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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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    13 hours ago

    we finally posted Dizā€™s LLM logic puzzle post to Pivot to AI! Letā€™s see if this draws flocks of excited new users to awful.systems ā€¦ weā€™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 youā€™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.

    • self@awful.systems
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      the only other thing on there is also confusing as fuck:

      ā€Mirrorsā€ is one of our services that developers and non-developers could use on their websites or in their favorite web browsers. It can reduce server load by acting as an extra caching layer for every direct link available on your website.

      All data will be cached for 86400 seconds or 1.00 day(s), and distributed globally, effectively increasing performance and reliability, which will lead to an improved user experience.

      so, ah, essentially a demo web app supposedly running at CDN scale, and supposedly powered by AI (to do what? this is not answered, of course). this is almost definitely just some basic cloud shit someone spun up, but like, why? thereā€™s money in it if all this shit is logging DNS queries and web site accesses to sell to advertisers or for other much more nefarious purposes (or theyā€™re doing injection on high value targets), but surely people who change their DNS settings and developers arenā€™t stupid enough to fall for this just cause it says itā€™s AIā€¦ right?

      Q: Is this really free?

      A: If itā€™s not, you should already see a Pricing page.

      this really is the slimiest way to avoid saying ā€œitā€™s free until we say it isnā€™tā€

        • self@awful.systems
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          2 days ago

          I got curious and looked up both IPs associated with the domain name and it is in fact just CloudFlare

          also, their DNS-over-HTTPS (this is new to me but I stay the fuck away from cloudflare and it looks like a standard theyā€™ve pushed for) endpoint is just the 1.1.1.1 one with the domain name changed, but the AdGuard and Accelerator ones basically confirm theyā€™re analyzing traffic before passing it off to cloudflare

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
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            a quick check using a canary. test command:

            curl -H 'accept: application/dns-json' 'https://0ms.dev/dns-query?name={snip}.canarytokens.com'
            

            canary trigger:

            geo_info: {'loc': '51.5085,-0.1257', 'org': 'AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.', 'city': 'London', 'country': 'GB', 'region': 'England', 'ip': '141.101.70.74', 'timezone': 'Europe/London', 'postal': 'E1W', 'asn': {'route': '141.101.70.0/24', 'type': 'hosting', 'asn': 'AS13335', 'domain': 'cloudflare.com', 'name': 'Cloudflare, Inc.'}}
            

            so, yeah, the actual resolve is being done by cloudflare servers too - itā€™s not even just a cf frontproxy to a different backend service. could be done with cf workers or something, I imagine, would need to test a bit further to know/try see

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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            thatā€™s fabulously odious!

            yeah, think iā€™ll be writing this one up for the weekend

            this sort of thing does not help me have an anti-carceral attitude

            • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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              This is slightly weird. Thereā€™s a company called ā€œDNSfilterā€ thatā€™s been advertising itself for a few years as an ā€œAI-powered DNS resolverā€ - since well before the present hype. I suspect their ā€œAIā€ bit is threat detection with machine learning in. They appear to be going for the lucrative boring enterprise market.

              This thread suspects the whole 0ms.dev thing was written with LLMs and the ā€œmirrorsā€ bit is basically an open proxy.

              You sure theyā€™re skimming results? I saw what looks like a filter to add to an adblocker ā€¦

              • froztbyte@awful.systems
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                14 hours ago

                and the ā€œmirrorsā€ bit is basically an open proxy

                could test this by setting up a simple example page and seeing the originating source for the traffic

                same technique as previous, using an http (not https) canary:

                geo_info: {'loc': '51.5085,-0.1257', 'org': 'AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.', 'city': 'London', 'country': 'GB', 'region': 'England', 'ip': '141.101.98.196', 'timezone': 'Europe/London', 'postal': 'E1W', 'asn': {'route': '141.101.98.0/24', 'type': 'hosting', 'asn': 'AS13335', 'domain': 'cloudflare.com', 'name': 'Cloudflare, Inc.'}}
                useragent: (no user-agent specified)
                request_headers: {'Host': 'canarytokens.com', 'X-Real-Ip': '141.101.98.196', 'X-Forwarded-For': '2a06:98c0:3600::103, 141.101.98.196', 'X-Forwarded-Host': 'canarytokens.org', 'Connection': 'close', 'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip', 'Cf-Ray': '89f1a3a114752508-LHR', 'X-Forwarded-Proto': 'https', 'Cf-Visitor': '{"scheme":"https"}', 'Cf-Ew-Via': '15', 'Cdn-Loop': 'cloudflare; subreqs=1', 'Cf-Connecting-Ip': '2a06:98c0:3600::103'}
                request_args: {}
                
                • froztbyte@awful.systems
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                  13 hours ago

                  idle thought: since this is (as @self highlighted) effectively an open proxy, you could also just resource-bomb it quite easily

                  not that Iā€™m planning to, but itā€™d be dirt bloody easy and it would be a very quick test as to the claims on the site

              • self@awful.systems
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                You sure theyā€™re skimming results? I saw what looks like a filter to add to an adblocker ā€¦

                see I donā€™t have a smoking gun on this, but if it is a garden variety adblocker and whatever the accelerator does (itā€™s extremely unclear) running on cloudflare workers, they at least have the ability to MiTM and modify DNS queries, and open proxies are always a security nightmare. my impression is the filter list they link is either what that endpoint uses to filter, or itā€™s LLM vomit they kept in because it felt more legitimate.

                this might be worth poking at more in a controlled setting ā€” a command line DNS-over-HTTP client using their endpoints and some exploration of the open proxy with curl (especially with sites that utilize credentials, with great care taken to use disposable accounts for this) might be illuminating

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    3 days ago

    Couldnā€™t find the way to turn this into a pithy blog post so just dumping it here:

    does anyone else feel that the rationalists want a future of a billion trillion virtual humans, each and every one with an immutable gender bit set?

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      Yeah, in my opinion Slatestarcodex also said something like that, that the idea of Rationalism lead to transphobia. (others read that part as being more anti-transphobia, or with a more positive slant re Rationalism/Scott).

      Not a huge surprise if you fetishise math and numbers, and miss the point of seeing like a state.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      Case in point, or the exception that proves the rule: Is being a trans woman (or just low-T) +20 IQ?

      Warning: This post might be depressing to read for everyone except trans women.

      Actual warning: This post and the comments is a particularly bad example of rationalists being red-pilled sexists. Even by rationalist standards. Donā€™t say I didnā€™t warn you.


      But yeah this goes way back and is really enmeshed in their worldview. Robin Hanson has been blogging terrible takes about gender for almost 20 years on Overcoming Bias, which Lesswrong split off from.

    • ebu@awful.systems
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      it is a little entertaining to hear them do extended pontifications on what society would look like if we had pocket-size AGI, life-extension or immortality tech, total-immersion VR, actually-good brain-computer interfaces, mind uploading, etc. etc. and then turn around and pitch a fit when someone says ā€œokay so imagine if there were a type of person that wasnā€™t a guy or a girlā€

      • mountainriver@awful.systems
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        Shouldnā€™t they be fans of The Culture? And didnā€™t The Culture have people changing gender for any reason (including curiosity), and it was accepted?

        (It was years since I read those books, so I could confuse it with something else.)

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          Shouldnā€™t they be fans of The Culture?

          I always assume that a large part of Rationalism is intellectual masturbatory contrarianism. (Aka contrarianism to make yourself feel smarter and better. See also how important it is for some of them that Sneerclub is a bunch of losers with no accomplisments (We donā€™t even blog!)). So I doubt it.

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            holy fuck, Yud criticizing Banks is fucking exhausting, and I keep getting angry seeing this barely readable shithead try to tear down the work of a sci-fi author he clearly doesnā€™t like because people keep bringing up the Culture novels as a counter to his horseshit, and because theyā€™re more fun and fulfilling to read than Yudā€™s nonsense ever will be

            so I tapped out early and quote mined the 400 years part:

            They live, in perfect health, for generally around four hundred years before choosing to die (I donā€™t quite understand why they would, but this is low-grade transhumanism weā€™re talking about).

            yud. buddy. that novel explains why they would in the same chapter that describes a Culture citizen going through with the voluntary decision to die. itā€™s boredom. the major motive force behind almost everything the Culture does is boredom, because its constituent beings want for nothing. the civilization as a whole knows that existence for human-like beings becomes intensely, painfully boring (just like reading yudā€™s output!) around the 400 year mark, and the Culture has both removed any stigma around voluntarily ending a painful existence and any reason to prolong it past your own comfort. after that, you can enjoy an afterlife of being acausally pampered by every networked Culture Mind.

            thereā€™s even a version of the voluntary death and afterlife process for entire galactic civilizations called Subliming, where every natural and artificial lifeform in your civilization becomes a singular being of pure energy and transitions into another dimension. just like with uploaded organic beings, Sublimed civilizations can still influence our dimension, but almost always donā€™t care to. the Culture is actually considered somewhat tacky by other galactic civilizations for being at a fairly late stage in its development without Subliming. they know how to do it, so chances are they just arenā€™t bored enough yet.

            yud omits this (probably, Iā€™m not gonna go back and check), but anyone who chooses an infinite existence at the cost of their own sanity is considered a fucking weirdo who should be sneered at. the Culture isnā€™t gonna end your existence (they donā€™t do murder, and thereā€™s a possibly even bigger stigma against forcibly altering a sentient beingā€™s mind) but theyā€™re also not gonna actively enable you to self-harm.

            • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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              Subliming

              Somebody in the comments points this out and he gets annoyed with this as some sort of literary device to not do the hard transhumanist work or something.

              Which is odd, as subliming is fine as if this wasnā€™t there humans minds and mind minds could do a singularity style intelligence explosion afterwards you couldnā€™t describe things because of the singularity style event. And Banks wrote science fiction which is always about humans, and not ā€˜the period after beings become so powerful we cannot really tell what is going on anymore as the increase of intelligence has reached infinityā€™

              Subliming sidesteps this problem because it wants to be interesting fiction, and not weird gobbledygook of incomprehensible alien minds. Yud basically forgets that The Culture is science fiction written for real human beings who live now.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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            But even that was optional right, it was just the cultural standard, nobody forced them to do it.

            It gets even odder in a way, iirc the more destructive megolomaniacs (or cult leaders or whatever) who couldnā€™t really accept that they are not allowed to use up massive amounts of resources/lives of other people were kindly suggested to play out these fantasies in VR, which I assume works on standard science fiction logic that it can be sped up, so those 400 years can stretch a long time in the computonium. (So the culture includes the LW virtual lives fantasy).

            (Iā€™m also pretty sure Yud is wrong about the Culture, iirc living by your strength certainly is a thing, it just has a fallback where you donā€™t die if you fail via the robots etc of the Culture (And I think even that could be turned off in most cases)).

            Anyway the article linked, and the conversation with the straw SF fan (who is heated while he stays calm) says more about Yud than the Culture.

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
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            2 days ago

            select the Banks extract, pass through wc: 1677

            select the yudā€¦emanation, do same: 13442

            at this stage itā€™s likely the basilisk will torture him purely for entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.

            • o7___o7@awful.systems
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              entropic revenge. information-theoretic retribution.

              Thereā€™s a metal ballad in there, I swear.

              • froztbyte@awful.systems
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                other album track titles:

                • cascading infinity
                • which mirror is me? [am I? - interlude]
                • the quintillionth heartbreak
                • lies of being
          • gerikson@awful.systems
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            What is it with Rats extolling The Player of Games above other Culture novels? Itā€™s the one HN likes best too. Itā€™s probably the only one Iā€™ve not re-read. Maybe itā€™s how the main character is kinda seduced by the parody of patriarchal capitalism in the culture heā€™s coerced to infiltrate.

            Personally I think Use of Weapons is the best one.

            • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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              i would think they didnā€™t read it carefully, and/or until the end, and donā€™t realise that ultimately itā€™s gurgehā€™s revulsion at azadā€™s societal rules, and him fully embracing the cultureā€™s values, that allows him to win and burn the empire to pieces.

              • gerikson@awful.systems
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                Obvsly youā€™ve read the novel more than I have considering your nickā€¦ I might have to give it another go.

                OTOH Iā€™d rather re-read the non-M novels first, especially Espedair Street.

                • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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                  tbh i used mawhrin-skel just because i needed a new drone, and twitter (at the time) bonked my skaffen-amtiskaw persona ā€“ i named the murdering british soldier that cannot be named in the united kingdom (david james cleary); i definitely value other culture books more than player of games. :-)

  • 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!

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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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 ā€˜vacationā€™ (summer recess), so nothing will be done. ā€œLekker gewerkt jongensā€

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        Sounds like a real ā€œDog caught the carā€ situation. Do you think theyā€™ll be able to cause much permanent damage to the institutions before they get turfed out?

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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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 donā€™t really seem competent enough yet to do real damage. (yeah, Iā€™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 ā€˜ah soon we are going to bash the gays againā€™).

          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 canā€™t get jack shit done. (Which, as always with protofascists, will be purely blamed on others).

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            15 hours ago

            ā€˜ah soon we are going to bash the gays againā€™

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

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

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      When I eventually shuffle off this mortal coil (not any time soon donā€™t worry!) Iā€™ll do so with a cell-phone in my hand, open to whatever god-forsaken replacement for the American healthcare system Silicon Valley dreams up.

      My family would find me lying there unconscious. The animated corporate mascot, looking slightly uncertain but still happy, would just repeat in a sing-song cartoonish voice ā€œYou might want to check your blood pressure!ā€ and ā€œyou still havenā€™t completed todayā€™s tasks for Health+ points! But donā€™t worry, thereā€™s still time!ā€

      Eventually they manage to shut Healthy Bob up; but continue to receive birthday reminders from Pinstagrambook long after my passing, with no setting to turn it off.

  • skillissuer
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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 canā€™t put my finger on (maybe just by association)

    • skillissuer
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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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        Iā€™ve noticed something similar with a lot of folks on the younger side in tech, although I havenā€™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 itā€™s not quite so much fygm as ā€œjustā€ 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. Iā€™m not sure if itā€™s right, or applicable particularly here)

        (thereā€™s also a form of that which is quite strong in USA-based folks, but I donā€™t think ludic hails from the states)

        • skillissuer
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          what i mean, he comes off as a benevolent grifter and i think itā€™s sleazy

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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    3 days ago

    me talking to someone after describing a dumb and horrible LW thing:

    i feel like iā€™m describing a livejournal fanfic cult, which i guess i am

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      one of the worse things about LW is that even just explaining their beliefs to uninvolved people makes you look like a complete weirdo

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        Iā€™ve (irl) met a ā€œpart-timeā€ LW reader and tried to have a conversation about some of the shit, and ā€¦ same experience

        just utterly had no ability to even receive the information about the longstanding sexual abuse or statements of yud being a charisma-for-nerds grifter

        (had an earlier conversation with ā€˜em some many months prior calling out many of issues in coiner world after theyā€™d gone laser-eyes having read the bitcoin paper, and they eventually got their head out of their ass, soā€¦. Iā€™m hopeful itā€™s not all lost yet)

    • deborah@awful.systems
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      as a former member of multiple livejournal fanfic circlejerks, I am so sad that LW didnā€™t join the rest of LJ in (1) getting off or (2) being mean on fandom_wank, and instead decided to create the torment nexus.

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          hahaha no failfandomanon is extremely at Dreamwidth, but I think the wankiest people mostly moved to other places in recent years.

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    Aaaand, there it is.

    I remember I used to watch this guyā€™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 heā€™s making a nonprofit with githubā€™s former CEO, there is absolutely zero barriers to the exact same bullshit from all the companies he complains about.

  • 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 itā€™s the fuckin LD50 gallery, straight up NRX. Judgement, PDF

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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        4 days ago

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

    • 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.

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          They will certainly win a lot of drinks in any ā€˜who has had the dumbest clientsā€™ contests.

          ā€˜And then we found the ā€œIā€™m definitely a Nazi now lolā€ messageā€™ 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

    • self@awful.systems
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      hahahaha happy garbage day everybody

      The logs also show Ms Power claiming that ā€œthe social disapproval for ā€˜racismā€™ is a psyop to stop people realising that there are alien and fairy racesā€, and that ā€œblack and white were alien races and very differentā€.

      wait, is believing in fairies as an adult a weird racist thing? fuck, itā€™d kind of make sense if the people Iā€™ve known who just causally slipped ā€œby the way fairies are realā€ into casual conversation were doing a dogwhistle I didnā€™t pick up on

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        one day Iā€™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.

      • skillissuer
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        the original recipe nazis were deep into occultism so maybe

      • Jonathan Hendry@iosdev.space
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        @self

        This is one of those David Icke things where youā€™re not sure if reptilians/fairies/aliens mean reptilians/fairies/aliens or if theyā€™re some kind of code or euphemism.

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          If you always bet on ā€œeverything confusing that weirdos say is a euphemism or proxy for Jews or Black peopleā€, 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: itā€™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

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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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              ā€œah ah but he wrote books - that surely canā€™t be the works of a person frothing in racism!ā€ is something Iā€™ve heard from a surprising number of people Iā€™ve met

              • skillissuer
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                if racism made people illiterate every facebook group and every youtube comment section would look completely different

      • 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.

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        I know someone whoā€™s a practicing christian and has said theyā€™ve seen angels

        technical, intelligent person on all fronts otherwise. I have ā€¦ not pushed matters

        (e: not claiming this person I reference is racist, more that Iā€™ve heard some really fucking kooky shit in many spectra, so I donā€™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)

        • mountainriver@awful.systems
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          I think the connection isnā€™t with belief in the supernatural, but with the specific belief that there are things around us that look like people but arenā€™t people. I can easily see how the latter at minimum makes one very susceptible for racism.

          If people start believing that androids are a real thing (not the OS, human like robots), itā€™s only a matter of time before people will be accused of being androids.

        • 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)

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          given some of the other things Iā€™ve seen from the guardian, not sure that wouldā€™ve necessarily been a contraindicator

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            @froztbyte

            I mean they didnā€™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 arenā€™t your friendā€ 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 ā€œby the way fairies are realā€

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

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          so I think I must just have one of those faces cause itā€™s been something that multiple former friends have revealed to me, and itā€™s usually a weird show of trust? and itā€™s always something like ā€œyou know, I just think fairies must be real, like theyā€™ve got to be out there? you know?ā€

          and in all cases Iā€™ve gone ā€œā€¦oh thatā€™s coolā€ and mentally earmarked that person as ā€œdo not trust with heavy machineryā€

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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            i mean, i have a friend who is literally a UFO religion believer, but theyā€™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 theyā€™re normal and you only find out about their interest in UFOs because itā€™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 thatā€™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 youā€™ve heard all month while looking for an escape route, without making it too obvious because youā€™re fairly certain theyā€™re armed. they will later go on the internet and call you an NPC who refuses to wake up because you wouldnā€™t discuss lizard people with them.

              • froztbyte@awful.systems
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                you only find out about their interest in UFOs because itā€™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 donā€™t know if Iā€™ve actually run into this kind of conversation. I donā€™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 donā€™t know exactly the kind of person youā€™re referring toā€¦ :|

                • froztbyte@awful.systems
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                  also

                  without making it too obvious because youā€™re fairly certain theyā€™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

                  itā€™s a whole fucked-up 'ole dynamic when you need to ā€œwatch your backā€ in the most very literal sense because you didnā€™t eat some bozoā€™s shit :|

          • 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, thereā€™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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            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

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                  Iā€™ve never had the full on ā€œletā€™s be nazis togetherā€ invite but Iā€™ve had several people launch unprompted into ā€œnow that itā€™s just us white folks we can talk for realā€ mode. internally they must have been like ā€œI see white skin, we are clear for takeoff, 54321ā€

                  funnily enough it hasnā€™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

    • 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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    Ian Moss on Twitter

    YouGov just asked me ā€œif there were a general election tomorrow which way would you voteā€ and I felt sad that the question machine had been working towards this moment all its life and then didnā€™t have the sentience to know it had finally made it.

  • 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 ā€œmass extinction eventā€ for start-ups and encouraged them to cut costs. Last week, he declared that era over and christened this time the ā€œGreat Reawakening,ā€ encouraging companies to ā€œpour gasā€ on growth, particularly around artificial intelligence

    jesus fucking christ these people would love to call it the enlightenment or something, wouldnā€™t they?

    ā€œSam Altman canceled the recession,ā€ joked Siqi Chen, founder of the start-up Runway Financial

    one day soon Iā€™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 ā€˜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 itā€™s at!

  • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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    Iā€™m so sick of ā€œif only we had more humanities in education the elites wouldnā€™t be fucking up the world.ā€ that has nothing to do with reality, it never has, it never will

    • 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.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          I have such sights to show you And more

          About half of evopsychgoogleā€™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 donā€™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).