Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

  • Mii@awful.systems
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    2 years ago

    So this is apparently something AI companies now think is smart to advertise with. Don’t know who’d willingly consider this something targeted at them, but here we are.

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      I rewrote the ad so they can lean into their marketing strategy.

      Hard book have hard word and make head hurt, AI make book easy! More book read for you. No hard word. This good idea!

    • self@awful.systems
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      the part of me that sometimes spends an hour just choosing the right words for the couple of paragraphs I’m writing is fucking screaming

      there is a screaming noise that comes from me while I write

      thanks magibook!

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        can’t wait for this shit to show up in usage among people who have english as an additional language at different level of fluency to their primaries. totally don’t see it causing a cascade clusterfuck in communication and comprehension.

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          there’s already a strain of this out there, with a lot of english-non-first students using LLMs to “make their work sound more polished”. similar as the strain using it for CVs etc

          ran across a great thread on fedi a while back, will see if I can find it

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      It’s good that they’re offsetting their advantages in the marketplace of money by actively crippling themselves in the marketplace of ideas.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        Considering the view counts a common thought. The amount of twitter followers vs yt subs vs actual views is funny. They even tried a tiktok.

        And they are trying so hard. Andrew Tate! Hogwarts Legacy! Destiny (the streamer, not the game, betting on the wrong horse there folks) Slapping at the Oscars! Pandemics!

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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    Not sure which sub a heartwarming story of Nazis shooting their own dicks off goes under, but: Nina Power of Compact gets called a nazi. Sues for defamation. In discovery, produces extensive facts not just supporting Nazi ideas but calling herself a Nazi. Loses so hard she just declared bankruptcy.

    there has been no media coverage of this, but hoo boy does there need to be

    EDIT: ohhh it’s the fuckin LD50 gallery, straight up NRX. Judgement, PDF

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      there are some phenomenal whoppers just in the opening paragraphs of that article, holy shit

      this is gonna make great piecemeal reading today!

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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        2 years ago

        we have scientifically ascertained that this is in fact that rare correct use case for the following emoji sequence: 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

    • self@awful.systems
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      hahahaha happy garbage day everybody

      The logs also show Ms Power claiming that “the social disapproval for ‘racism’ is a psyop to stop people realising that there are alien and fairy races”, and that “black and white were alien races and very different”.

      wait, is believing in fairies as an adult a weird racist thing? fuck, it’d kind of make sense if the people I’ve known who just causally slipped “by the way fairies are real” into casual conversation were doing a dogwhistle I didn’t pick up on

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        one day I’ll find a way to shoehorn our experience with a Waldorf School into a sneer.

        In summary, fairy-themed fascism can be tied back into the whole Helena Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, esoteric Hitlerism shtick. You most commonly get ambushed with it when dealing with fallen hippies, but it is diffusing into the wider online right via weird 4chan things.

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        I know someone who’s a practicing christian and has said they’ve seen angels

        technical, intelligent person on all fronts otherwise. I have … not pushed matters

        (e: not claiming this person I reference is racist, more that I’ve heard some really fucking kooky shit in many spectra, so I don’t know how much of a heuristic that sort of thing is by itself. the fairies thing may be a bit more concrete/direct - gonna have to try test it on some flaming racists sometime)

      • Jonathan Hendry@iosdev.space
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        @self

        This is one of those David Icke things where you’re not sure if reptilians/fairies/aliens mean reptilians/fairies/aliens or if they’re some kind of code or euphemism.

        • deborah@awful.systems
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          If you always bet on “everything confusing that weirdos say is a euphemism or proxy for Jews or Black people”, you will beat the house. Canadians, lizards, trans people, common punctuation marks, apparently also the seelie court I guess.

        • self@awful.systems
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          having unfortunately known several David Icke fans: it’s always veiled antisemitism, and the veil gradually disappears the more you let them talk

          e: yes, the area I live in is teeming with various flavors of conspiracy nut, why do you ask

          • Mike@awful.systems
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            I vaguely remember his original car crash on Wogan after he went loopy and it was barely veiled antisemitism even then - lizard people and the like

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              “ah ah but he wrote books - that surely can’t be the works of a person frothing in racism!” is something I’ve heard from a surprising number of people I’ve met

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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        see also all the TERFs yesterday loudly coming out in support of Power and her Nazi revelation

        the TERF to nazi pipeline is a doorway, or perhaps just walking over to the other side of the same room

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          the TERF to nazi pipeline is a doorway,

          It is funny how mad TERFs get when you mention they are saying the same things as neo-nazis, and then a few days later another TERF who is also a natzi is revealed again.

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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          she had a piece in The Quietus in 2018, but by 2020 they had kicked a writer out for being pals with DC Miller, her co-plaintiff in this case

          (just for confusion one of the Quietus guys is a different Luke Turner)

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          given some of the other things I’ve seen from the guardian, not sure that would’ve necessarily been a contraindicator

          • Jonathan Hendry@iosdev.space
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            @froztbyte

            I mean they didn’t seem very fashy at first. The later ones (2018, when she was fashy on the down-low ) started to get TERFy but earlier (2010-2014) it was all "the police aren’t your friend” and stuff about government trying to restrict the right to protest, etc.

            (I looked over her Guardian contributions after reading about the bankruptcy etc in this thread.)

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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        causally slipped “by the way fairies are real”

        wait, what? What sort of context? Multiple people? FFS TELL

        • self@awful.systems
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          so I think I must just have one of those faces cause it’s been something that multiple former friends have revealed to me, and it’s usually a weird show of trust? and it’s always something like “you know, I just think fairies must be real, like they’ve got to be out there? you know?”

          and in all cases I’ve gone “…oh that’s cool” and mentally earmarked that person as “do not trust with heavy machinery”

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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            yeah i have one of those faces too (tall, blue eyes, Danish cheekbones), disconcerting number of nazis who wanted me to be in with them

                • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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                  I’ve never had the full on “let’s be nazis together” invite but I’ve had several people launch unprompted into “now that it’s just us white folks we can talk for real” mode. internally they must have been like “I see white skin, we are clear for takeoff, 54321”

                  funnily enough it hasn’t happened since I became visibly trans

                • froztbyte@awful.systems
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                  ja that can happen/s here too

                  presumably your bones comprehend all the non-weather reasons that .au is such a popular za expat destination

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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            just remembered someone i met decades ago going on and on about spiritualism and ESP and just happened to drop in their own massive racism, there’s definitely a type

            • swlabr@awful.systems
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              The crystals to anti-vaxx to full-blown fascism pipeline is real and I have more than a few cousins deep in that KKK hole. Hate to be a science brodude, but all the spiritualism stuff can be a gullibility magnet for those prone to self radicalisation (the bad type)

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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            i mean, i have a friend who is literally a UFO religion believer, but they’re decent and politically good and trustworthy and present as normal-English, so

            • self@awful.systems
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              see occasionally you meet a UFO person and they’re normal and you only find out about their interest in UFOs because it’s the reason they want to get into radio or whatever and they want to see if you can recommend them a setup to communicate with satellites and other stuff in orbit. in effect, their UFO hobby is essentially a modified radio/birdwatching hobby that’s hopefully driving them to learn more about the world around them

              but much more often you meet a UFO person and hear the absolute worst thing you’ve heard all month while looking for an escape route, without making it too obvious because you’re fairly certain they’re armed. they will later go on the internet and call you an NPC who refuses to wake up because you wouldn’t discuss lizard people with them.

              • froztbyte@awful.systems
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                you only find out about their interest in UFOs because it’s the reason they want to get into radio or whatever and they want to see if you can recommend them a setup to communicate with satellites and other stuff in orbit

                you know, I don’t know if I’ve actually run into this kind of conversation. I don’t think I have. or if I almost did, I fairly likely applied a conversation logic-shortcircuit way before it got there (because of ambient red flag count). but fuck me, if I don’t know exactly the kind of person you’re referring to… :|

                • froztbyte@awful.systems
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                  also

                  without making it too obvious because you’re fairly certain they’re armed. they will later go on the internet and call you an NPC who refuses to wake up

                  ZA has many problems (and oh christ could I wax lyrical), but thank fuck I do not live in fucking eaglecountry

                  it’s a whole fucked-up 'ole dynamic when you need to “watch your back” in the most very literal sense because you didn’t eat some bozo’s shit :|

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      Wonder how the lawyers reacted when they got that treasure trove filled with stolen nazi gold during discovery.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          They will certainly win a lot of drinks in any ‘who has had the dumbest clients’ contests.

          ‘And then we found the “I’m definitely a Nazi now lol” message’ is a great punchline for a dumbest client ever joke

        • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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          I read the judgement quite carefully and it makes no reference at all to the discovery material. the only evidence it demonstrates awareness of is public or is testimony

    • ebu@awful.systems
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      wow, that side-by-side is so obviously bad i’m surprised it even got posted. usually AI bros try to hide the worst of the tech, or at the very least, say shit like “this is only the beginning!!”

      also, was not expecting to click that link and see FUNKe. good nostalgia

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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    we finally posted Diz’s LLM logic puzzle post to Pivot to AI! Let’s see if this draws flocks of excited new users to awful.systems … we’re doing Ray Kurzweil tomorrow, lol.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      There was a warcraft 3 pro who played build orders created by Chat-GPT and it was fascinating the degree to which it was able to perfectly imitate the form of the kind of thing you’d find on liquidpedia or some other guide but simultaneously make nonsensical errors that betrayed that it had no awareness. Like, telling you to build a unit of a different race or build without meeting prerequisites.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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    Tweet (Xcancel) from Ed Zitron: “This report is damning. Goldman Sachs’s Head of Global Equity Research doesn’t believe that generative AI is capable of solving complex problems, and says the tech industry “is too complacent in its assumptions that costs will decline substantially””, more in the quote tweet.

    • gerikson@awful.systems
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      Expect promptheads to dismiss this as being the ramblings of a “DEI hire” because they’re confused by the dual use of “equity” in their title.

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        Not just promptheads but the entire conspiratorial right is already way into not understanding how these functions and organizations work. There is a weird group of them who thinks that blackrock is a group of woke people (some of them are even saying it is ‘THEM’) behind everything. Because they confused a talk about ‘we need to tell organisations to focus more on diversity’ as a pro-diversity stance and not a ‘we need to make sure the companies we invest in don’t get sued, which causes a drop in share price’.

  • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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    the faster training data gets polluted the faster ai companies get fucked. therefore, I propose the deliberate creation of unmarked ai compost piles on reddit and discord: “communities” managed so as to minimize visibility to humans while generating large quantities of shit data

    • barsquid@lemmy.world
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      We could just mix corporate and bot responses to all content at a 99:1 ratio so the AI companies struggle to tell the difference. Also no need to do anything, as this is running on reddit right now.

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        if this were running you would be unlikely to know about it. the novel part is not spamming reddit, it’s trying to do so strictly to target ai companies, without humans ever seeing the result

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    some numbers on recent hypewave investments in here (via techmeme)

    Last year, Tom Loverro, an investor at IVP, predicted a “mass extinction event” for start-ups and encouraged them to cut costs. Last week, he declared that era over and christened this time the “Great Reawakening,” encouraging companies to “pour gas” on growth, particularly around artificial intelligence

    jesus fucking christ these people would love to call it the enlightenment or something, wouldn’t they?

    “Sam Altman canceled the recession,” joked Siqi Chen, founder of the start-up Runway Financial

    one day soon I’m going to get to my project of building up a graph database of every crank and issuer of batshit statements like these, so that in times to come I can easily follow up on ‘em and see how their shit aged. but all hail sammy, the saviour! no, forget about that musk fool, no-one ever liked him! sammy is where it’s at!

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      PrimalPoly was a sort of semi regular of the old sneerclub, so I can tell you a lot more than that.

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          I have such sights to show you And more

          About half of evopsychgoogle’s tweets are also about him and his wife.

          He and his wife (also a piece of work) have a very strange poly relationship btw, it seems to be more a constant dominance struggle than a loving poly relationship.

          And you know how a lot of these people when faced with the slightest pushback turn further and further right. 2013

          90% of the weird evo psych women on their period things you ever heard about, also him. (And while I don’t get the American fascination with strippers/strip clubs, I do get it is an important macho man culture thing for American men to do things with/around strip clubs so cudos for him that he managed to trick the university into sponsoring his visits).

  • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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    never really seen ludicity blog before, now that i read up ten posts on so in a single sitting i lowkey want to fuck off to live in a cabin in the woods

    the sheer wastefulness of it all, bubbleness of its economics, piling technical debt, institutional stupidity, and the man also feels off in a way that i can’t put my finger on (maybe just by association)

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      ludic be like: this industry makes no sense and causes untold suffering, but if you emit right vibes you can get by and make a pile of cash. Let me help you make a bank off those rubes

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        I’ve noticed something similar with a lot of folks on the younger side in tech, although I haven’t had the headspace to dig into it. the thing I noticed is a lot of folks still willing to go into this dysfunctional shit getting highly paid because of knowing how bad things are elsewhere. afaict it’s not quite so much fygm as “just” trying to hoarde in the wake of 2+ decades of multiple world once-in-a-lifetime economic clusterfuck, as well as in the face of the total existential disaster that exists otherwise

        (this is the impression I get in a wider sense. I’m not sure if it’s right, or applicable particularly here)

        (there’s also a form of that which is quite strong in USA-based folks, but I don’t think ludic hails from the states)

  • flavia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    Aaaand, there it is.

    I remember I used to watch this guy’s videos, and the icon for the image viewer in serenity was pepe the frog. And he also admitted to browsing 4chan. And he changed his twitter link to x.com before even twitter changed it. Also it was kinda weird that he had some private discord channels whose contents he was very secretive of. Now that he’s making a nonprofit with github’s former CEO, there is absolutely zero barriers to the exact same bullshit from all the companies he complains about.

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    Off Topic: Politcs

    spoiler

    Best of luck to our folks in the UK, enjoy the Tory tears!

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      I doubt any of you are following Dutch politics. But it is day 3 of the new (far right) cabinet, and day 1 and 2 were already a clown show. I think today they are going on ‘vacation’ (summer recess), so nothing will be done. “Lekker gewerkt jongens”

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        Sounds like a real “Dog caught the car” situation. Do you think they’ll be able to cause much permanent damage to the institutions before they get turfed out?

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          Sadly I think they will do quite a lot of damage, but most of it is by just not solving any issues which are issues currently (and pretending non-issues, like immigration, are huge problems). They don’t really seem competent enough yet to do real damage. (yeah, I’m including Wilders, who has been a politician all his life in this list). But a lot of damage has already been done. A lot of racists feel like they are allowed to be racist again for example. (a similar thing you heard coming from France, with the current rise of Le P, people going ‘ah soon we are going to bash the gays again’).

          Oddly our cabinet has always been mostly rightwing basically (at least the past 14 years), so it is really weird to see the far right pretend like the left has had any power.

          A lot of the dumb plans also cannot be done because of the EU. So a lot of people who voted for the current parties (like the radicalized bougie farmers) will be hurt a lot, so it will get worse later after they can’t get jack shit done. (Which, as always with protofascists, will be purely blamed on others).

          • o7___o7@awful.systems
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            ‘ah soon we are going to bash the gays again’

            I hate how so many people are genuine assholes at heart.

            It goes to show how important it is to put fascists in lockers.

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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    me talking to someone after describing a dumb and horrible LW thing:

    i feel like i’m describing a livejournal fanfic cult, which i guess i am