Feel like you want to sneer about something but you don’t quite have a snappy post in you? Go forth and be mid!
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 here 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.
extremely high context ancient-lore buttcoin lol:
anyone remember Ryan X. Charles, the man who spent nine months working at Reddit to reimplement bitcoind in javascript, 'cos it took that long for them to notice they were paying him and to stop doing that?
he became an extremely ardent Bitcoin-SV (Satoshi’s Vision) advocate who thought Prof Dr Dr Wright was a genius
anyway, he’s decided it’s time to flip to the non-losing side
https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770024760677687735
https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770039633490985430
(stefan matthews was the guy who brought craig to calvin)
not quite the sharpest tinnie in the six-pack
You sent me down the rabbit hole.
…as for what’s right for you, I dunno. The one major downside of fullnode is that there is only one developer working on it, though I think that once I move the project to reddit’s github and announce that “reddit is making a wallet” we will have many more eyes and developers on the project.
Just fucken lol.
And, like every other crypto guy, Ryan has pivoted to AI now. His github profile says “Building AI with AI. Founder @artintellica.”
https://artintellica.com/ Truly, a website.
jesus goatfucking christ
Back during the last Sneerclub blowout I found my reddit account getting psychoanalyzed by twitter rationalists. They were very upset about the Rod Dreher thing.
for some reason this is still hilarious
whaaat, do tell
It you search sneerclub on twitter you might find it. Apparently the Dreher thing indicates psychopathy (how they play the ‘bullied nerd’ trope again and again is fascinating to me).
Oh god what did Dreher do now? Last I heard he was divorced and living in Budapest.
I can’t figure out how to edit my post but his dad was also revealed to be a Klan bigwig.
Tweeting about penises every few days. More seriously: his mental health is way not good and he’s going full woo.
amazed when it turned out rod dreher’s wingnut welfare was ONE single patron funding him for years
so i’m not surprised he’s completely fucked now
My favorite part was the ex-boyfriend revelations. Also the one picture of twinkRod - he looks like a Lost Boys extra i swear to god.
OK thanks all for the updates. I was aware of most of them. It’s been quiet around him in the venues I frequent. I’d like to think it’s because most people recognize he’s not well and it’s punching down to make fun of him.
He’s ensconced in Hungary nursing on Orban’s teat and producing flattering nonsense.
many victim impact statements about the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried are harrowing.
some are not quite so harrowing
Strange man posts strange thing.
he could have just admitted he couldn’t get the ai to draw a dick. Instead, a future without dicks is his idea of a surprising future
dude’s taking non-feminising estrogen u kno
Those image generators are surprisingly bad at drawing nether regions, it turns into real horror shows quickly. A thing the ‘it is so over for real women’ incel weirdos don’t seem to talk about. (I checked it a while back no idea if it has improved since, but the conclusion was that sex workers can breathe easily (apart from them being fucked by mastercard/visa being run by cryptoprudes, governments going after them, and the general economic downturn driving the demand for sex work down but that is a different issue)).
This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
The Lawnmower Man (1992), dir. Brett Leonard
I know it’s stupid to try really think about this because the idiot was only trying for engagement farming, but what the fuck did they think that image was portraying (that supported their batshit commentary)?? That we’re all gonna become the blue dude from Watchmen, but in copyright-friendly conditions?!
a lotta yall still dont get it
AI equity holders can use multiple ZIRP juices on a single AI
so if you have 1 OpenAI and 3 ZIRP juices you can create 3 new AI startups
going to choose to believe that ZIRP juices are a previously unreleased Juicero product
If I came to believe the entire tech scene at this point was all ZIRP grift would I be right?
at this point it’s the standard analysis, so yes
How many victory points is that
petition to have these threads sorted by new by default, if that technology exists
new might be a good global default for everything local to our instance, given the traffic patterns of our threads. unfortunately it might take some doing to make that the default just for local stuff, without making things janky for folks reading federated content
amazingly, lemmy doesn’t even seem to persist the last sort you’ve selected correctly. which is like easy 10 lines of code to do even in React with Typescript
given the traffic patterns of our threads
Highlighting the new posts since the last time you visited a thread would be amazing if possible.
Re: Lemmy, some dude (ofc) is trying to start a new “decentralized” Wikipedia, and he touts as a merit that he created Lemmy:
I have worked on Lemmy for the past four years, bringing it from a prototype to a fully functional Reddit alternative.
Some would say this is damning with faint praise, others would see it as a warning.
(https://ibis.wiki/article/Announcing_Ibis,_the_federated_Wikipedia_Alternative@ibis.wiki)
These are only a few examples, journalist Helen Buyniski has collected much more information about the the rot in Wikipedia.
(quickly web-searches for that name)
Oh, she writes for Russia Today.
Authors and public figures in fields as diverse as Complementary and Alternative Medicine and progressive politics (including Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, Gary Null, John Pilger, and George Galloway) have complained of persistent negative coverage on Wikipedia despite the site’s vaunted neutrality and the promise that “Biographies of Living Persons” are held to the highest standard.
(snerk) Oh, no, Deepak Chopra and Rupert Sheldrake are upset. I can feel the quantum disruption in the morphogenetic field.
@blakestacey Oh dear, George Galloway complaining about negative coverage, how sad, much hardship. (Galloway is an utter shit.) John Pilger had credibility for a critique of US/western foreign policy, but the rest of the listed folks are just cranks.
now, you may have heard unfortunate rumours that the lemmy devs are a pair of tankies
this is of course shitlib lies spread by revisionists,
party like it’s 2007
now we know why lemmy dev is so slow
I can’t wait to see what happens as these people slowly learn the consensus problem in this domain
I’ve been kind of following development of Sublinks, which hopes to reach parity with Lemmy with more typical web tech so development can go faster/with more contributors, and also so they can pivot to better moderation tools. Maybe it works out, maybe we learn to love the jank.
I’ve been following it too, and hoping it yields a fork with better development priorities (and, frankly, developers) than lemmy, though I’m not at all looking forward to dealing with deploying Java and Go to production
once again i’m suggesting matrix room
Yesterday before bed I saw some galaxy-brained takes on PKM (personal knowledge management software) from a 7-day old account, and curiosity took over me. I was not disappointed. (sadly they deleted their account after I woke up: /u/Few-Elephant-2600 if you’re bored and have moderator API access)
Since GPUs continuously generate large amounts of waste heat during AI training, could electric/GPU stoves utilize this unused thermal energy resource through on-demand tickets as distributed networks instead of citizens using a wasteful private electric stove? What are the scientific challenges?
Honey can you preheat the porn generator?
Maybe you could pair it with this accursed AI of Things Smart Oven. Fun quotes:
“Users aren’t aware of any of the oven’s learning processes,”
Ovens that learn from one another
Finally, I can experience Windows progress bars when baking potatoes:
The predictive model updates the remaining baking time every 30 seconds
Since GPUs continuously generate large amounts of waste heat during AI training, could electric/GPU stoves utilize this unused thermal energy resource
I’m actually aware of businesses that already do exactly this, usefully
through on-demand tickets as distributed networks
“tickets” is this Ethereum bullshit?
instead of citizens using a wasteful private electric stove?
- Citizens Don’t Need To Cook
- Not a citizen? Get fucked scrub.
(this leaves me feeling incredibly
??????)What are the scientific challenges?
this seems like JAQing behaviour?
[ed: once again wearing my Lemmy Ate My Formatting shirt]
instead of citizens using a wasteful private electric stove?
I’m 99% sure this person eats only gig-work delivered food
yet another crypto argument getting run through find/replace
This is true, with the important distinction that presumably the next generation of GPUs will produce more calculation per unit of input energy, as opposed to proof-of-work crypto mining, where the coin generation is constant in time, by design.
i think that there’s *at least one supercomputing centre in germany that uses waste heat for heating buildings and not only their own
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Years ago a friend of mine asked me if I was interested in IoT/smart devices and I said I didn’t want to be locked out of my house if the wifi was out. His reaction indicated to me that he lost some amount of respect for me, and in turn I lost respect for him.
Since then I’ve only really seen IoT stuff in the homes of tech people, everyone else just DGAF. I think AI is following that same trajectory.
PS Years later pretty much the same exchange happened with brain simulated “immortality”, with the same mutual loss of respect.
PPS I currently have some smart lights installed. Once the initial novelty of having a bunch of RGB lights wore off, I pretty much just use them as normal bulbs, except with their brightness turned all the way down.
PPPS I also have some google speakers. None of them are in use.
Didn’t some soviet towns run central heating off power plant waste heat? “Where do you live? OpenAiVille, we get free^M cheaper central heating, but the noise of the severfans running every day and night is deafening.”
combined heat and power isn’t a technology unique to eastern block countries, but surely centralized city planning makes it easier to pump waste heat into municipal heating grid (or out to some chemical works or such). tbh it didn’t even occur to me that there are serious cities (population 100k+) that don’t have city-owned heating grid, even 50k towns and smaller can have their own CHP plants (tiny one, fits in shipping container or two)
and it’s not just some towns no no no. it was implemented everywhere where it was practical. near big cities - these need both power and heat, so okayish coal is shipped to them by rail, burned there and provides both heat and energy. beijing for example runs on 10 or so large CHP plants iirc. near lignite mines - lignite is burned there (does not make sense to ship it anywhere else, too shitty) and nearby town has free heat. where there’s neither, either coal was shipped to be burned in heating plants, centralized or individual, or gas was delivered by pipelines also for heating, and energy was delivered from larger centralized facilities. if there’s fuckton of energy somehow, like in russian far east with their abundant hydropower, or nothing else is practical, in some places heating was electric
NYC has steam pipelines running around the city, doesn’t that use CHP plants?
at what point is “large amounts of heat” output considered the part that’s the waste?
Do they know that brake discs get hot because they’re stopping a car from colliding with a wall?
But for electronics basically all heat is excess. Brakes are literally supposed to turn kinetic energy into heat. A GPU is supposed to solve linear equations quickly. The generated heat is because we don’t know how to not generate it. If I could power my oven with all the energy waste while playing Crysis I totally would.
Plus, heat of the brakes is also technically waste. Case in point, Formula 1 cars have specially designed systems whose purpose is converting energy dissipated during braking back into battery charge to power the hybrid engine.
My point was more about how you decide that the heat is the undesirable outcome compared to whatever the fuck the thing is meant to be doing. Brakes have a very clear purpose at the expense of the heat. GPUs being used as graphics processing units when you’re playing crysis have a very clear purpose to heat output ratio. Ya see wot I mean?
Yup, now I get the sneer, sorry for not catching on earlier.
To respond in this vein then: at least real art pieces I could burn for fuel…
I’ve started noticing what might be described as “filler art” being done by AI. For example, while a local restaurant was being constructed, it had boards up to obscure the goings on with AI art on it- easily distinguished by bad hands, disturbing looking noodles, and amorphous blobs resembling, uh, more morphous blobs. I didn’t take any photos because I didn’t want to ruin the sanctity of my phone.
Once they finally opened I tried their food and it sucked.
this kind of filler art, ai spam, ai porn, ai seo optimized drivel, ai generated fakes, ai propaganda, ai jpegs that are generated cheaply enough that human artists can’t get by on these rates, all of these are things that people don’t want to make on moral, legal or some other grounds. just like with all of other automation (well there’s no physical risk in making pictures). there will be more of it
Once they finally opened I tried their food and it sucked.
So it was at least accurate advertising on their part.
Pizza that tasted like it was generated by AI tbh
I mean I either want no fingers or all the fingers for my pizza
Anthropic’s Claude confidently and incorrectly diagnoses brain cancer based on an MRI.
A friend that wants you to have an aggressive brain tumour to make an AI look good is no friend at all
There are far too many people in this world who learned both wrong things from the “Pray tell, Mr Babbage” anecdote
“But look how convincing [it] sounds!”
… how did we get to the point where the ai bros are un-ironically telling us, as a selling point, that their shiny toy literally gives false yet convincing-sounding medical diagnoses ?!?!?!
If I were working on Claude and wanted to hype it up, I would not talk about this experiment online or in public. If I were working on Claude and wanted to be responsible towards “the public”, I would use this example as a cautionary warning, not to further hype up the tool.
This feels like the slight period at the beginning of the NFT craze when I wasn’t yet comfortable dismissing out of hand anyone excited about them, because surely there was a least some useful application that wasn’t for scamming people, and surely this many people couldn’t all be so deluded about the same idea.
“Oh, some patient data. Let me quickly casually scan this into the sv datacorp. What’s that…privacy concerns? Naaaaah I changed the filename”
oh lol just made this a post too
Apparently there’s a new coding AI that is supposedly pretty good. Zvi does the writeup, and logically extrapolates what will happen for future versions, which will obviously self improve and… solve cold fusion?
James: You can just ‘feel’ the future. Imagine once this starts being applied to advanced research. If we get a GPT5 or GPT6 with a 130-150 IQ equivalent, combined with an agent. You’re literally going to ask it to ‘solve cold fusion’ and walk away for 6 months.
…
Um. I. Uh. I do not think you have thought about the implications of ‘solve cold fusion’ being a thing that one can do at a computer terminal?
Yep. The recursive self improving AI will solve cold fucking fusion from a computer terminal.
Where are they going to find 500 people in India who are good at solving cold fusion and will do it for pennies.
Who needs things like “experiments” and “data”? Surely a
chatbotsuperintelligence can extrapolate all of physics from two frames of a video of an apple falling.James: You can just ‘feel’ the future. Imagine once this starts being applied to advanced research. If we get a GPT5 or GPT6 with a 130-150 IQ equivalent, combined with an agent.
… fucking hell that’s a few layers of quackery and far-AI promise nuttery all at once
I’m not going to substantively touch on most of those, because by and large I think everyone here gets it
but
'feel' the future… it’s so … “just vibes, man”. petition to crowdfund these poor dipshits some buttplug.io-compatible sex toys or something, give them something else to feel besides vibesI’ll give even odds that he was jacking off while writing that
I am extremely impressed (and a little concerned) by the fact that lemmy decided that text needs syntax highlighting
Just when I thought that Bitcoin could not possibly become any more stupid, I saw this on Reddit.
The halving will occur at block height 840,000 (a count of how many blocks have been hashed to the blockchain), and already people are predicting that will be the most valuable block to be mined to date. This is related to the point above: Ordinals works by assigning serial numbers to individual satoshis (or sats, the smallest denomination of BTC), which turns a fungible asset like bitcoin into something with provenance, identity and scarcity.
Tristan, the founder of Ordiscan.com, which tracks Ordinals projects, predicts that collectors of these “rare sats” could value the data in block 840,000 at $50 million dollars. Under the “Rodarmor Rarity” system, which assigns value to Bitcoin protocol events like difficulty adjustments and halvings, the first satoshi in the block alone could be worth upwards of $1 million, he wrote in a blog post.
They’re turning
Bitcoinssatoshis into NFTs. And if you thought spending money on links to monkey jpegs was stupid, how about buying a random-ass hash?i wasn’t really a sneerclubber before, but i did hang out in r/buttcoin. i remember that this was briefly an alleged thing among cryptobros few months ago, with side effect of making seleccion of bitcoin maxis very angry, and somehow making tx even slower and more expensive
I’ve been hoping to post something about the wild mid-tournament apex legends hacks, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of sourcing beyond the videos of its consequences
my pet conspiracy theory is that the two streamers had installed cheats at one point in the past and compromised their systems that way. but i have no evidence to base that on, just seems more plausible to me than “a hacker discovered an RCE in EAC/Apex and used it during a tournament to install game cheats on two people and [appear to] do nothing else”
has anti aging research actually accomplished anything or is the entire field a grift?
This is tangential, but there’s a surprisingly interesting article about penis enlargement from ProPublica. It’s sobering to see people who’ve convinced themselves it must have worked, because it’s too horrible to consider whether they actually made things worse. If there are any crazy, invasive age therapies out there, maybe there’d be similar themes.
https://www.propublica.org/article/penis-enlargement-enhancement-procedures-implants
Jesus Christ, I’m a penis haver and reading this gives the same sensations as watching people be punched in the balls.
The amount of toxic masculinity brain rot required before you willingly go for such an invasive procedure is inconceivable to me.
Also, this fucking quote:
You have to treat your penis like a Rolex.
What in the fuck’s mercy is this supposed to mean? You’re supposed to change its battery every few years? Take it off at night? I have a watch, just, you know, not a Rolex, a normal-person fucking watch, and I can’t decipher this. Is there some specific species of brain worm you get when you buy specifically a Rolex watch?
Bonus
Gordon Muir, a urologist in London, said that he’s been taking out Penumas “all the way across the bloody pond.”
Perfectly placed in the article, you’re reading about a horrific predatory industry and then a Brit pops up saying “ah those fookin’ yankee wankers, mangling cocks and sending them to me”. Just all-round endearing.
Kinda brings a whole new meaning to “overpaid, oversexed and over here”
I’m now imagining populations of penis havers who scoff at the enlarged ones behaving like the Rolex aficionados who play “spot the fake Rolex” and get into all kinds of watch minutiae. Look at the telltale marks around the base - definitely enlarged, not like my 100% natural model, which comes 2.5 seconds fast per day.
You can see it’s not genuine Penuma since its not leaking puss all over.
The amount of toxic masculinity brain rot required before you willingly go for such an invasive procedure is inconceivable to me.
The writer says there’s some indication it may literally be a psychiatric condition along the lines of body dysmorphia, and that most people who go through with it are at least average sized but unhealthily preoccupied with their member, consistently reporting feelings of shame and helplessness.
She also says that supposedly the consensus on the evolution of genital size has been quietly moving away from assumptions about giving an edge with inseminatory success and towards them being just for show, as apparently male primates do tend to involve their genitals in threat displays. Which is to say, maybe for some people it’s just unusual wiring that manifests as penis related existential angst.
Still, it doesn’t mention the extent to which the above is just evo-psych enthusiasts idly theorizing, or if field testing actually showed it’s possible to win a showdown with a gorilla by dropping trou and windmilling.
And then there’s also the guy who had the procedure done and is super happy about it, except he’s now looking at options for enlarging his wife’s vaginal canal and entrance as she’s been having a rough time of it, and who I’m sure would be found out to be the walking and talking personification of toxic masculinity if you were to give him the time of day.
Penis enlargement and breast implants can be understood as gender affirming surgery for cis people, it is just an affirmation of the gender assigned at birth. Rather than go to primates I would point to ancient Greece and it’s statues to make the point that ideals of gender and bodies shift over time. Greek statues shows as I understand it often an ideal body, which by the norms of its time included a rather small penis. So maybe some male ancient Greeks wished there were treatments to shrink their package?
With gorillas, my understanding is that primates that have very unequal sizes between the sexes has small penises, while its among the primates with roughly equal body size you find larger penises. So akin to plummage, the males showing off of that their bodies can afford to waste resources, and thus presumably is very fit. I am no biologist, but I think this means that if you try to win a domination fight with a gorilla, it may show who is the boss by showing off its physical strength. So not recommended.
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Show it to others as a visual gaudy signal of wealth?
Or to tell time? lifts left testicle “ten” lifts right “thirteen”.
Oh god theres a whole watch ‘community’ and its toxic as fuck.
“Guys will literally do anything instead of therapy” episode 2137
Tangential to your tangential - nice to see that the moral compass of McKinsey associates is still true north.
By the end of the year, Elist was doing roughly 60 Penuma procedures a month, and his oldest son, Jonathan, left a job at McKinsey to become the CEO of International Medical Devices, as they called their family firm.
On a lighter note:
[Dr. Penile Implants] has also been named as a defendant in product liability lawsuits regarding inflatable penile prosthesis brought by plaintiffs Dick Glass and Semen Brodsky.
CW, if you are male, maybe skip the part where the actual implant procedure is described. Starting with the sentence “With a purple marker,”
@gerikson Eh, I grew up in a family of doctors. They’d discuss their workdays at the dinner table. I fear nothing. Let’s have a read, see what all the fuss is ab… (turns green, excuses self)
Someone on Masto thought that the industry had missed a chance to call the procedure “spatchcocking”.
Oh, that’s good.
working at an unspecified medical journal over an unspecified period of time
we occasionally had to remind ourselves about appropriate and inappropriate placeholder imagery
But then you’ll never find out what like a jellyfish surfacing at sea is in reference to.
I’m not even halfway reading this and holy fuck it’s grim
Yeah it is one of those, wish I had not read that stories. Poor guys.
There seems to be some legitimate research into the effectiveness of anti-aging compounds like retinol, also they’ve come out with some good advice like wearing sunscreen, drinking enough water, and eating balanced diets to promote skin health which reduces the signs of what we usually associate with aging, if you count that.
so the actual advice is “don’t eat trash less healthy than asbestos”
there are some people claiming that polyphenols, flavins or other pharmalogically mischievous, promiscuous trash like that that is barely soluble in the first place and shredded by liver within minutes after absorption into bloodstream is the Real Secret To Long Life ™ but it’s really proxy for the not-deep-fried-everything diet, or at least that’s the impression that i’m getting
one specific strain that boils my piss the most is curcumin peddlers, because they waste everyone’s time and it’s a part of government-funded altmed disinformation campaign (of India in this case)
I’m annoyed by seed oilers claiming to have prevented sunburn.
seed oilers don’t even have an interesting conspiracy theory
heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great point:
The furor over seed oils has gotten so intense that on Aug. 15, Andrew Tate couldn’t help but mock people about it: “SEED OILS SEED OILS OMG SEED OILS OMG FUCKING OMG SEED OILS FUCK FUCK OMG FUCK,” he tweeted. “I can tell you losers have never had real enemies. You’re afraid of sunflowers. You legit won’t shut up about it.”
I’ve tried various face creams of different levels of prestige and not really noticed a difference, so, no, I guess.
Think dgerard mentioned last time I talked about it re H+ transhumanism anti aging that it all seems to have stalled.
none of it ever went anywhere (because these people are clowns who barely understand the thing they claim to be doing) and de Grey got kicked out of the pseudoscience charity he founded for sexual harassment
I still think about that Alcor stuff.
Someone on discord linked me to this AI generated horror-show of a “childrens” video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nywBUSaHFgY (I hesitate to give them any more views, Internet Archive says youtube vids take a few days to process though)
Which appears to be a channel of entirely AI generated video paired to children’s songs. And it is gosh darn creepy and gross and exploitive and unhealthy.
I hope youtube cracks down on shit like this.
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- 🙅 youtube applies helpful filters and actively works to tamp down things actively gaming metrics
- 👉 get dem tasty ad-clicks boiiiiiiiis
it’s truly a place with one of the longest-standing incentives problem configurations too, I think? I recall people both on- and off-site there complaining about this form of it going back at least 6~8y by now
Behind the Bastards had a few episodes on how AI children’s books are on offer at Amazon - also creepy and unhealthy.
Amazingly atrocious. I think this is my favourite https://youtu.be/A26bO26VnKQ
CZ created the Giggle Academy (from prison?) which seems to be an NFT fuelled education thing that wants everything to be automated with as little effort as possible.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240320105524/https://www.giggleacademy.com/
the website links to a “concept paper” which is nothing but a brainstorm doc which has a clear problem statement followed by a list of mushy, kinda, sorta, items that don’t add up to much at all
such as these under “gamification”;
Badges (NFTs), points, scores, rankings, etc.
Early education (elementary school levels) are easier to gamify. High school subjects become more difficult as the subject becomes more complex. Hopefully by then, the kids have developed enough learning habits to sustain their on-going learning.
or under “completely online”
There are some drawbacks to the online approach, such as lack of peer support, group learning, etc. We won’t be able to solve all problems. We will try to address some of these issues in later iterations.
Use AI & automation
Scalable
The page has a careers page, looking for gamification people and content creators, so there’s at least some money there (?)
anyway, dodgy af
this project intrigues me because we’re able to see the brainstorm doc that he believes is shareworthy, combined with a reasonably slick website and a careers page.
There is no open position for a “product designer” or any kind of role that would be interested in concretely working on addressing the clear problem statement in the brainstorm doc. I have to assume there isn’t anyone in the group doing that already because they would not let a brainstorm doc be published like that, as if it has any value.
This is what bothers me so much about iterative design culture and the “doing something is better than nothing” mantra. It makes out that identifying the problem/purpose is the assignment, and undermines the REAL design work of coming up with a good response to that purpose.
If this project gets off the ground, they’ll start building and they’ll hire UX designers and they’ll just make something that resembles an online school and focus on making sure it has blockchains and nfts and all that shit, and the whole concept of “design” will be relegated to user acceptance and finding frictions to remove.
At no point will anyone sit down and say “how can we effectively address illiteracy in developing countries” and find out why, what, how, and all the barriers, all the realities, the complexities, the options for means to achieve certain things, all the DESIGN.
Its no different for everything else in tech, they all start from this point where nothing was initially designed beyond throwing together an idea and iterating it into a behemoth that needs an army of staff to groom its hair and clip its toenails. The people given design titles (ux designers, product designers) are not answering to an overarching design or any principled basis for design.
it should also be said that the giggle academy is probably a publicity thing for CZ’s character
“Children’s website launched by inmates” ought to be the end of it.
skibidi toilet, right, but on the blockchain
I like the character arc of David learning about skibidi toilet and having his entire understanding of the universe pivoted with respect to it.
TELL ME I’M WRONG
Giggle Academy (from prison?)
my brain latches onto this as “gigglepig” (a la Brooklyn 99), and will accept no other meanings
