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 so 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.)
LOLmarchy allows all users to escalate to root.
Wouldn’t you be so grateful that your modular repairable upgradeable laptop that you probably sunk at least $2k into, and probably plan on owning for the long term, has specifically funded support for this steaming pile of crap?
edit:
As AI is increasingly producing high severity CVEs against core infrastructure, security needs to be top of mind for all developers, but especially authors of distributions targeted at developers. Lately there have been innumerable reports of developer machines being compromised and their access used to contaminate the software supply chain or exploit production systems. Developers are high-value targets because of the level of access they are often granted. Developer machines typically disable security guardrails for convenience, store credentials in plain-text dotfiles, and accumulate access to systems. This must change.
I’ll microwave a surplus Funko Pop doll if this paragraph wasn’t cut-n-pasted straight from chatbot output
It might be overoptimistic, but I think the fashware problem may solve itself.
I can’t believe millions in funding, a bunch of vide-coded bash scripts, and a desire to promote fascist ideology has resulted in a trash fire.
Anyone got “open software dev slander” on their 2026 bingo cards?
Transcript
I hope that this thing with “AI” has taught everyone that software developers are overall an awful bunch and they don’t have our backs, and that they’re much closer to the managerial class than actual workers.
And the idea that anybody who earns a wage is a worker is nonsense, the old divisions between white collar and blue collar are firmly in place. Boundaries being negotiated, indeed, yes, but not gone.
is the “managerial class” in the room with us right now
i’m not gonna pretend to be the communist understander, but the idea that capitalists would pay workers to work against their own class interests (and against other workers) is a feature of capitalism
Most managers are still primarily reliant on selling their own wage labour and do not own the means of production. Their power is highly constrained (literally just where they work, limited ability to control the circumstances of their work) and they are subject to the whims of those who own the means of production.
Getting more favourable terms to keep other workers in line does not fundamentally change your class interests but it does give you peverse incentives to harm your own class (which in the long run fucks you, e.g. you need sick leave too).
Deceiving workers about their class interests to divide us is a tactic of the capitalists and we don’t need to help them with that.
OP definitely has a kernel of a point, and there’s a lot to discuss regarding it, but he sprints right past it all to uselessly compress the conversation into the ~~ timeless dialectic of class consciousness ~~. The acculturation of software developers generally towards the ownership class is, if anything, still under-analyzed! You come into the industry already propagandized that if you just join the right startup and bust your ass, you’re gonna hit it big! In this way, it’s important to understand, and describe to others, Hacker News as a propaganda tool to shape and condition technical discussion, rather than the common perception of a neutral, focused technical discussion forum.
And the end circumstance is, even if you are awarded stock options at most of the big Silicon Valley firms, thanks to multi-class share structures, you’re given a booby-prize version of ownership! Your decision is binary, cash out or hold, you have no effective decision-making power over the future of the enterprise. There’s a lot of persuasive points here that still aren’t widespread in the public dialogue! But no, I guess it makes more sense to continue the same old tactic of labeling everyone we hate and fear with an obscure, difficult-to-spell French loanword. The rhetorical tactic that has been pretty demonstrably ineffective for over a century now.
There are, of course, equally valid reasons to be pessimistic. The historically-contingent development of computer programming has mainly been along lines that are obfuscatory rather than accessible, subject to continuous framework and API churn, fetishizing rapid delivery of “new features” over stability. All these aspects help create a false sense of mastery on the part of those who pass through the firewall of skill and tedium, then further combine with the class-mobility propaganda to create a false sense of security. And the interposition of uninspectable, poorly-replicable AI systems is the culmination of the rot, approaching the point where even the supposedly masterful programmer doesn’t really know what their system is doing, let alone the end user. In this way, I have to agree that there is far greater potential for solidarity with the users on whom this crap is imposed rather than the sunk-cost dead-enders who keep crapping it out.
But even then, I still don’t trust OP’s conceptual framework to build that solidarity. This is precisely the genre of Marxist argument that is most tedious and least effective, the kind that approaches religious fundamentalism. Dude’s writing seriously reads like Christian fundamentalist bullshit papered over with Marxist jargon. Later in the thread, we get bangers like
The middle class individual, the petty bourgeois, yearns for the righteousness of the proletariat, and avoids coming to terms with their own privileged status. That status frequently precludes them from making moral, ethical decisions, because their fleeting privileges and narrow expertise makes it difficult and dangerous for them to fall out of line, that line being drawn by the rich, the haute bourgeoisie.
Replace “righteousness of the proletariat” with “grace of the saved,” “privileged status” with “fallen nature,” “haute bourgeoisie” with “liberal elite” etc. and you’d have the exact output of somebody in a Texas megachurch. Dude’s a Jesus freak, his Jesus just happens to be named Karl.
fortunately the account (that i never interacted with) has my account blocked, so i couldn’t make them angry by pointing out they’re engaging in typical intelligentsia behaviour of assuming that only heavy industry workers are workers.
This guy clearly has some deep thoughts to air out…
The middle class individual, the petty bourgeois, yearns for the righteousness of the proletariat, and avoids coming to terms with their own privileged status. That status frequently precludes them from making moral, ethical decisions, because their fleeting privileges and narrow expertise makes it difficult and dangerous for them to fall out of line […].
Once you accept that you can begin to think about how to overcome that.
Or you may choose to ignore that and pretend they’re just blue collar workers and the very obvious tendencies they display are just because they’re temporarily deceived or lack class consciousness. No, they understand who they are, and yearning for proletariat righteousness is part of that understanding. It’s one component of a discourse of merit and authenticity, of rationalising their distinct social status.
https://sunny.garden/@librarysquirrel/117185341657385932
Honestly, it reads like a massive self-report, as it’s coming from a straight-from-uni second-year history PhD. Oh, you’ve noticed people tend to talk more about things that make them sound righteous rather than complicit? Probably also from people in your field. But it surely doesn’t affect you, as you’re so aware of the problem and working on being one of the good ones.
Misusing a defined term (petty bourgeois) to make your argument look more tied to historical ones is kinda fucking fail for a historian
I don’t really agree with the second part, but the first part rings true. It seems to me that most software devs are arrogant assholes who think they are the shit because they know some javascript. As it stands now, I would have to think for a long time about whether I consider the collective work of my profession in the last few years a net positive for the world.
Class consciousness in software is in the abyss, I have worked with people who didn’t know that sick leave was won through the labour movement and not something that “just made sense” to do.
That doesn’t change their class interests, it just means they behave ignorantly (in a way that hurts other workers but that’s why they need education, not isolation).
It seems to me that most software devs are arrogant assholes who think they are the shit because they know some javascript.
Tying back to the original point of this thread, that’s probably a side-effect of the “acculturation of software developers generally towards the ownership class” istewart mentioned. Beyond promising them an easy ticket to Bourgeois Street, making them feel more Important And Special™ than the average prole helps keep class consciousness to a minimum.
As it stands now, I would have to think for a long time about whether I consider the collective work of my profession in the last few years a net positive for the world.
From what I can see, things are tipping towards “no”. The fact Anubis, Nepenthes, Iocaine Glaze/Nightshade and other such shit exists at all speaks volumes about the negative impact of LLMs.
i’m not a fan of military industry, but that doesn’t make me claim the workers there are not proletariat.
I really don’t get that angle by the original poster. Plenty of people who are firmly in their worker category are genuinely awful people who vote against their collective interests as if it where their religion.
the reasons he thinks programmers aren’t workers seem to be threefold (a) they earn too much, (b) they don’t sweat enough and © they align with their bosses. and – to me at least – is obvious, that he only deigns to use the word “worker” for people who do (hard enough) manual labour.
this – from a dude who has a baccalaureate in italianistics, magisterium in linguistics and studies for phd in history – is an obvious intelligentsja stereotyping. lad thinks he’s punching up, and in reality he’s punching down.
Google is seemingly experimenting with replacing their help articles with LLM text.
I was searching for how to use multiple profiles on Chrome and found https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop in the search results, which used to look like a normal useful help article, however it’s now been replaced by an LLM that takes upwards of 30 seconds to load, will randomly just refuse to answer the question, and produces significantly worse output than the existing (now inaccessible to me) technical writer written article.
This may be being A/B tested, so if you can’t reproduce it here is one of the worse results I got:
slop
Here the “source” it gave me was the same URL it was hosted on. When I clicked through to it it just gave me different slop.
I’ve seen some bad decisions in the AI mania, but “let’s take our entire corpus of professionally written technical writing and replace it with slop” managed to surprise me.
Got another one: AI 2027 tracker. it’s not run by the authors of AI 2027 so its takes are different: like the authors say that the ‘China wakes up’ prediction was a miss while this website claims it was correct (even though their main source of evidence comes from April 2025, and their other evidence completely misses what that prediction actually said, which was that China would hoard compute and nationalise AI, neither of which have happened)
Full list of predictions here was scrolling down and something that immediately caught my eye is that the %s are bullshit. Somehow 80% accuracy manages to be both confirmed accurate and partially accurate? what?? what’s the threshold here??
Also does appear I messed up-they split every prediction into mini subcategories. I was looking at only China pushing AI-they do have sections for chips and nationalisation, both of which are partially accurate to debunked. Which makes that 46% accurate, more of a miss than a hit (like the authors said)
the %s are bullshit.
My first thought was something to do with
printf. <_<
I’m tired of hearing the same near future sci-fi political thriller story over and over. When are they going to get new material? Ghost in the Shell did it better anyway. Sigh. I might as well do the requisite sneering once again.
Mid 2025: Advertisements for computer-using agents emphasize the term “personal assistant”.
You could even call them a personal digital assistant. Or PDA for short. Maybe Chat-GPT should rebrand as something that emphasizes this, they could call it “Palm Pilot”.
Mid 2025: AI personal assistants can be prompted with tasks like “order me a burrito on DoorDash”.
Hunger pains interrupting your game? Order pizza while playing Everquest II!
September 2027: Agent-4 doesn’t do anything dramatic like try to escape its datacenter.
You know… I think I’ll give them this one.
October 2027: The NYT article cites evaluations showing Agent-4’s off-the-charts bioweapons capabilities, persuasion abilities, and ability to automate most white-collar jobs.
lmao
Anyway that aside: Petition to make the Daniel Curve a term of art. I want to hear less talk from the tech visionaries about how we’re in the gentle singularity or the soft-serve singularity or maybe kinda sorta approaching the singularity if you squint. I want to hear more talk about where exactly we are in the Daniel Curve.
Agent-4’s off-the-charts bioweapons capabilities
I would ask to establish metrics for “bioweapons capabilities,” if I didn’t already know the request would end in disappointment
China received word of Agent-3 capabilities and Agent-4 plans before losing their final spy.
“Our last spy got addicted to superhumanly persuasive AI generated anime girls and quit. So dang we’re like plum out of spies now.”
Inside the Agent-4 collective, a year passes every week.
Good luck proving this prediction true or false given that computer algorithms do not have a concept of time separate from the real one lol.
Inside the Agent-4 collective, a year passes every week.
Good luck proving this prediction true or false given that computer algorithms do not have a concept of time separate from the real one lol.
Inside my toy orbital gravity simulation, a year passes every ten seconds. Please update your singularity timelines accordingly.
Inside the Agent-4 collective, a year passes every week.
Good luck proving this prediction true or false given that computer algorithms do not have a concept of time separate from the real one lol.
This is just the hyperbolic time chamber but dumber
Hyperbolic crime chamber
what if Agent-4 was betrayed and trapped in the hyperbolic time chamber
Previously spoken about but we are roughly 31% behind the Daniel Curve™️
New Iris Meredith: “There’s no such thing as Just a Tool”, featuring the writings of notorious Nazi and notable 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger on the nature of tools, and Meredith’s own writing on how philosophically bankrupt the current tech industry is.
As a bonus, here’s an old Bluesky thread I found about game design affecting a game’s community.
Always love reading Iris’ work. I’m already finding ways to abuse the concept of the person-tool gestalt for dumb jokes that I have to over explain to my wife so I’m getting my money’s worth to be sure.
Also I definitely have actual fond memories of randomly running into people in Guild Wars 2. The of genericizing/instancing more of the world interactions (like loot and quests, for example) and using mega servers to dynamically scale resource usage and player allocation meant that you were very unlikely to organically run into the same people often enough to really make even a parasocial connection, but it dramatically improved the experience with the overall community.
Interesting if somewhat unintentional contrast between tools: a 7-month-old microblogging/Twitter-like thread is readily considered “old,” even if it contains (and might be a primary reference point for!) information that is relevant long before and long after. The same can’t always be said of a blog post.
Can AGI create a rock so big that it can’t pick it up?
depends on the size of the pinhead
There are many pinheads associated with AGI
so potentially many times infinite number of angels (or devils)
So this shit video got served up in my YouTube recommended feed today:
Honestly, the AI bros must be getting really fucking desperate if they’re trying to use Minecraft to criti-hype people.
the Documenting AGI channel also posted about an ‘AI civilisation’ in Minecraft, no idea if this is the same thing since I didn’t watch that video
This reminds me of that copypasta/rumour about how some quake 3 arena bots had become sentient because a server was left running for years and the bits simply decided to stop playing and remain frozen (because of course emergent intelligence in deterministically programmed bots is much more likely than a bug in the logic that only manifests after very long sessions 🙃🙃)
Of course, the irony is that in their desire to revolt against the violence being forced upon them they merely created an incredibly efficient means of achievement farming for those with the stomach for it.
I have seen a few opinion columnists like Noah Smith pass on “what if the AI engineers a lethal virus?” Biosecurity seems like a mundane wonky policy issue like making farmers provide toilets to their workers and checking the beef for BSE.
As is so often the case, I honestly don’t know what’s supposed to be different about our response to gengineered superplagues if they were made by an AI instead of the CIA or whoever else is in on that nonsense.
I feel the need to scream into the void so here goes: my corpo job has certain execs that are very deep into the AI bs, and they’ve done a full tour of all the stages and iterations of AI hype, following all the new trendy tools because otherwise we’d surely be left behind 🫠
And the current somewhat new hotness is spec-driven development. I’ve tried it over the last few days since it looks like it’ll be mandatory for larger work.
And boy. Boy oh boy.
There are no words in the English language to describe how much I hated it. There may be some ancient curses in R’lyiehian that would do it.
The Copilot mandates were bad enough, but honestly if this is an attempt to make me see the light and admit that in itself Copilot isn’t that bad, then it’s kinda working.
It’s just… idk, I got into software dev because I like logic puzzles (and wanted the money, let’s be real). I enjoy making a small thing and then slowly adding stuff to it. I do not enjoy sitting idly while the slopmachine writes a giant spec that I think I’m supposed to read and correct but can’t because it’s unreadable. It’s like a textual white noise. It’s pretending to describe a piece of software I want to make while actually describing all the steps of a ritual to summon an Elder God of anxious boredom and machine madness.
I think I’ll be defining all of my work as small from now on.
I’ve never heard of this AI spec driven development, but I’ve had the displeasure of reading a few obviously AI generated design documents and they are worse than useless. I always end up more confused about what the author wants after reading them than before.
It is the worst and I want to retire.
Spec-driven development is when you take these AI generated design docs and make it all you as a dev interact with. It’s waterfall but make it stupid and AI.
You give AI some guidelines and a feature description, then you twiddle your thumbs while it generates giant specs and occasionally asks you for some inputs, then you attempt to read the thing, give up, and give it to some other agent. Rinse and repeat until you burn a GDP of a small country in tokens and the agents agree that it’s going to work, and then you finally pull the lever and hopefully a feature matching all your specs appears. Or it doesn’t! And if it didn’t, it’s surely your fault because you didn’t give AI enough context.
I’m tired, boss.
Well we now have a horrifying example on why you shouldn’t get involved in fashtech. Artist a former maintainer of Artix Linux spent considerable effort on getting Xlibre into a usable state and when fixing their numerous bugs became too much they recommended switching back to Xorg. That didn’t sit well with the developers of Xlibre and they started to harass the Artix maintainer until they quit the team.
oh the infighting!
a great sneer found in the wild:
transcript
twitter screenshot
part one is a post by Steve Yegge (@Steve_Yegge), reads: “This is going to come off as grumpy, but it needs to be said: Stop showing people your junk. Everyone can build junk with Al now. Nobody else wants to see your junk. We’re not kindred spirits just because we both build junk. Play with your junk strictly in private. Thank you.”
part two is a reply by kitze ⚒️tinkerer.club (@thekitze), reads: “counterpoint: “, showing a link card that points at Yegge’s Gas Town post
Objection! Gas Town isn’t junk, it’s a memetic weapon trying to convince anyone with actual engineering sensibilities to abandon the industry and move to their cabin in the woods to become professional manifesto writers, thus clearing the path for AI inevitability.
piiiiisssssssss
My fucking eyes can’t they see how ugly their shit always is?
Sloppers hold up the ugliest, most artistically meritless shit while going “Oh yeah? what about this!?”
eww that tinkerer club page gives me serious crypto bro vibes
Marketed as “vibe code all your own tools” and one of the suggestions is 1Password/Bitwarden. I mean they can feel free to fafo with that one and let me know when you’ve been fired because all your passwords were 1) lost when Claude apologetically deleted the prod db or 2) got exfiltrated and used to steal all your ip because your vibe coded password app is insecure as all hell…
I am personally deeply offended that an independent vegan restaurant in my town recently banned meat eaters from bringing in their burgers from next door and passively aggressively eating them in the restaurant whilst making eye contact with the other customers. Whilst I appreciate that there are a huge number of burger joints that cater to meat eaters, I am troubled by the idea that a young fledgling meat eater who accidentally stumbled into the vegan restaurant with a double quarter pounder and bacon meal under his arm could be berated and asked to leave. That might upset him and put him off eating burgers which would be a terrible outcome. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here. I’m no carnivore. I don’t work for the beef industry. In fact, I am an omnivore and I have a friend who sometimes eats salads. I’m just saying that if little Timmy wants to enjoy a burger in the middle of a private space owned by people that hate burgers, that should be his god-given right.
*This post is about indie code forges banning slop
New Baldur Bjarnason, looking back on the blog’s history, and lamenting the death of web development.
I like the notion of pulling together people who are alienated by AI (or late-stage capitalism bullshit in general). I really have an indie web project to launch, once I’ve scored a new job, which sounds more unlikely than ever after this read.
So, this is something a little different, and I almost think it’s worth a top level post. It’s not directly about our friends the Rationalists, the current delusional billionare vortex infesting the US government with religious psychosis, or any of that. It’s an analysis of some collaborative fiction and what it tells us about the zeitgeist behind the mythological core of singulatarian/endless-progress thought.
Anyone here ever hear of the Orion’s Arm universe collaborative worldbuilding project? https://www.orionsarm.com/
I, for one, love it. Single weirdest and most expansive scifi worldbuilding thing ever, I think. It seems to have been founded by some old-school extropian types around the turn of the millennium. It is bonkers. Click through links on pages, start here, do a random walk: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b170f9e0941 .
It’s ultimately structured kind of like the SCP wiki but from before wikis were a thing, an utterly enormous interlinked compendium of encyclopedia style articles about a 10,000+ year future history of the post-singularity “Terragen sphere” expanding outwards at the speed of light. A few key figures have exerted editorial control to enforce an approximate history and a set of core ideas to keep it coherent. There have been retcons at multiple points to bring things into coherence, some of which I will get to later because they actually tell you something fascinating.
Rather than point out my favorite parts of it though, going through it, I have noticed something.
Early work was typically extropian-optimistic and exuberant. Immortal Transhumans and uplifted animals and ahuman AIs and robots expanding through the universe near the speed of light and diversifying and building interweaving empires, wormhole networks. Six successive singularities that become available to intelligent systems that pass the previous one, each one of which renders the intellect past it incomperehensible to those at lower levels, with the highest ones dependant on multiple stars converted into computronium linked by wormholes into massive processors.
But you can tell the work is a palimpsest. Newer stuff superimposed over older. Retcons occasionally not quite erasing the old. And you can tell the whole project has been slowly slowly taking a turn. Early work is SUPER extropian, SUPER libertarian, and SUPER weirdo-esoteric. Only people forged in 1980s Extropianism would invent the Tranquility Calendar as the core timekeeping method of the project, time measured from the apollo 11 landing with months of the year named after scientists and philosophers. The 12 greatest high-singularity powers are literally called the Sephirotic empires. It makes no bones about its exuberant transcendant idea of progress and expansion.
But something strange has happened over time. Over time, the authors seem to have realized the fundamental contradiction of a world in which this endless expansion and consumption and rebuilding of the universe in your image is possible. People call it the Fermi paradox but its not a paradox, its an observation: if it were possible to expand through the universe, why hasnt something already expanded here? Early work had more aliens, more high weirdness that was not terragen. But I can track down different examples of the galactic map - it has narrowed down the map of ‘high energy emission civilizations’ (things exuberantly using the energy of whole stars like the terragen sphere) from many to 2 in our galaxy, and the whole universe is now mostly ‘dead’ - most other galaxies do not have high energy civilizations, and there are multiple ancient ‘optimized galaxies’ that are stagnant, things expanding like the terragen sphere visible over cosmological distances are super rare and they even saw one vanish. Works involving aliens have started taking on an almost lovecraftian tone, evidence of erased ruins on planets only visible in vague impressions in the mantle, an ancient slow-liviging civilization with evidence of terrible secrets from millions of years in the past that they refuse to talk about or risk terrible consequences (the Muuh Taboo), civilizations that dont vanish ossifying into something that does not expand like their optimistic early ideas. Factions looking at all of this, going dark, and launching stealth seeds at the speed of light to other galaxies because they think the Terragen sphere is doomed.
With all this, recent retcons and recent writings are starting to take on a tinge of almost cosmic horror. Here you have this optimistic exuberent explosion of posthumanity, looking out into a universe that is otherwise almost dead and full of strange old things and wondering why the rest of the universe doesn’t look like them, what is going to go wrong to destroy them just like must happen to others.
This trajectory seems intrinsic to any singulatarian, endless-progress ideology. It always has to come to grips with the fact that the universe just doesn’t look like the kind of place where their ideas would actually work, and they have to posit weird things - the Great Filter, Mass-Effect style reapers, super weird transubstantiation out of this universe - to keep it going. All this optimism must eventually always collapse, into paranoia and despair or insanity. Since if you assume that you CAN keep progressing and expanding, that you DO have unlimited potential power, it means something even more powerful is waiting, threatening you, trying to stop you. I find this FASCINATING.
I don’t necessarily think the idea of a past great filter means paranoia/despair/insanity, the Lovecraftian horror element mainly enters in when you try to reconcile ideas about transhuman expansion throughout the universe with space opera style visions of intelligent aliens being reasonably common. It might just be that the laws of nature make it very unlikely that star systems/planets suitable for the evolution of intelligent life will ever arise, and unlikely that evolution will hit upon various milestones even if the planet is suitable. People have made speculative arguments about such unlikeness for reasons that are not primarily about the Fermi paradox, like the “Rare Earth” book by a geologist/paleontologist and an astronomer. It’s also sort of a natural extension of certain kinds of anthropic reasoning that our own existence shouldn’t count as evidence against Rare Earth style ideas.
As an aside, I wish there was some sort of terminological distinction between “transhumanism” as a form of belief in/advocacy for the imminent possibility of “superintelligent AI” or “enhanced” humans (a la Kurzweil, or what the rationalists really want as soon as we ‘solve alignment’), vs. SETI style speculations about the typical fate of intelligent life in the universe and the idea that this might tend to involve a major role for AI and self-replicating machines in societies that don’t destroy themselves (for example the speculations by J.D. Bernal, Freeman Dyson, Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke, none of which presupposed that it would happen anytime soon or that there would be any sudden ‘intelligence explosion’ leading to immediate doom/paradise). The latter I find interesting to think about (and I like some SF stories set in worlds where this is true like Banks’ Culture stories or Egan’s Diaspora) but these days it’s kind of tainted by association with the former.
The quirkiness of the Tranquility Calendar is mildly beautiful, between the second man on the moon getting snubbed with the every four year leap day (which for no good reason still happens around Feb 29!), [I guess Collins gets even more snubbed by not appearing at all] to the more diverse than expected list of honored “scientists/scholars”, until you realize the main reason is just to keep the ABCD naming pattern for the months.
I mentioned the calendar because it really captures the tone of the explicitly Extropian-derived writing of the early days. Which seems like it has to always break or change upon contact with reality.
Maybe this is just me being slow to put things together, but why exactly is that startup for AI cheating overlay for zoom job interviews now putting out workplace / startup humor shorts? They seem to have paid a host of clippers too. Ling Long is everywhere. Did the AI thing not work out for cluely?
I’m pretty sure this kind of marketing has been their thing from the start
