Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9 March 2025
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9 March 2025
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.)
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Starting things off here with a sneer thread from Baldur Bjarnason:
Keeping up a personal schtick of mine, here's a random prediction:
If the arts/humanities gain a significant degree of respect in the wake of the AI bubble, it will almost certainly gain that respect at the expense of STEM's public image.
Focusing on the arts specifically, the rise of generative AI and the resultant slop-nami has likely produced an image of programmers/software engineers as inherently incapable of making or understanding art, given AI slop's soulless nature and inhumanly poor quality, if not outright hostile to art/artists thanks to gen-AI's use in killing artists' jobs and livelihoods.
That article is hilarious.
So I devised an alternative: listening to the work as an audiobook. I already did this for the Odyssey, which I justified because that work was originally oral. No such justification for the Bible. Oh well.
Apparently, having a book read at you without taking notes or research is doing humanities.
[...] I wrote down a few notes on the text I finished the day before. I’m still using Obsidian with the Text Generator plugin. The Judeo-Christian scriptures are part of the LLM’s training corpus, as is much of the commentary around them.
Oh, we are taking notes? If by taking notes you mean prompting spicy autocomplete for a summary of the text you didn't read. I am sure all your office colleagues are very impressed, but be careful around the people outside of the IT department they might have an actual humanities degree. You wouldn't want to publicly make a fool out of yourself, would you?
If the arts/humanities gain a significant degree of respect
I can't see that happening - my degree has gotten me laughed out of interviews before, and even with a AI implosion I can't see things changing.