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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • @froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    13•10 months ago

    from the (current?) prick-in-chief at YC in this post:

    and everyone in our industry owes a debt to open source builders

    nice of you to admit it. now maybe pay down some of that debt by using sending of your piles of money to those projects

    oh, what’s that, you only want to continue taking from it and then charging other people service rent, without ever contributing back? oh okay then

    • David GerardMEnglish
      10•10 months ago

      a debt in the special non-financial sense

      the miracle of VC is learning to write like ChatGPT

      • @froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        9•10 months ago

        ah, the special non-financial sense, you mean blood debts? I think many of us will be happy to hold tan et co to account for blood debts

    • Ruby Jones
      10•10 months ago

      @blakestacey Super depressed that people were using the rubbish plagiarism machines to edit Wikipedia anyway. I don’t understand the point of contributing if you don’t think *you* have anything to contribute without that garbage.

      • @Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        8•10 months ago

        There are the weirdest people who make ‘content’ out there. For example, I saw a ‘how to start the game’ joke guide on steam, so I went to their page to block them (to see if this also blocks the guides from popping up, doesn’t seem so) and they had made hundreds of these guides, all just copy pasted shit. And there were more people doing the exact same thing. Bizarre shit. (Prob related to the thing where you can give people stickers, gamification was a mistake).

    • Resuna
      7•10 months ago

      @blakestacey

      I am disappoint.

      “The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.”

  • @BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    13•10 months ago

    (Another post so soon? Another post so soon.)

    “Gen AI competes with its training data, exhibit 1,764”:

    exhibit 1764

    Also got a quick sidenote, which spawned from seeing this:

    This is pure gut feeling, but I suspect that “AI training” has become synonymous with “art theft/copyright infringement” in the public consciousness.

    Between AI bros publicly scraping against people’s wishes (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C), the large-scale theft of data which went to produce these LLMs’ datasets, and the general perception that working in AI means you support theft (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), I wouldn’t blame Joe Public for treating AI as inherently infringing.

    • @froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      7•10 months ago

      “curated”

      it shouldn’t surprise me that the dipshit who was massively involved in “solving language” doesn’t understand the meaning of words, but grrrrr

      (and I say that as an armchair linguist who understands that language is as people use it (fuck prescriptivism))

      • @V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        7•10 months ago

        dipshit who was massively involved in “solving language”

        “In the what now?”, he said, voice trembling with a mixture of horror and excitement

            • @froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
              7•10 months ago

              no, that’s a personal extrapolation/framing characterising some of the shit I’ve seen from these morons

              (they engaged with very few linguists in the making of their beloved Large Language Models, instead believing they can just data-bruteforce it; this plan gone as well as has been observed)

    • @blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      10•10 months ago

      I researched cool topics using ChatGPT, Claude, Google

      That’s not what research means, you embossed carbuncle.

      I linked NotebookLM to the Wikipedia entry of each topic and generated the podcast audio

      It’s fucking James Somerton with extra steps!

    • @Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7•10 months ago

      The horror. Replacing the joy of looking into something and making your findings available in your own style to others replaced by autogenerated slop. And soon this will be all over the place, we will look back on the past period of low effort clickbait with nostalgia.

    • @bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      11•10 months ago

      I’m not in support of Effective Altruism as an organization, I just understand what it’s like to get caught up in fear and worry over if what you’re doing and donating is actually helping. I donate to a variety of causes whenever I have the extra money, and sometimes it can be really difficult to assess which cause needs your money more. Due to this, I absolutely understand how innocent people get caught up in EA in a desire to do the maximum amount of good for the world. However, EA as an organization is incredibly shady. u/Evinceo provided this great article: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/effective-altruism-is-a-welter-of-fraud-lies-exploitation-and-eugenic-fantasies/

      Man, that hits close to home. It’s a hard sell to sneer at people ostensibly doing their best to do good. Any kind of altruism, particularly one ostensibly focused on at least trying to be effective, feels like a such a rare treat that I feel like the worst kind of buzzkill letting newcomers know what cynical doomer ass death obsessed sex cult (and not even in a kinkily cool way*) a big chunk of EA and other TESCRL are. I can relate to them in so many ways, especially remembering what my teenage self was like, but at the same time it’s weirdly hard to articulate how immature those opinions (some of which) I used to, and they continue to hold, are**.

      Anyway, charity is a symptom of the failure of society. Luxury is a human right. Profit is exploitation. Nobody gets a billion dollars without mass homicide.

      * but unfortunately often in an uncool, very rapey way
      ** not all of them, there are levels of cringe I managed to avoid even in my teenage years

    • @swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      9•10 months ago

      It is worth mentioning that this is the question that catalysed the SRD post:

      Most Effective Aid to Gaza?

  • @froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    13•10 months ago

    as seen via jwz, the tail wagging the dog continues (archive) at mozilla

    “if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em” but the wrong way around. I guess they got tired of begging google for money?

    And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet

    this tracks analogously to something I’ve been saying for a while as well, but with some differences. one of the most notable is the misrepresentation here of “the internet”, in the stead of “all the entities playing the online advertising game to extract from everyone else”

    • Sailor Sega SaturnEnglish
      12•10 months ago

      Thanks I hate it.

      [Advertising is] the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.

      Content is a scarce resource y’know. Heaven forbid the content farms go out of business; or we might end up having to read Sherlock Holmes isekai fanfiction rather than a content farm’s two paragraphs and three screen-fulls of ads surrounding the tweet du jour. That would be terrible actually quite nice.

      We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history

      WTF. How is it possible for a company to be this self-congratulatory about entering the advertising space?! Someone needs to fork Firefox.

    • @o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      6•10 months ago

      I guess they got tired of begging google for money?

      If the stars come right, there may not be a Google to beg for money

  • @swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    19•10 months ago

    I’m just thinking about all the reply guys that come here defending autoplag, specifically with this idea:

    “GPT is great when I want to turn a list of bullet points into an eloquent email”

    Hey, you butts, just send the bullet points! What are you, a high schooler? Nobody has time for essays, much less autoplagged slop.

    • @zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      16•10 months ago

      No no no it’s fine! You get the word shuffler to deshuffle the—eloquently—shuffled paragraphs back into nice and tidy bullet points. And I have an idea! You could get an LLM to add metadata to the email to preserve the original bullet points, so the recipient LLM has extra interpolation room to choose to ignore the original list, but keep the—much more correct and eloquent, and with much better emphasis—hallucinated ones.

  • @froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    20•10 months ago

    from this post (archive)

    App developers think that’s a bogus argument. Mr. Bier told me that data he had seen from start-ups he advised suggested that contact sharing had dropped significantly since the iOS 18 changes went into effect, and that for some apps, the number of users sharing 10 or fewer contacts had increased as much as 25 percent.

    aww, does the widdle app’s business model collapse completely once it can’t harvest data? how sad

    this reinforces a suspicion that I’ve had for a while: the only reason most people put up with any of this shit is because it’s an all or nothing choice and they don’t know the full impact (because it’s intentionally obscured). the moment you give them an overt choice that makes them think about it, turns out most are actually not fine with the state of affairs

    • Tek say vote
      5•10 months ago

      @froztbyte I’m so unsympathetic to that notion.

      Also, literally zero of my friends here came via my phone’s contacts.

    • Florian Egermann
      9•10 months ago

      @froztbyte @jwz Not the biggest Apple fan, but you got to give them credit: with privacy changes in their OSs, they regularly expose all the predatory practices lots of social media companies are running on.

        • Florian Egermann
          4•10 months ago

          @bullspit @froztbyte @jwz Well, it‘s the „SMS“-app on iOS, so it should have access to the contacts?
          I believe they made their bet on privacy (since competing on features, UX and especially price is a loosing game).

          • Cuban's Bullspit
            4•10 months ago

            @fleg @froztbyte @jwz Yes, the “Only” allowable SMS app which also happens to replace SMS with rich and secure instant messaging, as long as you own an Apple device.
            I believe Apple play the Privacy card as it’s their best excuse to reduce intraoperatively and maintain their lockin/walled garden under the disguise of “we care about your privacy” (and don’t want to compete on features, UX an especially price)

        • @V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          8•10 months ago

          That has been Apple’s model for a long time. Privacy restrictions for thee in my walled garden, but I am the benevolent overlord that sees all.

          Still, in the current system Apple is the only thing holding back the floodgates? If there was no Apple in the committee to tell Google to go fuck themselves on their insane browser proposals we’d all be stuck in the all-encompassing Google walled garden. It’s better for us to have two monarchs battling it out than one insane absolutist.

          I have no idea what could be done to break this walled bullshit altogether, though, much less what any of us individually could do. Like a completely open-source (both software and hardware) smartphone that is actually usable and multiple bank robberies to finance marketing and sales for it?

    • Olivier Roux (moose)
      6•10 months ago

      @froztbyte exactly. I resisted for years using WhatsApp because it wouldn’t even run without full access to your address book (this has now changed). I mean, I have client contacts on my phone, I (and they) don’t want to share them with a random social network that will probably resell them. Also a dodgy legal situation, esp. re GDPR: those people in your address book didn’t give you permission to share their contacts with a 3rd party company.

    • Resuna
      9•10 months ago

      @froztbyte @blakestacey

      There are so many features of modern applications and platforms that I have to wonder why anybody would have thought it was a good idea, this is just one of them. Sharing your contacts shouldn’t even be an option. As somebody else in this thread put it, it’s not your data.

    • @Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      9•10 months ago

      Cloudflare is such a weird company in various ways. Saying loudly that they can’t judge groups when people ask them not to support the neo-nazis, harassers and worse (they have moved on this under pressure, but it takes a lot of pressure). But then they do this.

      • @FredFig@awful.systemsEnglish
        8•10 months ago

        Wasn’t the first time he shut down 8chan (or was it Kiwifarms? Something along the lines), he immediately came out to say “It’s really bad that I have the power to take down a website of shitheads.” Just seemed like everything about his ideology is confused.

        • @rook@awful.systemsEnglish
          4•10 months ago

          There’s nothing confused about his ideology. Anything to do with porn or sex work will get kicked to the curb without a second thought, but fascists and bigots will be defended up to the point where they try to restart sectarian violence in Ireland (which was the final act of kiwi farms, from recollection. Presumably even the ceo couldn’t defend them at that point, though I bet he tried).

          Dude doesn’t give a shit about free speech, or lament the power he’s ended up with. He just really loves fascism.

          • @froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            2•10 months ago

            Anything to do with porn or sex work will get kicked to the curb without a second thought

            can’t say why but I can say this is not completely/100% true; however

            but fascists and bigots will be defended up to the point where they try to restart sectarian violence

            yup

            please don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to bat for cloudflare. the company is detestable and problematic in extremely many dimensions

            in this particular case and wrt the dude himself, it indeed appears to be much about the power. in the case of the commentary FredFig references, I suspect that came through a lens of “it is bad that I can do this [where “this” is “acquiesce to societal pressure to silence people I don’t wish to silence”]”. didn’t see the comment at the time though, so I have no idea if it was dogwhistled or what at the time

        • @bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
          6•10 months ago

          Nobody told him to make his CDN so dominant in the market. He kinda chose to have this power. If you think Cloudflare’s services are some kind of a universal inalienable right, make them free, you pussy. Be a philantropist, share that sweet bandwidth with the poor. Gimme a /24, coward. Why are you taking money for a basic necessity, you monster?

          Y’all can thank me for taking down 8ch and KF, because I also do not run hosting infrastructure for either of them. Same goes to all of you who do not run a CDN that welcomes nazi websites. Thank you for your service.

      • SteveEnglish
        6•10 months ago

        I guess I should be clear this is not an endorsement of cloudflare, just fun to see dickheads being dickheads to each other

  • luciole (he/him)English
    8•10 months ago

    Maybe not the right place, not really a sneer but anyways. The Smile (aka Yorke & Greenwood from Radiohead) made a music video with StableDiffusion and I’m pretty bummed out. 😔

      • SteveEnglish
        5•10 months ago

        For real, I can’t find info about this. Can you share a source?

          • SteveEnglish
            7•10 months ago

            Yeah, it doesn’t look good. Both artists are shilling NFTs on their personal profile but only one of them, Ciro Negroni, is openly pro AI. The studio site, weirdcore.tv does have some folio projects credited as being with AI visuals and they also have studio NFT projects. They do seem to specialise in lots of different styles of digital glitch art.

            It doesn’t look good. Especially the lack of questions about AI in the official The Smile tweet thread announcing the video

            Did I say it doesn’t look good?

            Edit: I’d like to know https://x.com/fasterandworse/status/1841878497662283978

          • @Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
            6•10 months ago

            Well to be fair, this kind of weird picture melding is the correct way to use the technology. Though it’s hardly groundbreaking at this point is it, I feel I’ve seen it a million times.

            • @froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
              5•10 months ago

              this was what I was thinking, too. and this particular video doesn’t even seem to make great use of it? it’s extremely milquetoast, doesn’t vary at all, and doesn’t even do anything visually interesting more than once (if that, and that it then just repeats and repeats and repeats and…)

    • @o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      10•10 months ago

      Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

      I’m dead. At least the Rust Evangelism Strike Force finally got to have their theocracy

  • David GerardMEnglish
    9•10 months ago

    I have only just noticed that this is dated a year in the future