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 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.
Dear ~
SneerclubTechTakes, will you be my ‘Friend’? :)AI ‘Friend’ Company Spent $1.8 Million and Most of Its Funds on Domain Name (404 media, archive)
AI Companion Device Releases Diss Track Against ‘Friend’ (404 media, archive, diss track on twitter)
Here’s Friend’s advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4 . The music choice and general vibe is… unsettling.
“It’s real! Premium domains are expensive, but it’s worth it,” Schiffman told me in an email after I reached out to ask if it was true.
[…]
“People just don’t get consumer, I view this as saving money. Much less money needs to be spent on marketing, it’s a one time thing,” Schiffmann said.
there’s an entire type of startup guy embodied by Schiffmann, and I can’t be the only one who’s met this type more than once
The company advertises the device as “always listening” when connected to bluetooth. “When connected via bluetooth, your friend is always listening and forming their own internal thoughts. We have given your friend free will for when they decide to reach out to you.”
presented without comment
We have given your friend free will
Wow that was easier than expected, we can’t get philosophers to agree what that would even mean but it’s done folks
Enough money to blow it all on a domain name. Not enough money to port their chatbot-app from iPhone to Android, or pay someone to resolve customer issues. (twitter.com, xcancel.com)
Also doxxing them when giving their refund.
people just don’t get consumer, I said, as the unfulfilled refund requests continued to rack up
Forget the diss track person, I’ve tracked down the true origin of Friend:
the ad alone should be a thread it’s the most insane thing I’ve seen in years
the yt comments are brutal btw definitely check them out
The yt comments are indeed delightful
Was the pitch what if A24 made commercials?
MidsommAir
I like how the advertisement’s URL opens with a fucking O_Q like even its unsettled by this shit
It’s like how can we make a depressing tamagotchi?
Here’s Friend’s advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4 . The music choice and general vibe is… unsettling.
This hast the same vibe as a trailer for shows like Black Mirror. I actually feel sad for the people they’re targeting with this, holy shit.
unsettling.
Indeed.
In other news, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 got sent a viewpoint article with the title “Can Artificial Intelligence Speak for Incapacitated Patients at the End of Life?”.
I will give MAIHT3K credit for managing to get through that shit, because what the actual fuck.
Ugh, just reading the summary made me want to puke. What the fuck is wrong with those people. Who the fuck thinks that delegating the responsibility to computers is a good idea. Can’t they cope with the outcomes of their choices and need to outsource that responsibility to some magick software
wait wait wait wait this it not substack of some deranged fash techbro ghoul like balaji srinivasan, that’s JAMA, are you sure these are actual MDs and not three techbros in a stolen labcoat
one of them - first author - has three fluff pieces on genai in similar tone to their name, the other two, it seems to me, didn’t wrote a thing about ai earlier
then again scott siskind exists, but this is not something that i’d expect even from him
JAMA article’s not in scihub, anyone got a copy?
anything newer than 2022? won’t be on scihub, because scihub got in a court case in india, that they hope they can win and secure reasonably stable place where they can operate from
tho it seems to me that the entire article is that three screens of text
that’s fuckin grim.
Linking without factchecking or any due diligence. This appears to have been making the rounds:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1ecshvh/elon_tried_to_enter_the_babyfur_community
https://xcancel.com/christiolson/status/1817349838444667034#m
OT: https://xcancel.com/bnuuyhopper/status/1816574082588246342#m
Note: reposted from last week’s Stubsack :)
this is the first thing i see on lemmy this week and i think it’s already enough internet for me today, basilisk have mercy
also musk’s downfall probably started the moment he became buddies with thiel
even failed to kill him in his dumb vanity car purchase, i mean
The upshot of this is that if acausalrobotgod ever gives us a time machine, you just need to plant one tree on your way to killing hitler, and you solve so many problems.
Maybe there’s an easy way to prevent apartheid in South Africa entirely? That alone led to so many waste-of-oxygen white dudes, we could nip Musk in the bud and much more
I aim to displease!
It’s been 3 days, my hope that this is real is fading :(
Musk will always own that hilariously disturbing baby roleplay Twitter alt though
Does TP0 have an point he’s trying to push with this thread? It’s disingenuous enough that it feels like there’s an agenda, but at the same time what could the point even be? Fuck cancer patients?
Possibly anti-universal-healthcare fearmongering. This stat’s been going around US conservative circles. And I even typed that before seeing the thread ended with:
Remember the lopsidedness of health spending and need when talking reform.
“Dear healthy people: don’t let the sickly suck away all your money”
I mean, you know what the point is.
It’s eugenics. It’s always eugenics.
Leukemia patients are always over-represented in their data because it’s so much easier to use the calipers on people with no hair.
Okay first of all what the fuck is a TP0? I swear you guys just make those people up and they’re lazier and lazier written each time.
Second, what’s the point here? Like, is either of the tweets making a point? Cause it just sounds like someone discovered why universal healthcare is a good idea? The fact that spending is so unequal is quite literally the entire point in favour of having universal insurance?
Also
1% is responsible for 24% of medical expenses
Now do how much of the population gets 24% of the income :)
Cremieux used to post to Reddit as user Tr***yPornO (with the slur instead of the asterisks). Nobody here wanted to call him that, so it was rapidly abbreviated TPO or TP0. He posted the same breathtaking racist shit with low quality cites that didn’t check out as he has since. He also told all manner of inconsistent lies about who he was.
Speaking of breathtaking racism with low quality cites, does anyone remember ebola chan? He was my favorite because he was a reactionary with 4chan temperament, so he’d mald when pushed instead of spewing out word salad.
At least he wears his kink proudly, not many rightwing weirdoes would just admit they’re really into that.
I wouldn’t be too quick to conclude it’s that - I’ve seen a number of these creeps wear/handle-pick slurs as a trying-to-be-funny pejorative
Oh I’m sure he’s trying to be edgy, but in that case there’s nothing that would trigger him more than what I’ve said :>
TP0 is the OSI connection-mode transport layer protocol’s transport protocol class 0 duh.
Transport Protocol Class 0 (TP0), the simplest OSI transport protocol, performs segmentation and reassembly functions. TP0 requires connection-oriented network service.
I thought it meant “thread poster zero” because I never really understood the order in which one reads tweets and replies, so when I saw “TP0”, three frames later I already deduced an entire vocabulary of terms to designate each persona in a twitter screenshot
from the top down with either dfs or bfs depending on how you found the thread to spread, or from the inside out (by clicking through QTs until you get to the root). because twitter totally made browsing this shit easy.
what’s hard.
oh man i’d forgotten St Rev, a favourite minor nrx from the mid-2010s
I’d never heard of him. His latest tweet is complaining about the left wing slant on his thread and he says that you can’t “get away from the culture war I guess”. Yet every fifth post below is a rage post about libs and lefties.
It’s like how all topics are either the cishet white standard quo or “political.” Raging about libs and lefties is standard quo and telling a dimwit they are a dimwit is “culture war.”
that’s just “poors don’t deserve healthcare” what else
otoh aren’t they going against their benefactors (old rich ghouls)?
christ and it’s always the fucking bad-faith bullshit arguments. I bet if you pulled another dimension to the same fucking numbers there you’d instantly find some Rather Interesting correlations with income brackets, and if you pulled a dimension for care/spend class you’d find Another interesting correlation
I wish these people just fucking wouldn’t, gah
Well, history sure does fucking repeat itself again, doesn’t it?
At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)
At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)
I expect history to repeat itself quite soon - where previously using the term “artificial intelligence” got you looked at as a wild-eyed dreamer, now, using that term’s likely getting you looked at as an asshole techbro, and your research deemed a willing attempt to hurt others.
asshole or scammer or grifter. so many possibilities
This does suck for all the non-LLM ML stuff that has actual usage. (Even if a percentage of that was also snake oil, or had dubious success rates).
Ehh, if you’re calling your ML stuff AI then that’s on you (and you’re probably not technically serious about what you’re doing anyway). Other people are pointing out that AI isn’t a term that many compsci/software people would use, and neither the article (or afaict the study) or my experience suggest that ML has the same negative association as AI.
AI has been and always will be the term for making the computer play a game against you. A search tree with some prunning is not ML, but if you use it to implement a chess bot then it is AI in the game sense.
If you’re not doing video games then the term is essentially meaningless
Baldur Bjaranason coming in with a solid sneer aimed squarely at his own industry’s finest
For as much as they like to talk about building things and solving problems the software industry doesn’t seem to put a lot of effort into building things well or solving their own problems.
I had a simple question: how to rescue a Windows hard disk to a new SSD?
The answer is ddrescue from a Linux USB stick, but the Windows user wasn’t comfortable at the command line.
But if you Google it, you get:
- insanely detailed geek pages. These contain the right answer! But not the specific right answer.
- AI slop.
Eventually I just did it myself with ddrescue. But I got a first-hand experience of how fucking unusable search is now.
Oh, and Google is now showing AI slop answers at the top of searches in the UK.
For people from the future:
I’m a fan of Clonezilla, which is a debian-derived live distro designed specifically to clone partitions as well as whole disks. If you’re comfortable with how Linux represents devices, it’s as close as you can get to training-wheels-included imaging for free.
BIG WARNING: Be sure to write down the BitLocker key before you begin, or else it’ll be a bad time!
@dgerard What kind of HD? I have at least 4, incl. 2 x 500GB, 1 x 1TB, that are not “seen” anymore by the system… as if the head was “locked” somehow…
The original is a 1TB mechanical hard disk, the new one is a 2TB SSD. I just copied the disk image with ddrescue and it works (and took 2 hours). Next step: expand the partition to 2TB with gparted.
insanely detailed geek pages. These contain the right answer! But not the specific right answer.
I had a windows problem once, so was looking through all that looking for an answer and saw somebody go ‘I need to save my data, which is very important, so how do I fix this problem’ and then they got a reply with ‘follow these steps with step X making sure they would delete their data’. And this was before the whole era of AI slop so I fear how much worse it has gotten now.
@ai_shame RT’d a good sneer in the wild recently:
Bonus: Eliezer, of all people, also sneered at the TESCREAL twat:
Harry Potter and the Surprisingly Good Take
Harry Potter and the Broken Clock
It’s the same story as has ever been. “Smart People”'s position on anything is often informed by their current economic relationship wrt to the things they care about. And maybe even Yud isn’t super happy about his profession being co-opted. What scraps will he have if his own delusions became true about GPT zombies replacing “authentic voices”?
No one is immune to seeing a better take when it’s their shit on the line, and no is immune from being in a bubble without stake.
I’ve read enough of the Yudster’s work to recognize that he is particularly vulnerable to being replaced by a small shell script that outputs a massive volume of text that says very little of substance, and what little there is is weirdly racist.
that’s a linkedin-level take
Somebody got all his books from libgen and it shows.
hey no shaming libgen, that shit exists for good reason
You are mistaken in my reasoning, I’m saying a person with a well paid university position (which gives him access to money and the university library, which I assume pays for access to their books/papers and doesn’t libgen or equivs them) should understand that a lot of training material is indeed not free. This being in addition to the university paying him for his own research, and him prob being pretty annoyed if he was replaced with an iSandberg bot and now was homeless. (This is in addition to what Yud said).
Turns out making papers about replacing the earth with fruit is something Anders-GPT can do perfectly well on its own.
which I assume pays for access to their books/papers and doesn’t libgen or equivs them
wrong assumption tbh. the open-access fight is happening because the publisher cartels are extortionate and access is extremely uneven. I (personally/directly) know more than a few people presently in academia who roll libgen on a daily basis because it is easier/quicker/the only option/the only actually working option for the things they need
it’s often easier to pirate the published version of your own paper than to access it by official means
Fair enough, my bad. No idea it had gotten that bad. But still, I wasn’t intending to rag on libgen, just his idea that these things (which also includes education) are free already.
if you want to get really mad, shibboleth “elsevier”. it’ll be a speedrun of learning some of the worst of what’s fucked atm
Here’s a quick and dirty vanilla js script that highlights all posts in a thread according to how recent they are, the brighter the newer, and alse separately highlights new posts, to make long running threads easier to follow. I’m posting it in the stubsack because it’s the thread I had in mind when writing it.
Pasting it in the browser’s console and pressing enter should be enough for the page you have open, not that I’ve cross tested it any… Worst case scenario it does nothing or it colors the posts wrong and you just reload the page, I swear it won’t steal your crypto, or mine any new.
In Firefox you can find the console by pressing F12 and selecting the console tab.
edit: Also if you prepend javascript: to the code and store it as a bookmark you can just invoke it by calling the bookmark, like a macro, see https://awful.systems/comment/4173451
Note: longer threads don’t load all comments at once, so you’ll have to rerun the script if you scroll down far enough.
edit: fixed for Edge, because why wouldn’t it show dates differently there.
edit: updated it to check if there’s a (xx New) notice in the post count in the OP and use the number to highlight the latest xx posts, i.e. all post made since the last time you were here. Change the value of variable newPostColor if you don’t like the lovely shade of lavender I picked. Depending on if edited posts are counted as new or not the count might be off, and like, what if there’s a new post that’s also been edited? Solving that seems to mean moving away from the warmth and comfort of the quick and dirty territory, and also is there a public philthy repository somewhere?
edit: here’s how it looks in the SAP thread:
edit: NEW: added some legibility changes and also consecutive executions now toggle old post highlights.
Code now in spoiler:
spoiler
(() => { function getHighlightedColor(min, max, value) { const percentage = (value - min) / (max - min); return `rgba(0,0,255,${percentage})` } const newPostCount = (() => { const text = document.querySelector("span.fst-italic").textContent; return text.includes("New") ? parseInt(text.match(/\d+/)[0]) : 0; })(); const newPostColor = "#783AFF"; const timestampNodes = [...document.querySelectorAll("span.moment-time")] .map(x => { return { Node: x, PostBox: x.closest('.ms-2'), Date: Date.parse( x.dataset.tippyContent .split('\n').at(-1) .replace(/Modified |at /g, "") .replace(/(?<=\d+)(st|nd|rd|th)/g, "")) }; }) .filter(x => x.PostBox != null) .sort((x1, x2) => x2.Date - x1.Date); const minDate = timestampNodes.at(-1).Date; const maxDate = timestampNodes.at(0).Date; const hl = (dt) => getHighlightedColor(minDate, maxDate, dt); timestampNodes .forEach((x, i) => { if (i < newPostCount) { x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = newPostColor; x.PostBox.querySelector('.person-listing').style.textShadow = '1px 1px 0.75px #FFFFFF'; x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = ".5em"; } else if (x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor == "") { x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = hl(x.Date); x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = ".5em"; } else { x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = ""; x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = ""; } }); })()other handy thing you can do: make a bookmark that has the URL be
javascript:(function() { function bits go here} )();, and stick it in your bookmark barYes, do this if your browser allows it, it’s way better. Just paste the code in the OP prepended by “javascript:” without quotes in place of the url and as far as i can tell it works.
I only now saw how badly the syntax on my post is fucked, that’s what I get for trying to snip things in a dodgy textentry rather than a real editor 😅
leaving it up for posterity tho.
In the spirit of “worse is better”, here is a ublock filter I just threw together to highlight all the comments less than a day old:
! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text("hours ago"):style(background-color:#7700AA)EDIT: fix bug with 1 hour and 20 minutes ago. regex is even worse is better.
! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text(/(hour|minute)s? ago/):style(background-color:#7700AA)I love this but I don’t know if I have the same royal Grape Fanta energy in me. I think I’m on one of the alternate themes but I like #333333
the way you made it, it works only for awful.systems users
This is really cool!
I was just thinking it would be cool to have something like RES’s ‘Previously Read’ feature that only shows the new comments, and everything else is darkened or collapsed. This does a similar thing though and it’s great for these weekly threads
This new trend of describing the American right wing as weirdos sure is something, isn’t it? What used to be our little hobby has escaped containment, largely due to the surfacing of JD Vance and his backers during the RNC. As recently as last month, when NRx and Rationalist oddballs came up in a news item, the response of the average reader would be to shrug and dismiss them as a small minority of sweaty nerds and assume that “regular” Republican politicians wouldn’t have anything to do with them. Things have changed; now there’s many an NPR-loving granny googling “what is a yarvin” and getting wound up about it in her group chats.
We’ve all heard of the Overton Window, which according to Wikipedia is, “the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.” I therefore propose a new thing, the “Yarvin Window,” which we can define as “the range of insane policies that it is politically acceptable to ascribe to your ideological opponents.”
This is the price they pay for grabbing the wrong end of the poo stick.
What amazes me, as a sort of US politics watcher from the outside, just how badly the various republicans weirdos are reacting to this. Esp Vance, posting his dolphin fucker stuff in the middle of the jokestorm about him being into furniture. But not just him, the GOP going ‘don’t be racist about Harris’ and then all the racists doubling down on their racism, etc etc. The weird lashouts re weirdness. “how dare you call me weird! Grabs calipers I can see from your skull shape that you are …”
damn so he’s a posadist too on top of everything?
If I had a nickle for every time I’ve heard about dolphin sex I’d have four nickles. Which isn’t much, but also is kind of a lot.
https://nitter.poast.org/edzitron/status/1819591404873568715
Zitron’s sample size may be limited to his Twitter following, but its a bad sign for AI if bashing it gets you praise from both sides of the political aisle:
Bonus Tweet from Chris Alvino:
I was just thinking about this today. I had a thread go viral where I bashed AI, resulted in thousands of new followers, and I’ve had to block a bunch bc they turned out to be on the far right. Honestly amazing how bipartisan AI hate is. Never seen anything like it before 😂
The proud tradition of “no really, Trump isn’t that bad if you pretend he’s a normal libertarian who happens to be an asshole instead of listening to the words that come out of his mouth”
So many fully-cooked brains in that thread.
BTW, ever notice how easy it is to replace “robot overlords” in TESCREAL stuff with literally anything else? Compare this gem from the linked thread, “The Authoritarian Peril”:
https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGUAQszqWkAAGFRb.jpg
with this version where Tolkein stuff is seamlessly swapped in for evil sentient gaming rigs with no loss of generality:
A dictator who wields the power of the One Ring would command concentrated power unlike any we’ve ever seen. In addition to being able to impose their will on other countries, they could enshrine their rule internally. Millions of orcs could police their populace; mass surveillance would be hypercharged; dictator-loyal Ring Wraiths could individually assess every citizen for dissent, with advanced near-perfect lie detection rooting out any disloyalty. Most importantly, the orcish military and police force could be wholly controlled by a single political leader, and programmed to be perfectly obedient—no more risk of coups or popular rebellions. Whereas past dictatorships were never permanent, Isildur’s Bane could eliminate basically all historical threats to a dictator’s rule and lock in their power (cf value lock-in). If the CCP gets this power, they could enforce the Party’s conception of “truth” totally and completely.
isn’t that the Palantir business plan
ha ha, wow.
Yeah, simple as, innit?
with advanced near-perfect lie detection
how the fuck would that work mate, just give me a glimpse of your notes on how a legendarily useless and unworkable forensic technique would become “near-perfect” with GPUs.
Ya know, it’s funny that you point this out, it’s a thing about their style of argument that’s been nagging at me for a while.
There’s a pattern in the promptfondlers’ propaganda where they claim that they they’ve identified a path to improve their technology recursively and infinitely, but their strategy relies on the invention of what is essentially a “truth oracle” in the compsci sense of the word “oracle.” If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.
I guess that’s true, since anyone could use a truth oracle to implement a binary search on The Akashic Records or whatever to discover new useful truths about life, the universe, and everything. Any new route of investigation would end in a game of 20 questions with your infinite knowledge genie.
Naturally, LLMs are never going to be a truth oracle; you just can’t get there from here, but try telling them that.
If they had a machine that could reliably decide the truth value of an arbitrary proposition, then they could foof us all to roboheaven ASAP.
Damn bro, they’re gonna hate this Turing fellow once they learn he crushed their dreams OVER
SEVENEIGHT DECADES AGOEDIT: someone pointed out I suck at arithmetic
Realistically, most EAs will vote for the white male over the non-white female anyway, but it’s on-brand for them to post a giant substack with reasons why.
After hate-reading the replies I spied Roko plus an an unironic Yarvinite what an absolute G E M
Dude posted to the EA forum as suggested and it went over like a lead balloon:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/A6W5qm9gWyr3mikmS/the-ea-case-for-trump-2024
Kinda funny that they write thousand page essays with detailed reasons on why to vote for a person who can’t read more than two sentences without getting distracted by a ketchup bottle.
Amazing quote he included from Tyler Cowen:
If you are ever tempted to cancel somebody, ask yourself “do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths.” If you don’t cancel those people — and you shouldn’t — that should broaden your circle of tolerance more generally.
Yes leftists, you not cancelling someone campaigning for lower drug prices is actually the same as endorsing mass murder and hence you should think twice before cancelling sex predators. It’s in fact called ephebophilia.
What the globe emoji followed with is also a classic example of rationalists getting mesmerized by their verbiage:
What I like about this framing is how it aims to recalibrate our sense of repugnance in light of “scope insensitivity,” a deeply rooted cognitive bias that occurs “when the valuation of a problem is not valued with a multiplicative relationship to its size.”
do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths
Wh… What? Does favouring seatbelts also induce millions of premature deaths, because of… because of what? What the actual fuck dude?
Someone posted this to /r/SneerClub and it got 150+ comments, didn’t realize you can still start threads there.
the number of people on /r/sneerclub who seem utterly unaware of the new digs is tragic.
looks like completely-ineffable just decided to start it up again
why?
i have no idea!
but still the founder and first mod
Two Sneer Clubs, both alike in dignity…
ah looks like he restarted r/badphilosophy at the same time
Matt Yglesias argued that “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK” following the deadly collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. And yet his arguments were perfectly correct, if maybe a bit “too soon.”
Jesus.
Roe v. Wade cannot be overturned twice
Where are your Bayesian priors now, asshole?
Siri, how can I unread a post?
Also look at this dude in the replies advocating for mask-off right-wing sexist / racist / fascist EA: https://x.com/diegocaleiro/status/1729715617945788773 … if you dare 😱
Tangent: I had assumed nitter was dead and buried by now, glad to see there are still some functioning mirrors. I’ve found it impossible to share threads without.
https://status.d420.de/ there’s a few nitters post-rebirth, all of them probably using a fleet of real accounts and anti-bot protection instead of the guest accounts that first-age nitter used.
Strange, they didn’t count the number of utils I get by voting for Kamala just to make these bastards mald
Prominent EA/rationalist cult member Kelsey Piper taking a break from defending tech billionaires for going MAGA to angrily insist on her duty to keep her children segregated from the Oakland masses: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1817335817515532694
She’s listened to anecdotes “about kids who are like my kids” (👀👀👀), and that’s quite enough engagement with that system, thank you very much.
As sympathetic as I am to the parents and children for whom public school is a necessity rather than a choice, I don’t think she’s actually wrong here? Putting her kids in public school won’t magically immediately increase funding, reduce student/teacher ratios, improve facilities, get reactionary Texas nonsense away from history curriculums, or otherwise fix whatever problems those schools have. Rather it will mean that more people in that school have the resources to Karen their way into getting the people who can fix those immediate problems to make them a priority, and there’s a time lag in how quickly that can be done (assuming parents still care enough to agitate as their kids get older and graduate). And while there are a lot of very good reasons to assume that growing up in a family with those resources has a more immediate impact than which school your kids go to (i.e. her kids are still going to have access and interest in private tutoring, PTA involvement, and a home environment free from the stress of economic precarity and that will benefit them regardless of what school they go to), we still talk as though giving your kid a good education at a good school is the most important single thing you can do to help them be successful. If we’re going to talk like going to a bad school is like playing Russian Roulette with your kids, I’m not comfortable with the logic that everyone has a moral duty to play because it reduces each individual’s odds of losing, y’know?
Of course, given her proximity to the Ratsphere I’m probably being incredibly charitable and she’s actually worried about having her kids spend time too close to genetically inferior races with mathematically-described low IQs or something.
I don’t know about “magically immediately” (?), but the benefits of racial and economic integration in American schools is actually incredibly well studied and documented; you don’t have to argue from first principles unless you just want to ignore those benefits and do the thing you wanted to do all along.
Don’t get me wrong, I think ending the de facto segregation we’ve ended up with needs to be a primary policy goal and that dealing with people not like themselves is going to do good for any kid all on its own. And the numbers parents use to figure out which schools are “better” are cooked to all hell, making trying to accurately judge school quality incredibly difficult. But that doesn’t change the fact that some schools do have better outcomes or more problems than others, and while the broader systemic factors that create those problems need to be solved, expecting parents not to try and take care of their own kids first isn’t a viable way to make that happen.
it’s 110% white suburban totally-not-eugenics
Rumor, but lol if true “A former coworker worked in campaigns for a while and the thing he told me about doing that which has stuck with me is that everyone on campaigns is doing insider trading on betting markets” Source. Campaigners making money scamming Rationalists basically.
This orange thread is about San Francisco banning certain types of landlord rent collusion. I cannot possibly sneer better than the following in-thread comment explaining why this is worthwhile:
While I agree that the giant metal spikes we put on all the cars aren’t the exclusive reason that cars are lethal, I would hope we both agree that cars are less lethal when we don’t cover them in giant metal spikes.
