Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)
Something seems to be lost on my peers today: it’s still easy to not use AI. The food we eat, clothes we wear, and every electronic device we touch may embody innumerable injuries to the world, and all this is inescapable. Eschewing AI is one thing that we can actually do to live out ethics that affirm values of human and environmental rights. It’s almost a gift! Just use a computer the same way you did three years ago!
Send more tech billionaires to space, more often, for longer: https://web.archive.org/web/20220117205028/https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/we-dont-know-why-but-being-in-space-causes-us-to-destroy-our-blood/
I think Trash Future had a great statement when Richard Dawkins was going on about Claudia that applies to this, which was “you don’t have put in the the newspaper that you hug your stuffed animals and tell them good night.”
I’m at a bar trying to watch the Knicks, and there’s someone 2 seats over from me very loudly talking to their date about AI with a lot of LessWrong-coded talking points. For the love of Jalen Bronson just let me watch the fucking game
Congratulations bb you’re a bog standard misogynistic
Love how one of the top qualities for women is “feminine”. I can’t imagine one of my friends being asked about me and just saying uh she’s a woman I guess. A real womanly woman. She-woman. Girl
Women unreliable? GTFO
I’m surprised that the religious fanatics (protestant) haven’t turned on AI yet. The ones around these parts think that UFOs and pokemon cards are satanic, so the Californian lying machine that tells kids to kill themselves wouldn’t be much of a reach.
Generally conspiracy theorists aren’t interested in actual things that cause real problems, I think. Air polution and global warming being deliberate decisions by elites who don’t care about killing millions, for example. It has to be some wild take like Pokémon child sacrifice or something, so you get to feel like you spotted the secret truth.
But if you want to see some actual apocalyptic conspiracy against “AI”, as in it is literally the manifestation of the body of the Beast and the voice of demons etc., check out Paul Kingsnorth’s substack. This is a burned-out environmental activist who radicalised anti-immigration with Brexit, started pushing a narrative of hobbit pastoralism as a justification for racism, and converted to Christianity with that fervour you only find in converts.
I find it helps to remember that when it comes to conspiracy theorists, most of the absurd stuff (eg Flat Earth) is downstream of the really important belief (eg millenarian Christianity). Essentially, start from the high-level ideology/political/religious beliefs, decide what would have to be true about the world to justify them, and let confirmation bias take care of the details.
He sounds like a fun guy to talk to at parties! /s
If I had a nickel for every time I got ambushed at a party by a surprise right-wing shoeless guy…
It owns the libs though, that’s usually enough
Trump likes AI and they like Trump too much to dislike something he likes.
Grim but likely true
Can I interest you in a video titled “Mike Adams Joins Alex Jones to Discuss AI World Simulations, Digital Gods & the Data Center Takeover”? It has an AI-generated thumbnail, yet the title sounds anti-AI, and I’m not going to watch it to find out which way it goes. I’m just assuming it leans toward whatever direction will pay them the most, which is possibly also why we haven’t heard much protestation.
Some of them think it’s demonic but I guess there’s a conflict of interest since big tech is supporting the Republicans.
This was from last year but I forgot about, but this article allegedly about a survey conducted by MIRI and Stanford University on a bunch of AI experts about timelines, which is definitely entirely AI generated since said survey straight up doesn’t exist (I didn’t find anything like it when I did some searches) and it quotes a person who doesn’t work for MIRI
the website title being “ai blogs ai” kinda gives it away
Here’s a LWer suggesting the key to life extension is to grow unconscious clones of yourself and when your current body becomes too old, just pop your brain into the clone
please enjoy picking apart this idea, b/c so far the LW commentariat aren’t interested
I see that lesswrong-er has read Time Enough for Love
Oh here’s a comment, sounds pretty reasonable actually
Doesn’t work because aging affects the brain as well and many deadly diseases originate in brain: insults (sic!), Alzheimer and brain cancers. Add risks of the transfer itself and the uncertainty when it should be done: too early for healthy aged person and and too late for one with cancer of any type (risks of metastases). All together it gives less than 10 years increase of of medium life expectancy.
back to the “upload smooth pristine brain onto the computer” drawing board we go!
TIL, thanks!
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 And how will we get them to wake up? I can just imagine rows of them lying on gurneys, murmuring “GO WOKE GO BROKE” or “BREAKFAST MEANS BREAKFAST” in a dull monotone.
Somehow Emperor Palpatine returned.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984
making people give birth to horribly mutilated babies, then declaring those babies non-persons so you can put the senescent brains of the wealthy in them, helping them refuse to face their fear of death? no, seems ok to meit’s funny because it’s almost directly the eve capsuleer picture, but we already knew these dipshits don’t read
also, how would this work? body grows old, but brain just….doesn’t? self-rejuvenating hermet crab brain!
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 I would love to know what sort of life this person has, that they feel scared of not getting enough of it
Huh, I got déjà vu and yeah there’s this story from a couple months back! https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/30/1134780/r3-bio-brainless-human-clones-full-body-replacement-john-schloendorn-aging-longevity/
MIT Technology Review found no evidence that R3 has cloned anyone, or even any animal bigger than a rodent. What we did find were documents, additional meeting agendas, and other sources outlining a technical road map for what R3 called “body replacement cloning” in a 2023 letter to supporters. That road map involved improvements to the cloning process and genetic wiring diagrams for how to create animals without complete brains.
Please don’t let this be the next bubble.
@Amoeba_Girl @gerikson Jacksons Whole
@Amoeba_Girl @techtakes I guess the private equity bros behind this one were reading Larry Niven’s “A Gift from Earth” when they were teens (seems more likely than Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”.
@cstross but I thought we already had brainless clones. I’m confused. If we don’t have them, who are these people in the government? @Amoeba_Girl @techtakes
@Amoeba_Girl In the Star Wars universe, they’re referred to as “decraniated,” although they’re not clones. They’re meat robots.
techbros really just want to be slavers and mask slipped now a bit more
@Amoeba_Girl Corrected headline: “Inside the Stealthy Startup Founded by Brainless Human Clones”.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 it’s not immortality, because the brain still ages. But otherwise… I guess? ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Like many concepts out of sci-fi novels, by the time we get the capability, we will have evolved our thinking.
Also: having productive people sitting around on life support seems inefficient compared with giving them jobs.
tiny little problem of spinal cord attachment, surely It Will Be Solved™. at least they didn’t throw nanobots at it
i guess that immortal oligarch class is a 100% ethical thing for them
Just like the famously well-adjusted and happy Rei Ayanami.
Imagine it like this: a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure to be alive in case you ever need a new kidney or liver.
Or, alternatively, he has speculated, you might one day get your brain placed into a younger clone. That could be a way to gain a second lifespan through a still hypothetical procedure known as a body transplant.
The fuller context of R3’s proposals, as well as activities of another stealth startup with related goals, have not previously been reported. They’ve been kept secret by a circle of extreme life-extension proponents who fear that their plans for immortality could be derailed by clickbait headlines and public backlash.
And that’s because the idea can sound like something straight from a creepy science fiction film. One person who heard R3’s clone presentation, and spoke on the condition of anonymity, was left reeling by its implications and shaken by Schloendorn’s enthusiastic delivery. The briefing, this person said, was like a “close encounter of the third kind” with “Dr. Strangelove.”
A key inspiration for Schloendorn is a birth defect in which children are born missing most of their cortical hemispheres; he’s shown people medical scans of these kids’ nearly empty skulls as evidence that a body can live without much of a brain.
And he’s talked about how to grow a clone. Since artificial wombs don’t exist yet, brainless bodies can’t be grown in a lab. So he’s said the first batch of brainless clones would have to be carried by women paid to do the job. In the future, though, one brainless clone could give birth to another.
Last Monday, the same day it announced itself to the world in Wired, R3 sent us a sweeping disavowal of our findings. It said Schloendorn “never made any statement regarding hypothetical ‘non-sentient human clones’ [that] would be carried by surrogates.” The most overarching of these challenges was its insistence that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or humans with brain damage are categorically false.”
So he’s said the first batch of brainless clones would have to be carried by women paid to do the job. In the future, though, one brainless clone could give birth to another.
The
fuck?
This reminds me of the research I’ve read on people with a split brain - people who have gotten their corpus collosum severed in order to treat severe epilepsy and ended up with two independent but functional brains controlling parts of their body or different functions. From what I remember (and I’m too lazy to find and cite a source, so please correct me if I’m wrong) they ended up not only having half of their bodies controlled separately, but some speech functions and communication abilities were also split. So for example, if they saw something with their left eye only they wouldn’t be able to identify it speaking out loud but their left hand would be able to write the name of the item. I almost definitely got the pop science oversimplification of this, but the relevant takeaway is that the human brain is really complicated and resilient. If each half can independently develop the ability to replicate motor functions and some communication and reading/writing, then it seems like at best wishful thinking to assume that it’s possible to consistently engineer a human body that’s just alive enough to keep the biological machinery functioning but not alive enough to merit even the moral consideration of a farm animal.
In turn I’m reminded of House of the Scorpion which tells the story of Matteo Alacrán, who was born and grew up in relative luxury on an opium plantation staffed by neurologically neutered slaves, including clones. Matteo himself is eventually revealed to be the latest clone of the patriarch of this whole enterprise and the decision to let him actually live a good life up until it’s time to kill him and take his organs is a kind of twisted kindness on his part. But compared to the actual rationalist plan, the Alacrán method at least treats everyone like a disposable resource used to further the goals and whims of the ruling sociopath. Matteo is treated as a person, is what I’m saying. Congratulations to the life extension weirdos for making the sociopathic drug lord ruler of a literal YA dystopia novel seem like they have an actual point.
Putting aside the sneering and philosophy to nerd for a minute, before getting back to it.
For a long time people were very into the split-consciousness notion of what happened to split-brain people, but a couple things have come around and now some people really think that the better way of thinking of it is still-unitary consciousness with a very difficult time moving around information between different sensory/expression modalities.
First, you get people who are born without a corpus callosum who are behaviorally normal (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13554794.2013.826690). They get a bit of extra connectivity sidways through their deep brain structure as some kind of homeostatic compensation, but the total amount is definitely low. What this says is there’s a difference between a brain that grew under a very unusual set of structural constraints, and one that grew normally that gets shredded. Similar with those people you find now and then with a brain that’s 90% fluid (though with the actual cortex pushed up against the skull around a big bubble of CSF) and the only neurological findings are things like weakness in one leg and an IQ of 80 (worth noting that this is still very very different from hydranencephaly) (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61127-1/fulltext).
Second, when you do a wider range of experiments with the split brain people you find that while they cannot verbally say what is in their left visual field (which goes to the right side, while language is usually a left-side phenomenon) they can reliably state that something is there with speech, or either hand, and approximately where in the visual field it is. The low bandwidth awareness of presence is there, but they cannot get their speech capacity to access the details. It’s like their sight is now multiple separate sensory modalities, some of which is very difficult to talk about and some of which are very difficult to draw with particular hands.
https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/5/1231/2951052
People argue a lot about what this means
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393221002402
You can also apparently reorganize around very small amounts of remaining fibers to have no deficits like that, with no issues talking about anything in either part of the visual field
Now, getting out of the nerd mode, there’s a LOT of weird literature from the 60s to 80s about people with very strange brain anatomy who nonetheless developed normally or better than expected
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1469-8749.1965.tb07839.x
“Two cases of hydranencephaly are described in infants. In both these there was evidence of excessive intracranial pressure-as is often the case-and both were operated on to relieve this. The progress of the older child, now 21 months of age, was throughout excellent physically and mentally, and he is considered to be normal. The progress of the second infant was remarkably good for three months, but thereafter mental retardation and spasticity followed; he was also blind. There is no good explanation for the unexpectedly good progress of the first patient.”
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.7434023
"…the most severe group, in which ventricle expansion fills 95 percent of the cranium. Many of the individuals in this last group, which forms just less than 10 percent of the total sample, are severely disabled, but half of them have IQ’s greater than 100. This group provides some of the most dramatic examples of apparent ly normal function against all odds. Commenting on Lorber’s work, Kenneth Till, a former neurosurgeon at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, London, has this to say: “Interpreting brain scans can be very tricky. There can be a great deal more brain tissue in the cranium than is immediately apparent.” Till echoes the cautions of many practitioners when he says, "Lorber may be being rather overdramatic when he says that someone has ‘virtually no brain.’ "
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8749.1999.tb00621.x
“Consciousness in congenitally decorticate children: developmental vegetative state as self-fulfilling prophecy”
“According to traditional neurophysiological theory, consciousness requires neocortical functioning, and children born without cerebral hemispheres necessarily remain indefinitely in a developmental vegetative state. Four children between 5 and 17 years old are reported with congenital brain malformations involving total or near-total absence of cerebral cortex but who, nevertheless, possessed discriminative awareness: for example, distinguishing familiar from unfamiliar people and environments, social interaction, functional vision, orienting, musical preferences, appropriate affective responses, and associative learning. These abilities may reflect ‘vertical’ plasticity of brainstem and diencephalic structures. The relative rarity of manifest consciousness in congenitally decorticate children could be due largely to an inherent tendency of the label ‘developmental vegetative state’ to become a self-fulfilling prophecy”
Worth noting that I looked at that paper and these case studies do have noticeable brian mass around the base of the skull, just not much.
Edit I am also very mad at how people so reductionistically talk about different behaviors being restricted to different parts of brain anatomy. It’s different in different creatures. You strip the cortex out of an adult cat and itll still walk around and look at things, though not be all there (yes this was done in the sixties), you strip it from an adult human you get a vegetable. Lots of brain parts are capable of lots of things, its just that as brains get bigger the more peripheral parts are easier to expand faster and grow in importance, their fibers exerting more control over the rest, and I would not be surprised at all at other brain bits being capable of quite a lot when they grow without the influence of the bigger bits.
Anybody ever read the short story “Cutie” by Greg Egan? Very apropos…>
just in case: i immensely appreciate the random pearls of highly-specific knowledge that sometimes land here as random comments. thank you so much.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BioMan That reminds me of “Peace on Earth” by Stanisław Lem
not alive enough to merit even the moral consideration of a farm animal
I foresee a rise in gourmet cannibalism to try to recoup at least some of the cost of keeping the meatbags alive and healthy for 30-some years
Brb injecting musk with Kuru to kill all the billionaires
Looks like some read about
DuneThe Torture Nexus again.
I think I saw this movie on TV at 2am. And it sucked
Ah yes, Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979), The Island (2005) and probably at least one direct-to-DVD sequel to Universal Soldier (1992), who even keeps track of those
I have fond memories of Universal Soldier because my buddy knew the projectionist showing the movie and I fancied her
I have fond memories of a Universal Soldier sequel because it was one of the weird movies we discovered randomly while away from home for academic-team tournaments.
I thought this interview with Prof. Michael I. Jordan was worth listening to, he’s bringing down the hype a bit: Intelligence is collective, not artificial — Prof. Michael I. Jordan (UC Berkeley / Inria).
Rhythms of the body are showcased in the scores of dances performed daily across the continent [inaudible] in Uganda, Kpanlogo in Ghana, Nganda in Gambia, [inaudible] in Cameroun, Sindimba [phonetics] in Tanzania, [inaudible] in Nigeria and so on.
Imagine if this was about European music and naming various cultures inside Europe, if all of them would be the [inaudible] people.
“There are some good uses for ‘AI’ like making transcriptions”, they tell me. “No need to pay people to do transcriptions, this is good for accessibility, nope, no issues whatsoever with using ‘AI’ transcriptions everywhere” /s
Ugh. Does it worry anyone else how much this fraudulent/incompetent way of claiming to be scientific resembles nazis and race science at their most fundamental workings?
A lot of rationalists (again including Yudkowsky) endorse eugenics so that’s probably not a coincidence
Saying a lot of rationalists endorse eugenics is a bit like saying a lot of Nazis endorse white supremacy.
Rationalism (the online subculture, not the older philosophical meaning of the term) is a subculture predicated on a notion of “general intelligence” which is reified ableism and therefore, necessarily, entails eugenics.
Imagine the disappointment the rats must have felt when watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and wondering why all their heroes are getting their faces melted off.
it’s just another fash-adjacent subculture
In a surprising turn and with much hedging, George Hotz suggests that maybe LLMs are bad actually. hackernews says that he’s holding it wrong.
I’m sure he is regretting his part in bringing online a major player in this fashtech fashion scene. Bet there’s a bunch of tears-wiping with dollar bills going on.
Yeaaaaaaaaaah pretty much
At this point I’m starting to suspect that AI thought leaders like being booed for giving anti-human speeches. Sundar is looking forward to it!
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is scheduled to deliver the commencement speech at Stanford next month. […] “These graduates are actually both going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact,” he added, referring to AI.
don’t kinkshame
don’t kinkshame
Back in my day California perverts said “don’t scene in public”
It’s jawdropping how everyone in Silicon Valley is living in their own little world where AI is the greatest invention ever and everyone should be grateful for living in the year of the AI Gods
They do. Not the booing itself but being a edgy contrarian. Saying “provocative” anti-human hot takes is how you one-up one another inside the cult and prove you’re the edgiest, most disruptive, fastest moving breaker of things in the industry.
may they enjoy their introduction(s) to tomato milkshake ducks and shiver in fear nightly at the memory of feeling unpopular
back when LLMs started to get widespread and it became clear that they always make errors and you can only spot the errors if you’re an expert who already knows the answers, because the errors are disguised with plausibility, people would tell me, “oh but they’re useful for some things, like making summaries”.
four years and billions of dollars and devastation to “improve” them later, and I see from this Spotify screenshot that “AI summaries” are going well:
it’s hard to explain how wrong this is thing is if you don’t already know the books (which is a demonstration of the same principle, it looks too plausible, it’s signal-shaped noise). but I’ll try.
Long (click to expand)
Plot errors
Or, “does this thing even work?” (the answer is no).
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A bitter 10-year winter: The winter is 1) famously not arrived yet, we’re waiting for it to this day, it’s not even autumn yet as of book #2; and 2) not 10 years but an unpredictable amount of years, the unpredictability being the worst part of it.
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The Queen’s sons and Robert’s brothers battle for control of the realm: The Queen has 2 sons, only one of them is battling and that’s debatable as he’s a puppet of the Lannisters and their alliances. Robert’s brothers are battling, yes, but also, famously, Ned’s son the King in the North, and the Reaver-King of the Seastone Chair. It’s famously called the War of the Five Kings, not the War Of The Previous King’s Brothers And His Sons.
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Robert’s young daughter, Princess Arya Stark: Arya is famously the daughter of Ned Stark and distinctly not a princess.
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The exiled last heir of the former ruling family tends to his dragons: The bot force-transed Daenerys Targaryen 😔
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The guardians of the realm’s Wall dwindle in numbers as menacing barbarians gather their forces: The guardians have already dwindled in numbers, literally millennia ago, and the actual menace isn’t the people beyond the Wall but what they’re running away from—viz. winter, a supernatural death force that is, famously, coming. Getting people to focus on the actual menace is the entire point of this sub-setting.
Synopsis errors
These are subtler than the funny plot errors but worse, because they defeat the purpose of a synopsis: informing the reader about whether this is their cup of tea, whether it it something they want to commit to right now.
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“Good and evil content for power”: ASoIaF is famously a series whose whole point is to deconstruct simple binaries of good and evil in fantasy, to present multiple perspectives simultaneously, all of them flawed to various degrees but still having valid points.
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“Menacing barbarians gather their forces”: As pointed above, the entire point of the story is that other peoples like the Free Folk aren’t actually barbarians, or if they are they’re still well justified in the menacing, or sometimes they are truly fucked up but then not any more fucked up than the more State-based societies, etc. Characterising them in this way sets up the reader to expect the wrong kind of novel. A proper synopsis would be to the note of: “Meanwhile, Ned Stark’s bastard son Jon Snow struggles to convince the Watchers on the Wall to put aside their prejudices and focus on the common threat, for winter is coming…”
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“Set in a glittering fantasy world”: This one is less wrong than it sounds as, unlike the TV producers, George R R Martin does understand that fantasy is made of glitter and dazzle, azure and carmine, and there’s plenty of colour,sparkle and glittering things in here. However, that phrasing doesn’t distinguish or characterise the books in contrast to any other conventional fantasy series, to the point of severe mischaracterisation. The distinguishing point of ASoIaF is precisely mixing that glitter and velvet with starving masses and diarrhea epidemics, to juxtapose genuine magic and awe with oppression and horror. “A glittering fantasy world” is like calling Dubai a “glittering urban city” or North Korea a “glittering green farmscape” and leaving it at that.
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“Deftly realised magic”: The series does the “return of magic” trope so there’s little magic or supernatural in the first two books, and what there is is very deliberately not “realised”—it’s left suggested, ambiguous and incipient, a thing of the shadows, where you don’t know if a prophecy is real or not, if a god is a god or a delusion. If you’re looking for a detailed and fully realised magic system, you’re reading the wrong type of fantasy.
Silly errors
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Queen Cerisi: How does a computer misspell Cersei’s name? How did capitalists burned billions to invent worse computers that are crappier?
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George Martin pursues the embattled Seven Kingdoms through a bitter 10-year winter: All by himself, then? Did he bring a cook at least? No wonder the final books are taking so long, the guy is waging a one-man war at his age.
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enriched by 8000 years of history: 8000 years. Why 8000 years. [untitled goose chasing meme] why 8000 years?!? the Dawn Age was over 12000 years ago, the Age of Heroes >10000, Aegon’s Conquest was about 300 years ago and the fall of the Targaryens 16; the relevance and richness of history increases logarithmically with recency, the remote eras are barely sketched, and there’s no special relevance to the 8000 mark. Maybe the first Long Night, but its dating is dubious, and there’s no reason why you would consider that sketch of lore as particularly “enriching” for the story but disregard the invasion of the First Men and the Pact which likely caused the Long Night in the first place.
what am I doing with my life why did I set out to do this. I miss wasting precious free time late night because somebody was wrong on the Internet, emphasis on somebody
“Cerisi” and gender confusion make me think this might be for some reason a machine translation of a generated summary, so like, two layers of slop?
It’s been so long that I last cared about anything GoT-related but that was such a good summary. Your post goes straight in my bookmarks, thanks for making it.
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Encyclical from the pope about the dangers of AI, mostly sane actually: (provided link skips quite a bit about social justice and referencing previous literature)
EDIT, snippets:
- We cannot be satisfied with […] the so-called “alignment” of AI […] without […] openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. […]
- [ about post and transhumanism ] From the perspective of the Church’s Social Doctrine, the key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, “necessary sacrifices” may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. […]
we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it…
Edging dangerously close to self-reflection there, but quickly pivoted.
Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good… The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all…
A timely reminder that the Vatican Bank were fighting lawsuits as late as 2010 where they argue they were justified to use filthy lucre from the WW2 fascists they trafficked, because Communists are dangerous. Such dedication to rebuilding demolished cities and the common good.
The Church does not claim to assume the functions belonging to the State. On the contrary, she esteems those who serve the common good, and she firmly acknowledges the responsibility that civil institutions hold within society.
Doesn’t claim to assume the functions belonging to the State, while being a literal ethnostate, with a bank distributing official Euros, which argues they’re immune from prosecution under the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
Fuck right off. The Vatican has just found a new group of fascists willing to fill their coffers as payment for shelter.
From the pope’s first address to the college of Cardinals: “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution"
Here we see how the treasury of social teaching manifests. The Church is a laundromat, specializing in whitewashing. I can’t even get past the first full chapter of this shit.
tired: butletian jihad
wired: butlerian crusade
I don’t think anyone here is at risk of being tricked into thinking that the pope is their friend (unlike some people on social media…)
Under the last pope the church used similar arguments to argue that transgender people are unnatural (unsaid part: and probably shouldn’t be given healthcare). It’s hard for me to read this without thinking about that backdrop:
Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.
“The Catholic Church is an institution which has harmed, and continues to harm many, many people” and “it’s really good that the leader of the world’s largest religious organization is speaking out against AI and fascism” are both true statements
Thank heavens the church is speaking out against fascism as they cheer on a fascist government taking away my healthcare.
I don’t care if you want to celebrate it and I wasn’t saying you shouldn’t or that it’s a bad thing. But this comment is really inviting a “no shit sherlock” kind of response.
just gonna leave https://www.npr.org/2025/11/12/g-s1-97651/gender-affirming-care-ban-catholic-hospitals here
… an Anthropic cofounder was specifically thanked during the Pope’s speech where he said that they will "work together to “find the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence.” Chris Olah wasn’t a random attendee. The Vatican had been cultivating these relationships for many years.
gebru straight up judges the text on the composition of the guests at the unveiling, and declines to read it, this is kremlinology in the worst style.
it is a doctrinal document directed at the catholic faithful, it is useful to actually take it at face value, and criticise it for its own (de)merits.
what the fuck’s the Pope gonna do, convert Claude to Christianity?
Not if Dawkins converts Claudia to Atheism first!
I can’t decide if I hate hardcore atheist or hardcore christian claude more
Seizing “the res novæ of our time” [derogatory] from this
When our enemies are so fucking immoral I have to hand it to the HEAD OF THE CATHOLIC FUCKING CHURCH when the fuck did I enter the twilight zone
for the nerds here, said head of the catholic fucking church quotes (correctly!) one gandalf from the works of well known catholic writer named tolkien
I encountered this in the wild over on Reddit about the Pope and AI
