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.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      0·
      4 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

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        4 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·
        4 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

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            4 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)

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            4 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

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    In other news, Procreate put out a damn good sneer aimed at AI art:

    Creativity is made, not generated.

    Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future. We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a lot of merit, but the path generative AI is on is wrong for us.

    We’re here for the humans. We’re not chasing a technology that is a moral threat to our greatest jewel: human creativity. In this technological rush, this might make us an exception or seem at risk of being left behind. But we see this road less travelled as the more exciting and fruitful one for our community.

    Unsurprisingly, they’re getting a standing ovation from artists for doing the right thing.

    • imadabouzu@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      Procreate is an example of what good AI deployment looks like. They do use technology, and even machine learning, but they do it in obviously constructive scopes between where the artist’s attention is focused. And they’re committed to that because… there’s no value for them to just be a thin wrapper on an already completely commoditized technology on its way to the courtroom to be challenged by landmark rulings with no more room ceiling to grow into whooooooops.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 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.)

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 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·
      4 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

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 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.”.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 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?

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 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.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 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.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      I’m sorry but did the company not have anyone in their org who has had kids???

      Bassinets are, as mentioned, used for 5-6 months. Reselling expensive baby gear that’s only used for the first months of infancy is very common. Established companies, like those making baby carriages or car seats, know this and make their money upfront at purchase time, preying onrelying on baby-braineddoting parents with more money than sense to buy the latest and greatest.

      The people designing this product and/or their financiers should be ashamed of themselves.

      Or they could have open-sourced the protocol and relied on dudes like this one to keep it going:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41285690

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      A friend of mine recently had a kid and gave the snoo a good review. If it’s really that good a product, it should be nationalised in the name of public health.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        Apparently that’s what the company wants too.

        Although putting your progeny into a device named for a Reddit avatar is questionable behavior.

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          4 months ago

          Oh for real? A company that wants to yeet itself into the arms of the government? Big if true.

          Yes the name sucks. Considering the gamut of cringe reddit exhibitionism that’s out there, this is a probably within a few notches of all the narwhal stuff.

  • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 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·
      4 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·
      4 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·
        4 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.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        4 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·
        4 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·
          4 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”.,

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 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·
      4 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

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 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.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 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.

    • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 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.

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 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.