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 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.

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

  • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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    4 hours ago

    Today on highlighting random rat posts from ACX:

    poster thinks the future of llm training is contingent on focusing early on philosophical and theological text because they match the causality of human experience

    (Current first post on todayā€™s SSC open thread)

    On slightly more relevant news the main post is scoot asking if anyone can put him in contact with someone from a major news publication so he can pitch an op-ed by a notable ex-OpenAI researcher that will be ghost-written by him (meaning siskind) on the subject of how they (the ex researcher) opened a forecast market that predicts ASI by the end of Trumpā€™s term, so be on the lookout for that when it materializes I guess.

    • gerikson@awful.systems
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      4 hours ago

      scoot asking if anyone can put him in contact with someone from a major news publication

      how about the New York Times

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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    11 hours ago

    In the process of looking for ways to link up with homeschool parents that arenā€™t doing it for culty reasons, I accidentally discovered the existence of a small but active subreddit for ā€œprogressive monarchistsā€. Itā€™s titled r/progressivemonarchists, because their imagination in naming conventions only slightly outatrips their imagination for forms of government. Given how our usual sneer fodder overlaps with nrx I figured there are others here who I can inflict this headache on.

    • bitofhope@awful.systems
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      7 hours ago

      A silhouette of a nuclear family with their heads overlaid by the flags of Australia, Canada, the UK and New Zealand. Above them king Charles of Normal Island holding and umbrella, shielding them from rain labeled "Trumpism and far right ideology".

      Quality shitpost, I could imagine some thirteen year old actually believing this.

      Flags of Spain, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, Denmark, Sweden, the UK, Norway, Andorra, Luxembourg and Belgium. Above the quote: "On the whole the European countries which have most successfully avoided Fascism have been constitutional monarchies" from George Orwell

      Yea, no fascism whatsoever took place in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, or Belgium during WW2, in which they were all very successfully avoiding being occupied by fascists.

      Extra points to Spain who already avoided succumbing to their own homegrown brand of fascism before the Nazi German invasion of Poland, and where they avoided having fascists in power all the way until the 1970s. Thereā€™s a book I quite like about the war where that happened called Homage to Catalonia. I wonder if Orwell ever read it.

      Missing from the list is Italy, which is no longer a constitutional monarchy, but used to be until 1946, which is why they were so good at avoiding fascism they even named it.

      This might take the cake for the dumbest take Iā€™ve seen from George Orwell and not for a lack of competition.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    12 hours ago

    (Reposting from the last thread)

    Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero

    My investigation tracked to you [Outlier.ai] as the source of problems - where your instructional videos are tricking people into creating those issues to - apparently train your AI.

    I couldnā€™t locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various ā€œtasksā€ to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.

    Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera ā€œdeviceā€ to record ones every waking moment

    P.S. sorry for the linkedin link behind the mastodon link, but shared suffering and all that. I had to read ā€œUber for AI code dataā€ so now you do too.

    • nightsky@awful.systems
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      19 minutes ago

      I had to read ā€œUber for AI code dataā€ so now you do too.

      Wow, what a fractal of cursed meaning. I donā€™t even understand what it really means, but it feels like understanding it any further would cause considerable psychic damage.