this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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(here’s a Verge article about the Waymo car getting burned during a Chinese New Year celebration)

a self-driving car got destroyed (to a round of applause from the crowd) in San Francisco! will the robot car fans on the orange site take this opportunity to explore why the tech seems to be extremely unpopular among the populations of the cities where it’s deployed?

of course the fuck not, time to spin the wheel of racist dog whistles and see which one we land on! a note to the roving orange site fans (hi, fuck off), these replies are either heavily upvoted or have broad agreement in the thread (or I’m posting them here cause I want to laugh at some stupid shit, you don’t dictate the terms of my enjoyment)

This isn't a revolt against AI. SF attracts anarchist mobs and they'll vandalize buses, trains, police cars, bikes, whatever is around.

we’re off to a strong start with some bullshit straight from musk’s twitter (which he stole from the fever dreams of the conservatives on his platform)

Alternatively: this is San Francisco where on a good day the locals don’t need much excuse to set fire to a car (although I usually associate it with the Giants winning a World Series) and this poor dumb stupid driverless Waymo drove into a celebratory and by the looks of it somewhat drunken crowd on the Streets of Chinatown during the Chinese New Year where in following its prime directive to do no harm, it got itself stuck up the creek without a paddle so to speak. Waymo probably should have accounted for that ahead of time and told their cars not to go near Chinatown this evening.

remember that no matter what, the robot car is the victim here. there’s no chance Waymo was doing anything dangerous or assholeish in the area; much like robocop, the car is an innocent victim of its fucking prime directives??? and you wouldn’t set fire to robocop, would you?

This is a hilarious take. A few youths went bonkers and defaced private property. Has nothing to do with philosophical beliefs or a Big Tech agenda. You should debate the finer points of the Big Tech agenda with them while they run up to you in a maddened rage.

yeah! I can’t wait until these angry mobs set fire to your robot car body! then you’ll see!

Arguments about driverless cars aside, the youth in this country are seriously lost. It only takes one generation of poor parenting and poor civic policies to ruin a culture.

this one is downvoted, but this reply isn’t:

Sounds like they were right. The youth at that point was lost, and are now raising people who will literally burn down a waymo for fun, or because of some horrifically ignorant idea about fairness.

oh you poor woke kids don’t like when shitty dangerous robot cars are on the streets? are you gonna start crying about how it’s “unfair” they’re covering up pedestrian injuries and traffic accidents now? your grandpa would never stand for this

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[–] DarkNightoftheSoul@mander.xyz 10 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I'm new here. Is ycombinator the orange site, and I thought hacker/dev/techtypes liked ycombinator? A brief primer for a tourist would be appreciated.

[–] self@awful.systems 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

as the esteemed poster who doesn’t seem to know fuck about what we do here pointed out, the orange site is hacker news

we’re a sister community to SneerClub and inherited a lot of its house posting style. part of our mission statement is to call out bigotry in the tech industry and to act as a pressure release valve for folks who are frustrated by it. unfortunately, hacker news has severe (and very well-documented) problems around amplifying and enabling race scientists, transphobes, various branches of neoreaction, and fascism. we derive enjoyment from sneering at and deconstructing garbage, sometimes in great detail.

generally, the only way to truly get what we’re doing here is to check out our archives and lurk; we have several months of posts on lemmy and several years in our former subreddits r/SneerClub and r/TechTakes. I recommend looking up our Urbit threads if you’d like a good sampler platter of our posting style and subject matter (and a good example of hacker news helping mainstream neoreaction)

if you are here to debate any of the above, take careful note of the sidebar

[–] DarkNightoftheSoul@mander.xyz 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I'm 100% here for shitting on people with bad and wrong opinions, but I'm also terminally online and need to get away from, uh... some of the powerful emotions on display here. Bad for my headspace. Keep doing god's work though.

[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 9 months ago

that’s understandable; it’s not for everyone. thanks for stopping by!

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Quite a few hacker/dev/techtypes do dislike ycombinator, but for most it isn't some sort of thing they talk about a lot. Lot of the regulars here don't like it for example (which includes the person who help Assange get into tech), but hacker-famous old tech hacker non-local Foone (who is looking for a job, and money so if you know anybody with spare either help them out.) really hates the place (so much so that they have redirected their site to some anti-YC thing when linked from there).

But yeah, techtakes and sneerclub tend to have a bit of jargon (which is understandable in the second case, as lesswrong and other sneertargets also do a bit of jargon) so we have taken the orange site moniker from there. We also tend to be a bit hostile to outsiders due to the large influx of 'explain yourself' dumb r/destiny or r/redscare redditors on reddit. (Another reason to be a bit hostile is because if this is your first look into Silicon Valley Rationalism you will learn of things you should not learn of, things you cannot unsee or unlearn (people being contrarian about showering and then only showering once every 14 days for example)).

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 9 months ago

Yes, yc

It’s not favourably thought of anywhere outside its walled garden of sycophant techbros. When it is, in fact, thought of. Which also isn’t much, because its sphere of relevance is extremely small