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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I don't think him having previously done undefined PR work for companies that include alleged AI startups is the smoking gun that mastopost is presenting it as.
Going through a Zitron long form article and leaving with the impression that he's playing favorites between AI companies seems like a major failure of reading comprehension.
According to the archived website, he did do PR for DoNotPay, which is advertised as "The first robot lawyer."
It's certainly possible though that at the time he thought there was more potential for this sort of AI than there actually was, though that could also mean that his flip is relatively recent.
Or maybe it's something else.
What else though, is he being secretly funded by the cabal to make convolutional neural networks great again?
That he found his niche and is trying to make the most of it seems by far the most parsimonious explanation, and the heaps of manure he unloads on the LLM both business and practices weekly surely can't be helping DoNotPay's bottom line.
Thing is, that by December 2023, the time of the archive, there was already a scandal with someone using ChatGPT to do the work of discovery. While he might have stopped doing PR work for DoNotPay by that time, he was willing to advertise the fact that he did do such PR work for such a company. It shows either a lack of due diligence in researching his clients, or maybe it was just a paycheque for him. Perhaps he thought he knew more than what he actually did. Or maybe there was something else, I'm not clairvoyant.
It's clear that he's pivoted from that viewpoint, but it does make me curious what happened between then and now that caused him to become skeptical.