Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 September 2024
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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
years ago on a trip to nyc, I popped in at the aws loft. they had a sort of sign-in thing where you had to provide email address, where ofc I provided a catchall (because I figured it was a slurper). why do I tell this mini tale? oh, you know, just sorta got reminded of it:
Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2024 07:22:05 +0000
From: Amazon Web Services <aws-marketing-email-replies@amazon.com>
To: <snip>
Subject: Are you ready to capitalize on generative AI?
there’s no way you did that without consulting copilot or at least ChatGPT. thank you sam altman for finally enabling me to capitalize whole words in my editor!
....this just made me wonder what quotient of all these promptfondlers and promptfans are people who've just never really been able to express emotion (for whatever reason (there are many possible causes, this ain't a judgement about that)), who've found the prompts' effusive supportive "yes, and"-ness to be the first bit of permission they ever got to express
and now my brain hurts because that thought is cursed as fuck
yes, i actually never learned how to capitalize properly, they told me to use capslock and shift, but that makes all the letters come out small still. thanks chatgpt.
my IDE, notepad.exe, didn’t support capitalizing words until they added copilot to it. so therefore qed editors couldn’t do that without LLMs. computer science is so easy!
there's a difference between "barebones"[0] and this shit
[0] - I will grant you that notepad used to be abysmal about handling unicode in the before time, but it's been less-fucked since at least XP or so iirc
Notepad has a right click menu? Mind blown ;). (but yes, sorry im showing my old ass and having decades old software grudges which are not really relevant anymore, I have become that which I hated).