Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      Surely an April Fools’ thing?

      Still, if it’s just a parody someone seems to have gone above and beyond in generating content for it.

      • David GerardOPM
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        101 year ago

        a parody in the we mean it sense

        /ratanon/ escapes containment

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        you may be right:

           Registrar URL: http://squarespace.domains
           Updated Date: 2024-04-01T06:39:18Z
           Creation Date: 2024-01-14T00:27:20Z
           Registry Expiry Date: 2025-01-14T00:27:20Z
           Registrar: Squarespace Domains LLC
        

        but even then, the choices of content are … telling

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        with good coverage in all the major categories: sub, masochist, and victim

        these people truly are the worst

        (e: I want to be very clear here: this isn’t meant to be kinkshaming, but as a particular highlight of their specific focuses being of a really particular slant)

    • Mii
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      1 year ago

      Jesus Christ, this guy read A Modest Proposal and took it as fucking inspiration.

      Why is it always eugenics and euthanasia with these chucklefucks? The idea of exterminating large amounts of humans seems to tickle something in some people’s brains.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      Never heard of the dude, but despite writing a 6 part series entitled “Imagining Elon Musk’s Million-Person Mars Colony – The greatest thought experiment of all time” has has not gotten the new party line from Dear Leader that the most pressing issue is the catastrophic lack of (white) babies rather than too many people.

      OTOH porque no los dos? Force women in the “first world” to have kids, euthanize all the brown people.

      edit people killed at or around 60 is a minor plot point in the pretty terrible Asimov novel Pebble in the Sky, where it is not seen as a Good Thing.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        It’s bizarre to me that the articles starts out arguing that this is necessary for environmental reasons, then shifts to egalitarianism (spread wealth from the global north to the south), before landing on productivity. A complete scattershot argument whose only constant is a desire to euthanize the old, with only the EO Wilson connection for any clue as to why he came to this conclusion.

        As for fiction, I think you could name probably quite a few stories that feature this kind of mandatory maximum lifespan, almost always as an obvious signpost that the government is cruel. (I am trying to remember one in particular, I think it was a short story called “Hop for Jubilee”? Ring any bells for anyone?)

  • David GerardOPM
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    51 year ago

    from HN:

    I got frustrated with ChatGPT for hallucinating sometimes, and my friend said “could be worse, could hallucinate all the time.” And I thought it’d be fun to make that, and then we came up with a few more, and now we have this: https://cap-gpt.onrender.com/

  • David GerardOPM
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    111 year ago

    afab boyfriend on Bluesky:

    ME READING WARHAMMER 40K BOOKS IN 2018: this setting is so fucking dumb. No way a society would let their entire technological infrastructure be controlled by a handful of fanatics that have convinced themselves that computer code is literally God

    ME NOW: Ah,

    • @[email protected]
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      41 year ago

      At least in 40k they actually have godlike beings and observable magic. This is the bad place!

  • David GerardOPM
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    91 year ago

    this ape is a message
    we considered ourselves to be a powerful yacht club
    this ape is not an ape of honor
    no highly esteemed juice is slurped here

    – more falafel please, SA

  • @[email protected]
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    121 year ago

    Scott Aaronson: “Open Letter to Anti-Zionists on Twitter”

    Posting here rather than in a separate thread because I’m probably the only one who rememembers him from the old /r/sneerclub days, but he’s an endlessly fascinating figure to me - his ability to view literally every possible scenario through the lens of “poor innocent little smol-bean Scott just wants to discuss things rationally, but is persecuted by his ontologically evil foes and their self-righteous dupes” - doesn’t matter if it’s feminists objecting to his older incel-y posts, Sneer Club dunking on him, cops arresting him for stealing from an airport store or leftists not being fans of the genocide he supports… He must always be the victim. His enemies must always be unreasonable and motivated by hatred of him, specifically.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn
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      61 year ago

      What’s he referring to when he says he’s most famous for something about confronting radical feminists with his personal issues?

      • David GerardOPM
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        1 year ago

        my god, you missed out on that?

        here is way too much background reading!

        • commenter on Shtetl-Optimized talks about the rapey “nice guys” she suffered at college
        • Scott Aa takes this as a brutal personal attack on him
        • Laurie Penny tries to be nice about it
        • Amanda Marcotte? not so nice about it
        • Scott Alexander weighs in with one zillion words, unreadable, so relentlessly awful that Scott demands readers not form an opinion of him based on a thousands of words essay he worked hard on and chose to publish
        • Elizabeth Sandifer with the correct and readable opinion of this bilge (also long, but worth it)
        • db0
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          61 year ago

          Holy shit you just sent me down a rabbit hole. How can these people be so terrible. Existing in their spaces must be like constantly smelling faintly a rotting corpse but not being able to quite place where it’s coming from.

        • @[email protected]
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          61 year ago

          commenter on Shtetl-Optimized talks about the rapey “nice guys” she suffered at college

          Not just that, but one of very few feminist commenters in an aggressively anti-feminist comments section on a blogpost about how it’s wrong that MIT pulled Walter Lewin’s online lecture videos after he was accused of sexually harrassing a student. Scott Aaronson, Friend To All Women, felt no need to intervene as his fans trashed the very notion of online sexual harrassment - only when a woman made an uncharitable remark about nerd men.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          just looked the guy up. He’s handsome. He literally looks like Jerry Seinfeld (actually, he looks even more like Pablo Schreiber who played Nicky Sobotka in The Wire). What a god damned twat. (Not that being attractive makes any of his arguments any worse than they already are)

          • David GerardOPM
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            101 year ago

            He managed to attract and keep a wife and have kids with her and still talks like the most rancid incel.

          • @[email protected]
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            91 year ago

            The title of the blog (“Shtetl-Optimized”) refers to his belief that he would have been happier in a traditional shtetl where the kindly village elders would assign a wife for him.

            • @[email protected]
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              31 year ago

              Yeah that always gets me, and he picked that name fully knowing what it meant. It isn’t like the meaning of it has changed over time. (Like my now unfortunate nickname, which prob gets me tagged nowadays as a rightwinger, due to the weird shit they had with budweiser, and before that it got me tagged at a rabid leftwinger because of ‘soy’. Nevermind that it predates all that, and even the bodybuilders/weightlifters misreading the science and causing the whole anti-soy mania, and it is just a reference to 90’s shadowrun. I feel this a lot and then I ignore it because I figure most people are not this online to even notice).

    • David GerardOPM
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      91 year ago

      And now, maybe, I can at last go back to happier topics, like how to prevent the destruction of the world by AI.

  • @[email protected]
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    81 year ago

    we’re looking for a sneerious name for a collaborative design/programming community for non-dickheads, like hacker news but not shit. thread your suggestions here!

    • Steve
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      81 year ago

      I’m feeling uncreative but it’s a shame giggle academy is taken

      “painter news” could be a nice jab at PG’s “Hackers & Painters”

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        Just to confuse things design a logo that references both Margaret Hamilton from NASA and Margaret Hamilton the Wicked Witch actress. Maybe a woman flying on a NASA rocket-propelled bicycle, but maybe not because the slow and judgey might think that’s calling NASA Hamilton a witch.

        Actually referencing a non-technical woman might even help repel HN types.

      • @[email protected]
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        121 year ago

        GNU/Scrotum is a great name for a lemmy fork, but Richard’s copyright lawyers would probably sue me and the settlement terms would involve him eating his foot skin on my couch and leeching off of my wifi from his 2004 laptop for 12-24 months

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          Are you sure he limits it to his foot skin?

          Play your cards right and you could put him to work like one of those fish that eat dead skin off feet as part of a pedicure.

          Apropos of nothing, does Stallman still request access to a parrot? It’d be funny to find him a place to stay with a person whose parrot is trained to talk shit about Stallman. “KWOK! SHUT UP ABOUT HURD!”

          • @[email protected]
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            61 year ago

            he’ll probably draw a significant amount of power from the fact that some of the walls in my house contain GNU utilities running on small Linux systems

              • @[email protected]
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                91 year ago

                Richard’s 2004 laptop runs FreeDOS but he find/replaced all instances of “FreeDOS” in the code to “GNU/Hurd”

            • @[email protected]
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              51 year ago

              I heard if you make minor modifications to those but then don’t publish source (along with branding them and dropping license files) then he can take 20d6 psychic damage

        • @[email protected]
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          Nah it’s masturbation in Swedish.

          More specifically, “en runk” is analogous to “a wank”, but it’s not idiomatic.

          wanking = “att runka”

          I wanked = “jag runkade”

          I had a wank = “jag tog en runk”, non-idiomatic. You’d say “jag runkade”. If you want to use a noun, “jag drog en tralla”.

          • David GerardOPM
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            121 year ago

            so 100% in the tradition of the area of software that thought a good name for its photoshop clone would be “gimp”

    • @[email protected]
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      131 year ago

      I’ve just been staring off into space for the last half-hour trying to process this. This is legitimately a nightmare scenario. The ML and automation systems here are being used in conjunction with human policy decisions to turn a military intelligence function into an accountability sink. This is how you square the circle and turn a self-defense force into an agent of ethnic cleansing without needing to change the low-level organization to effect that goal. Everybody gets to maintain plausible deniability just enough that they can answer any uncomfortable questions and justify their actions to themselves, and by the time anyone starts to really question or investigate those justifications the job is largely done. I don’t know that I could construct a clearer example of how this technology can be used to the worst possible effect.

  • @[email protected]
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    81 year ago

    with advent of HapsburgGPT inevitable, what’s the next overhyped dumb thing cryptobros turned promptfondlers will turn to?

    • David GerardOPM
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      71 year ago

      they’ve been trying quantum but as awesome as quantum computing will be when it arrives, it’ll be a bit obvious that in 2024, these expensive lab toys can’t quite factor numbers so high as 35

      • @[email protected]
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        71 year ago

        nanomaterials got worn out already? i mean these are real but quite underwhelming, it’s always some sensor or shiny powder, not nanomachines

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        What’s wrong with the weed advice? Seems reasonable enough to me.

        The 2 page treatise on inequality which is primarily impotent faffing about from “first principles” definitely hurt me though

        • @[email protected]
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          61 year ago

          the psychoactive effects are quite subjective (and no one-size fits all), so I find the stated-as-fact/certainty of tone there a bit of a waste

          (it is also a very common enough thing in many communities of people that partake in psychoactives, but, yeah)

    • @[email protected]
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      91 year ago

      I don’t understand the logic behind the playlists in nightclubs.

      (my emphasis)

      that’s your problem right there bud

      • @[email protected]
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        As somebody who amateur DJ’ed (badly, very badly I must add, I’m not suddenly cool, more the reverse):

        I don’t understand the logic behind the playlists in nightclubs. IMO, the choice of music is often quite bad, it leans heavily towards repetitive EDM, the playlists could consist of far more interesting music

        This is such a revealing thing. And the theorizing after it on why bars do this is even more revealing (he could have just asked). But yeah people don’t go to bars for interesting new music, they come for the socializing, which is a lot easier if everybody can dance along with the music, or just nod along with it if it is more a socializing place. Sometimes there also isn’t a plan but just ‘we should get a DJ’.

        The whole list is a collection of ‘I have no empathy and I also never thought about asking people about these things’ btw. I really hope this is a teenager.

        • Mike Knell
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          101 year ago

          @Soyweiser @gerikson Plus the sets of “people who can DJ competently” and “people who are convinced that they should be allowed to DJ in public” do not, unfortunately, overlap completely.

            • @[email protected]
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              61 year ago

              I guess he doesn’t realize that everyone has a different idea of what music is interesting, and the big nightclubs have to go for the lowest common denominator in order to keep up sales.

              • @[email protected]
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                31 year ago

                I kept with the “this has definitely seen mass consciousness” options to really hammer down the point ;D

  • @[email protected]
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    111 year ago

    So, a lesswrong suggests gathering “The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject,” where “tacit knowledge” is defined as “knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction”. The low-hanging fruit is that the recommendations under “Finance” are Keith “Roaring Kitty” Gill of GameStop fame… and Martin Shkreli.

    The higher-hanging fruit is the seeming conviction that just because a lesswrong saw somebody drone on about a thing in a YouTube video, it can’t be explained in written words.

    • David GerardOPM
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      41 year ago

      Shkreli is probably good for teaching you how to use Excel at 90wpm?

        • @[email protected]
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          51 year ago

          it strikes me that there’s quite a similarity in how the lesswrongs have this continuous drive for so-called “secret knowledge” to how others are about sacred geometry and “hidden universe secrets”. anyone else pick up on something like that?

          • @[email protected]
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            61 year ago

            I think of it as an evolved version of what a lot of the new age cults did with quantum woo — it’s a thin veneer of knowledge designed to trick folks who think they’re too smart for religion into a religious mindset. the Rationalist version of the veneer is particularly thick, but the end goal is the same: Magic is Real and You Can Be The Gandalf