Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Itās remarkable to me how far and how rapidly this guy swerved outside of his initial lane, all while having absolutely terrible voice and diction for being a long-form interviewer. Heās worked on that, but itās clear that his initial success was based off of targeting high-level professionals who otherwise wouldnāt very often be sought out for the type of interviews Lex does. Iām thinking of guys like Jim Keller and Chris Lattner, who would probably only make such public appearances in the form of keynotes at conferences for their specific niches.
But you canāt convince me that youāre really the worldās best technical interviewer if youāre also uncritically sitting down with Donald fucking Trump, or deciding that youāre suddenly enough of a historian to take on Gibbon with your fucking podcast. Whoās financing this guy, anyway? Is MIT actually kicking him cash, or is it just an RMS scenario where they give him space because theyāre concerned about where he might end up otherwise?
The only thing Iāve seen from Lex Friedman was his interview of Brian Kernighan. For most of it I just thought it was very kind of BWK to patiently indulge this kid, who was clearly still new and unaccustomed to public speaking or researching his interview subjects, despite the weirdly professional gear setup and production.
Lex hasnāt optimized the skill of technical interviewing; he has optimized the skill of simultaneously stroking the intervieweeās and the (implicitly) listenerās ego.
Note that he uses the same strategy as Joe Rogan: invite a smart person on, ask them introductory questions about their research, and then just kind of sit there with a dumb look and fail to understand what theyāre saying. I gather that itās easy to empathize with and doesnāt require listeners to actually learn much since theyāre essentially sitting in a 101 course with a professor who is reading the curriculum aloud. What puzzles me is why MIT funds this shit.
I donāt think itās very surprising. The various CS departments are extremely happy to ride the wave of easy funding and spend a lot of time boosting AI, just like how a few years ago all the cryptographers were getting into blockchains. For instance they added an entire new āAIā major, while eliminating the electrical engineering major on the grounds that ācomputationā is more important than electrical engineering.