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 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 soo 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.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    I wonder how soon we’re going to hit the “we have team $foo building that internally since we can’t use $serviceX for that (externally hosted has security issues)” phase of corporate fafo

    why am I thinking of this? oh, no reason. just pondering the cyclic nature of history I guess you could say.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        I mean, “here’s the video you asked for” is a pretty standard setup for a Rick roll, so it’s definitely in the training data, and if it doesn’t have an actual URL to link it’s going to fill in something if it starts to spit out an affirmative response, which as we’ve seen is a really standard failure mode for these systems.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        See, I actually don’t hate the idea of engineering and automating away parts of work. Work, almost by definition, sucks. If it didn’t suck we wouldn’t think of it as “work.”

        But the current model of AI is less trying to free humanity from work than it is freeing work from humanity. Take the important business of making the line go up away from the grubby hands of people who need things like “food” and “healthcare” as a necessary precondition for working, to say nothing of their desires for “dignity” or “respect”. Even creative and artistic work that gets underpaid in exchange for being something people can be innately passionate about can be taken away from those people and fed a diet of raw electricity and compute.

        • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Yea, there’s a lot of work from which it’s quite worthwhile to free humanity. It’s just that an AI company having that as its tagline and full contents of its social media bio reads with a very particular anime villain cadence. Makes me think of Seymour Guado in Final Fantasy X vowing to “free the world of its sorrow”.,

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Techish (I would use the word techbro here, but that needs an explantion even) people who want to make their fictional science fiction utopia real, but got so scared of their own science fiction ideas going wrong and killing everybody they started a cult around rationality, sort of a Vulcans fan club. They have a pattern where they think they and their methods are smarter and better than actual experts.

      When trying to do their own research with an open mind, but they left their minds so open that all kinds of sexists and racists crawled in. Who are welcomed as long as they are verbose enough.

      And to close it off, Musk is a fan.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Yes, there is a certain yearning for ‘secret forbidden’ knowledge and contrarianism, but I tried to keep it short and simple. Almost never do they find a solution in anything in the left side of politics.

          • imadabouzu@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            Yeah that’s totally fair, I just was tailgating the sneer I guess.

            Almost never do they find a solution in anything in the left side of politics.

            That’s a good point, and I think it speaks well to their savior complex. They want above all to push the guilt and discomfort of social issues away so they don’t have to live in the discomfort of reality. Dogma does this, and it really doesn’t matter if you have the veneer of science or the mythology.

    • ahopefullycuterrobot@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Longer than I’d intend, but the way I describe it is probably as

      1. A mystical Harry Potter based sex cult deeply embedded in the techbro scene. They want what many cults want: to commune with God, achieve immortality or enlightenment, and obtain power in the current world, but they dress it in the trappings of science and computer programming.

      2. Do to demographic features, their desire to be clever, and a certain contrarian attitude, they will often seek to rationalise harmful social practices, which leads them to support anti-feminist and race realist positions with shocking frequency.

      3. Because of their close connections to the tech scene, along with the personal relationship the cult founder had with Peter Thiel, and the fact that the cult has been indoctrinating kids since the aughts, they are shockingly influential in the AI scene.

      4. As most cults, they claim to want to teach people to think correctly (rationally), but they actually value the community of being in a cult (and the potential social networking and financial benefits) over thinking rationally.

      5. In terms of style, they like long works with unclear arguments, being clever or witty over being right, and strongly signalling their rationality (sometimes even using good tools), but not allowing that to interfere with the core features of being a cultist.

      (1-3) are what I’d consider core. (4-5) are what I’d add if the person seems interested. If they seem really interested, I’d also discuss other connections (e.g. to Effective Altruism, the Future of Humanity Institute, George Mason University, Future Perfect, neoreaction), their ideology in more specific terms (e.g. the Sequences, Roko’s Basilisk), and associated members (e.g. EY, SSC, Aella, SBF).

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      SV Scientology, they can’t land you a leading role in a summer blockbuster but they sure as hell can put you in the running for AI policy related positions of influence or for the board of a company run by one of their more successful groomings. Their current most popular product is court philosophers for the worst kind of aspiring technofeudalist billionaire.

      If this gets them interested you’ll eventually get your chance to do a deep dive to any details of cosmist lore you find relevant.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      It’s a little bit like a tiny version of the Mormons if Joseph Smith had read the collected works of Isaac Asimov instead of the Bible and also his name was Yud.

      Or to go with less of a sneer, the Rationalist/TESCREAL/Californian Ideology is a loose grouping of fringe beliefs rooted in old-school science/tech fetishism with a lot of science fiction overlays and libertarian/reactionary politics that effectively define “let ultrawealthy tech capitalists do whatever they want” as the only reasonable choice and make it a moral imperative.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Personally I might try explaining some of the foundational stuff before going into the big R. Scientism, utilitarianism would be my starting points.

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        It can’t be that stupid. You must be explaining it wrong.

        Weirdly and widely applicable, as always

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      decentralized cult which worships the concept of rational thinking as superior to evidence. has lots of little rituals which are supposed to invoke rational thinking. uses AI in the place of angels and demons. no core holy texts, but the closest things are a sequence of blog posts and a harry potter fanfic. very influential in silicon valley, very intermingled with various explicitly fascist groups

  • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    turns out duckduckgo does AI search result summaries too, although at least you can turn the little bastards off

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      it’s unfortunate that all the Google alternatives big enough to matter are all-in on making the exact same mistakes as Google at roughly the same time, probably in hopes that one of them can swoop in and take the top dog spot when the monopoly ruling finally makes Google stumble

      and if that sounds like a fucking stupid plan, you’re right, and that’s why neither of us are advertising executives

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Off-the-cuff prediction: there probably won’t be one dominant search engine after Google stumbles, for a few reasons:

      • All of them are making the exact same mistakes as Google, as self noted (when they aren’t having their own unique dumpster fires)

      • AI has made it much easier to spam searches with SEO shite, so any attempts at algorithmic search risk being spammed to death in short order

      • Public trust in tech is utterly shot to hell - not sure how much people trust search specifically, but I suspect people are currently trusting word-of-mouth (e.g. Reddit, TikTok) over whatever any of the major search engines are providing right now

      • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        In retrospect google since it’s inception, when it was still good, google always actually relied on human curation. Primary component of pagerank were:

        • “how much have people linked to this?”
        • “how much have reliable sites linked to this?”
        • “how good quality are pages from this site usually?”

        (Which is still a way to get value out of google by adding “site:www.reliable-website.example” tags)

        It was definitely a useful product, but ultimately it relies on human labor to surface quality results closer to the top.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Self-identified emergency dept physician on my local subreddit just believes things that spicy autocorrect tells him about his job.

    Dude here claims that Tennessee is ranked #3 for physicians looking for work, but when asked for a source…

    Obviously you’ll find various resources. ChatGPT has it as #3 for whatever that’s worth. At least for my specialty Tennessee offered a top salary, moderate tort reform, no income tax, eliminated the professional privilege tax, and more. It’s certainly not a bad place to practice and I’d argue very few physicians are avoiding Tennessee.

    https://old.reddit.com/r/nashville/comments/1eweryn/curing_tennessees_doctor_shortage_law_paves_way/liz36dj/

    Wish I knew where he worked so that I could avoid it.

    • 0xb0ba@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      My experience talking with people has been often this same situation; they have some specialty expertise and for whatever reason now accept ChatGPT as all knowing and use it a lot day to day. It worries me since the response to “why” is usually along the lines of humans aren’t always right but this is AI so it will keep getting better eventually.

      Tools should be 100% correct. Your work has regressed because you swapped out good tools and practices for spicy autocorrect

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    J, K. Rowling, skull enthusiast:

    Khelif, who went on to win Olympic gold despite the harassment, reportedly filed a lawsuit alleging cyberbullying against Rowling (Elon Musk is also named in the suit). Shortly after the lawsuit became public on August 13, Rowling went silent on X, leading to speculation from many onlookers that she had pushed her transphobic narrative too far. On August 23, though, she again appeared on the platform, spreading more false and misleading commentary on Khelif. Her first post was a quote from a transphobic hit piece against Khelif by Colin Wright, the former managing editor of the far-right website Quillette.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      lol, poor helpless joanne just can’t help but run headlong into the wall

      saw something drift by that she’d also deleted a bunch of tweets in the quiet time, so her coming out swinging is doubly funny

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        I mean, does she actually write books anymore? Or is she a full time TERF now? Because that’s a direct conflict between what’s in her legal best interest and in her professional best interest.

          • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
            0·
            3 months ago

            @froztbyte @techtakes Speaking as a working writer: she’s a hobbyist writer. At this point she’s so rich she could spend £100K/week of her capital and still be a multimillionaire when she dies aged 100+. A novel typically takes a year to write and even JKR is unlikely to make significantly more than £100K from a book (unless it gets filmed). So she keeps writing for ego/self-esteem but not from necessity (to stop writing would leave a hole in her life).

        • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Her professional interest would be to shut the fuck up and just live in her castle, forever rich beyond measure. She could never write another thing in her life and she’d never run out of money anyway.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      This wasn’t the first love triangle in the Heinlein residence (they had earlier been in a consensual threesome with L. Ron Hubbard)

      UNSEE UNSEE

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            there’s a friend of mine that’s ex-scientology. didn’t get in if their own choice, but that of family. they got out before it could really get its claws into ‘em

            but the reason I bring this up is because it’s from said friend that I learned of the fact that we have a Hubbard museum house in ZA. it looks like an episode of TNG fucked a vintage porn set, and it’s preserved in that state

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            I don’t have friends of such tendencies

            or, perhaps better stated, I am not aware that I have such friends. and sincerely hope to avoid learning that I do

            (e: this comment came first, and is why the other came to mind)

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        If either of the parties involved were just about any other science fiction author, it would be the among the least damning things I’ve heard of the other one, but it just had to be these two.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        and that’s twice in as many days that I have been doing a Lady Macbeth “out, out damn spot” routine with my entire central nervous system

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Problematic developer with AI crush realizes she’s just dust under the wheels of progress

    https://justine.lol/history/

    You know those polls that say fewer than 20% of Americans trust AI scientists? It shouldn’t be the case, because no group is doing more right now to elevate the universe to a higher state of complexity. You know who the public does trust? Open source developers.

    Justine, LOL indeed.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      You know those polls that say fewer than 20% of Americans trust AI scientists?

      No, but I’d say its a good sign we’re getting close to an AI winter

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      In classic Rationalist fashion, she noticed something she didn’t like, hypothesized a cause with no real evidence, and then proceeded to rant about the implications of that unproven hypothesis.

      My suspicion, on the other hand, is that because Claude is just reproducing statistical patterns from its training data is simply reflecting the fact that she is referred to as a Nazi coder far more often than she is as some kind of open-source luminary. Unless her github metadata signs everything “Justine T the open-source developer” then that association isn’t reflected in the patterns extrapolated from the training data.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      elevate the universe to a higher state of complexity

      girl my life already too complex, ain’t no one need elevation to an even higher state of complexity

      can we maybe do a lower one?

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Problematic developer with AI crush

      I thought this was gonna go in a completely different direction.

      Setting: romantic sunset beach, without a crowd in sight. There is no sound but that of a gentle breeze, waves lapping at the shore, and seagulls in the distance. Ryan turns to his girlfriend Tiffany. He gets down on his knees, the sand muddying his pants. Tiffany clasps her hands over her mouth in disbelief. Ryan says: “Tiffany you are the light of my life. You have made me a better man. I can’t see me living with anyone else but you. Will… will you marry m-- bzzt. Thank you for using Virtua-Boyfriend, unfortunately we ran out of VC money so are shutting down.”.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Etsy: an artistic one-stop chop shop where slop pops up like catch crops - and that quick shot’s no hatchet-job, so keep it from pops 'fore it leaves him in a strop:

    Etsy sucks

    (Full disclosure: the opportunity for some quickfire rhymes may have played a role in birthing this sneer.)

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      This author seems to write what is fairly typical escapism porn LNs. According to this summary the plot is about as stupid and problematic as you might expect for such a thing. If the Alya-san anime goes well this will probably get at least a manga.

      All this is just adding up to: hack author is formulaically chasing trends and trying to parlay some genAIed trash into a manga and maybe an anime.

    • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      The GMO melons attached to that high school girl nearly took me out, but the boderline race-porn title is what killed me.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      /r/AnimeCircleJerk

      Always a coin flip on if circlejerk subs are fascist or not. But this one looks pretty alright at first glance! Lots of making fun of transphobia and creepy people.

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Trust me when I say there’s nothing worth reading in the article beyond the headline:

    He would be right if he meant in the sense that Bruce Wayne ineffectively leads a personal crusade motivated by unresolved childhood angst, and that the world would be much better off if his money was just spent on basics needs for the people and he went to therapy.