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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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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.
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Neal Stephenson comes out strong and funny against GenAI here:
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/a-remarkable-assertion-from-a16z
"Hypothesis 1: it was written by a clanker"
Lmao imagine reading a Stephenson book and being peeved that it ends
(His sex scenes are far far far worse than his endings, those are a mercy)
Years ago, I said, "I've never finished a Stephenson novel." Someone replied, "Neither has he."
oh yeah the relationship between the fusion-device wielding 30-something Aluetian freedom fighter and the 16 year old skateboard courier in Snow Crash is... of its time
We were reading through various classics for bookclub and we noticed how many books had a ~14 year old girl has romantic/sexual relationship/gets abused by 30+ year old man. Snow Crash was one of those. I know popular thinking on this has changed a lot the past 20+ years but still always a shock, esp when you realize how much you didnt notice it.
Also a reason why the first evil dead aged very badly. Dont show that to people without warning them unless you want them to leaf.
Yup that’s one of them. The cryptonomicon protagonist no-nut-Novembering all the way to the ww2 treasure is another special fave
Best part is the footnote:
@nfultz @gerikson best part of the footnote is that he puts quotation marks around "think". Scary :)
Stephenson knows how computers work.
@dgerard he does, looks like
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 Sub-hypothesis 1B: the AI was fed the whole book but the input was truncated because whatever toolchain they used wasn't made to handle 160k words at a time.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 please do not insult the noble machine consciousnesses thus. It was probably written by a venture capitalist.
Someone in the comments found the github (??) where they made the site or something, and it def was generated initially, but it used heavy nerd speak so it was translated.
"Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function."
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984
A16z, like everything big tech, is AI.
It is wretched bullshit.
Andreessen Horowitz? More like, And here’s some horse shit
@swlabr yup
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984
Hypothesis 3: As some people seem to insist, "literally" has recently morphed into a contronym, and now it figuratively also means "figuratively".
...sorry, I meant it literally also means "figuratively".
...no, wait, that's just the same thing. 🙄 It *actually* also means "figuratively".
(Really? People couldn't find a better new word to provide emphasis than "literally"? What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now? Do they care? Ugh...)
It seems really common for words for factuality to become intensifiers. I just used the word "really" as an intensifier, thought it really means things occurring in reality. "Very" had the same thing happen to it, as it originally meant "truthfully" (as in "verify" or "verity"). If I say something is "truly massive", am I likely specifying the massiveness is not imaginary in some sense, or am I trying to convey massiveness beyond the lower bounds of "massive"? Is a "proper banger" of a tune distinct from an improper banger or is it just a highly bangerful banger?
fuzzy logic says this thing has mass most of the time, ish
english is a fuck
Bit late to tilt at this windmill tbh. Prescriptivist pedantry is prohibited past puberty. This was decreed by Maximilian D. English (the D stands for dictionary) in 1727. I don’t make the rules (MDE does)
tom sawyer literally rolling in wealth
but he never helps huck finn out financially?
pretty shit story, mark
"Literally, not figuratively", said in a Sterling Archer voice.
— Merriam-Webster
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 real missed opportunity to end that post mid-sentence
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 The only thing that could have made that article better is if he'd literally ended it mid-sentence.