnessing her with the basket of squash is actually a very effective deescalation technique you can use yourself, too. It’s something salespeople do to manipulate others. Due to some quirk of human psychology, we almost reflexively feel more friendly towards someone we helped. Not someone who helps us, somebody we do a favour for. Subconscious probably goes “if I decided to do a favour for this guy he must be an ally; otherwise I wouldn’t be helping him, now would I”, which bypasses the guards of “he’s only helping me because he wants something”. Thus if you want to defuse someone’s hostility, ask them a favour—something genuinely helpful and that they are able to do, and in a way where it’s awkward for them to refuse.
  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026English
    7·
    9 days ago

    Ursula is great! I love The Dispossessed. You can kinda read them in any order based on what catches your attention, except stuff like Earthsea that is best consumed in order.

    if you like this kind of stuff I would recommend also:

    • Margaret Killjoy (A Country of Ghosts is basically The Dispossessed spiritual successor; The Sapling Cage is fresh queer fantasy; also the Danielle Cain series has been published in audio as podcasts, it’s like, anarchopunk post-collapse Scooby-Doo)
    • The Serpent Gates series (this starts exactly like the Tombs of Atuan, except Tenar is a lesbian orc and the equivalent of Ged is using her for his own purposes and the rest of the story goes very different but the protagonist is a lesbian orc so I automatically like it)
    • The Wayfarers series (slice-of-life sci-fi, kind of like Star Trek at its best, exploring diversity imaginatively)
    • The two Robot and Monk books by the same author (feel-good hopepunk about how society could be good after collapse)
    • Octavia Butler is the other undisputed giant. Lilith’s Brood series for some genuinely creative sci-fi, or the two Parable books for collapse fiction that is so prescient it’s downright uncomfortable.
    • A Memory Called Empire and it sequel (sci-fi about colonialism and the Empire; sophisticated handling of these themes that I appreciated as a Global South migrant)
    • This Gilded Abyss. Fundamentally a CaitVi fixfic. If the previous sentence made any sense to you you must try this one. Otherwise: Picture the Titanic, but it’s a luxury submarine in a magical-steampunk type setting. Now add zombies. Now add toxic yuri.
    • The Locked Tomb series (lesbian Warhammer 40k. my favourite book series in the world. spectacular audiobook narration.)
    • This Is How you Lose the Time War—absolute hoot of a book, just a delight from start to end. Picture the Spy × Spy comics from MAD. Now make one spy a time-traveling agent from future biopunk ecogarden plant utopia, the other spy an agent from future mind-upload hypertech cyperutopia. Their mission is to shift the timelines to their respective visions. Alas, they’re both lesbian… (Sorry, I have a bit of a pattern in my interests)
  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026English
    13·
    2 months ago

    I mean, those sound like rookie numbers to me. I regularly spend like, less than five minutes between eye-contact-and-smile and wild hardcore sex, and most of the five minutes is the time to walk them down to the dungeon and negotiate limits. The only special trick is simply going to a space where everyone else also wants to have sex, it’s called a sex club.

    Leaving aside all considerations of ethics, I cannot comprehend why the supposed bastions of rationality would waste time with baroque theories of psychological manipulation to try to coax randos during non-sexual situations into having sex, when if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever. You know, like, if I wanted to play boardgames I would go to boardgame night, if I wanted people to listen to me sing I would go to karaoke. I would not approach strangers in a bus stop and go, “hey wanna hear me sing?” The idea of doing that for sex of all things is bizarre to me.

    (This is a rhetorical sneer, the pickup-artistry phenomenon is easily comprehendable; it’s because these men are not really trying to have sex, they’re trying to fulfil a gaping hole of unexamined, endless need for validation.)