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.)
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.
Before focusing on AI he was going off about what he called the rot economy, which also had legs and seemed to be in line with Doctorow's enshitification concept. Applying the same purity standard to that would mean we should be suspicious if he ever worked with a listed company at all.
Still I get how his writing may feel inauthentic to some, personally I get preacher vibes from him and he often does a cyclical repetition of his points as the article progresses which to me sometimes came off as arguing via browbeating, and also I've had just about enough of reading performatively angry internet writers.
Still, he must be getting better or at least coming up with more interesting material, since lately I've been managing to read them all the way through.
roughly this is where my thinking on it is too. and there's a chance that because of such clients is why he hates this shit now as he does.
the guy's quite obviously a great orator and engaging writer, evidenced by the popularity of his writing. and this is another part of why this comes to mind for me - applying a bit of critical view, just to check. while we're at the point of building new relationships, new critiques, new platforms, figuring out all these new options to deal with sweeping hand motion all this other garbage, wisest to try make the most of it now
Notably DoNotPay seems to be run-of-the mill script automation, rather than LLM-based (though they might be trying that), and only started branding themselves as an "AI Companion" after Jun/2023 (after it was added to EZPR's client list).
It's entirely possible they simply consulted Ed, and then pivoted away, and Ed doesn't update his client list that carefully.
(Happens all the time to my translator parents, where they list prior work, only to discover that clients add terrible terrible edits to their translations)
It's an archive, so he can't really update that.