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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • skillissuerEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    Deep Research is the AI slop of academia — low-quality research-slop built for people that don’t really care about quality or substance, and it’s not immediately obvious who it’s for.

    it’s weird that Ed stops there, since answer almost writes itself. ludic had a bit about how in companies bigger than three guys in a shed, people who sign software contracts don’t use that software in any normal way;

    The idea of going into something knowing about it well enough to make sure the researcher didn’t fuck something up is kind of counter to the point of research itself.

    conversely, if you have no idea what are you doing, you won’t be able to tell if machine generated noise is in any way relevant or true

    The whole point of hiring a researcher is that you can rely on their research, that they’re doing work for you that would otherwise take you hours.

    but but, this lying machine can output something in minutes so this bullshit generator obviously makes human researchers obsolete. this is not for academia because it’s utterly unsuitable and google scholar beats it badly anyway; this is not for wide adoption because it’s nowhere near free tier; this is for idea guys who have enough money to shell out $whatever monthly subscription and prefer to set a couple hundred of dollars on fire instead of hiring a researcher/scientist/contractor. especially keeping in mind that contractor might tell them something they don’t want to hear, but this lmgtfy x lying box (but worse, because it pulls lots of seo spam) won’t

    OpenAI’s next big thing is the ability to generate a report that you would likely not be able to use in any meaningful way anywhere, because while it can browse the web and find things and write a report, it sources things based on what it thinks can confirm its arguments rather than making sure the source material is valid or respectable.

    e: this is also insidious and potent attack surface marketing opportunity against clueless monied people who trust these slop machines for some reason. and it might be exploitable by tuning seo just right