MoreWrite

Sometimes I get stuck on everything I am doing and try to break out by essaying a weird creative thing and just going with whatever I can make in a single sitting. This time, that ended up being a teaser for a podcast that doesn’t exist:

For reasons outside the scope of this note, I have been reading Scott Aaronson’s Quantum Computing Since Democritus for the first time since it was originally published.

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last set of predictions on the AI winter. I’ve found myself making a couple more.

Well, it seems the AI bubble’s nearing its end - the Financial Times has reported a recent dive in tech stocks, the mass media has fully soured on AI, and there’s murmurs that the hucksters are pivoting to quantum.

(This is a mega-expanded version of a stubsack comment: https://awful.systems/comment/8327535)

It’s pretty much a given that we’re in for an AI winter once this bubble bursts - the only thing we can argue on at this point is exactly how everything will shake out. So, let’s beat this dead horse and make some random predictions before it inevitably gets sent to the glue factory. I’ve hardly got anything better to do.

This is a rough excerpt from a quintet of essays I’ve intended to write for a few years and am just now getting around to drafting. Let me know if more from this series would be okay to share; the full topic is:

Recently, I found myself ruminating on the general lack of AI slop over on Newgrounds (a site I use rather heavily, and have been since I joined in 2023). The only major case I’ve seen in recent memory was an influx of vibe-coded shovelware I saw last month.

if you ever wonder how I write Pivot, it’s a bit like this. The thing below is not a written text, it’s a script for me to simulate spontaneity, so don’t worry about the grammar or wording. But how are the ideas? And what have I missed?

MoreWrite preface: I wanted to get this out of my system and now that I’ve written it, I’m not sure if I want to post it anywhere else. Due to the sneer-like attitude of it I seem to have ended up writing it with the imagined audience of awful.systems readers, but since it’s not really about anything rationalist or techbro adjacent, it’s kind of off topic for anywhere on this site except MW. If any of you know a place where this essay might be appreciated, I can consider editing it for publication elsewhere. Most likely I’ll just leave it here as a practice piece, though.

I wrote this and I want to know what else someone would want to know, if I’m dead wrong on any of it, etc.

In this guide I will offer a step-by-step explanation to running a successful business. I am the owner of a startup company at Y combinator in SF Bay Area. I am a thought leader, podcaster, financial coach, fertility coach, “coach guru” coach, professional wrestler (also an aspiring author with 37 books published in the last two years).

Well, Trump’s got elected, I’m deeply peeved about the future, and I need to feel like I can see the future coming.

Ever since the beginning of the AI slopnami, but more specifically since the public diaspora about the technology began and a large number of people — or dare I say the majority? — started to hate the plagiarism machine that Sam Altman and his friends unleashed upon the world, I wondered who exactly are the people that violently defend this technology?

(This is an expanded version of two of my comments [Comment A, Comment B] - go and read those if you want)

So, after the Routledge thing, I got to wondering. I’ve had experience with a few noble projects that fizzled for lacking a clear goal, or at least a clear breathing point where we could say, “Having done this, we’re in a good place. Stage One complete.” And a project driven by volunteer idealism — the usual mix of spite and whimsy — can splutter out if it requires more than one person to be making it a high/top priority. If half a dozen people all like the idea but each of them ranks it 5th or 6th among things to do, academic life will ensure that it never gets done.

I just want to share a little piece of this provocation, but would like to know how compelling it sounds? I’ve been sitting on it for a while and starting to think its probably not earning that much space in words. The overarching point is that anyone who complains about constraints imposed on them as being constraints in general either isn’t making something purposeful enough to concretely challenge the constraints or isn’t actually designing because they haven’t done the hard work of understanding the constraints between them and their purpose. Anyway, this is a snippet from a longer piece which leads to a point that the scumbags didn’t take over, but instead the environment evolved to create the perfect habitat for scumbags who want to make money from providing as little value as possible:

I’ve been hit by inspiration whilst dicking about on Discord - felt like making some off-the-cuff predictions on what will happen once the AI bubble bursts. (Mainly because I had a bee in my bonnet that was refusing to fuck off.)

(CW: Every aspect of dog-related trauma. Opiate abuse. Write anything you like in the comments: assume I would otherwise be posting this in some venue appropriate for its content.)

(Gonna expand on a comment I whipped out yesterday - feel free to read it for more context)

After reading through Baldur’s latest piece on how tech and the public view gen-AI, I’ve had some loose thoughts about how this AI bubble’s gonna play out.

Who’s Scott Alexander? He’s a blogger. He has real-life credentials but they’re not direct reasons for his success as a blogger.

Poking my head out of the anxiety hole to re-make a comment I’ve periodically made elsewhere:

I just read Naomi Klein’s No Logo, and despite being so late to that party It’s not hard to imagine how big an impact it had in its time at identifying the brand being the product more than the things the businesses made (*sold).

This is just a draft, best refrain from linking. (I hope we’ll get this up tomorrow or Monday. edit: probably this week? edit 2: it’s up!!) The [bracketed] stuff is links to cites.

It has become increasingly obvious that some of the most prominent and monied people and projects in the tech industry intend to implement many of the same features and pursue the same goals that are described in Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism(4); that is, these people are fascists and their projects enable fascist goals. However, it has become equally obvious that those fascist goals are being pursued using a set of methods and pathways that are unique to the tech industry, and which appear to be uniquely crafted to force both Silicon Valley corporations and the venture capital sphere to embrace fascist values. The name that fits this particular strain of fascism the best is technofascism (with thanks to @future_synthetic), frequently shortened for convenience to techfash.

Feedback types: Is this a thing? / challenging perspectives / general opinions

Hi, welcome to awful.systems’ new writing community where we can help anyone who wants to share something more substantial in a blog post or article. I don’t think it should matter what the writing is about or if it is fiction, non-fiction, researched academia or an opinion piece. It can help to have some one else look at it.