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. Also, happy April Fool's in advance.)
Today on the orange site, an AI bro is trying to reason through why people think he's weird for not disclosing his politics to people he's trying to be friendly with. Previously, he published a short guide on how to talk about politics, which — again, very weird, no possible explanation for this — nobody has adopted. Don't worry, he's well-read:
So far I've only read Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, but can say it is an excellent place to start.
The thread is mostly centered around one or two pearl-clutching conservatives who don't want their beliefs examined:
I find it astonishing that anyone would ask, ["who did you vote for?"] … In my social circle, anyway, the taboo on this question is very strong.
To which the top reply is my choice sneer:
In my friend group it's clear as day: either you voted to kill and deport other people in the friend group or you didn't. Pretty obvious the group would like to know if you're secretly interested in their demise.
Wow, farriers are going crazy with these modern horseshoe designs!
image transcription
Above: a single axis scatter plot. The ends of the axis are labeled "Left" and "Right". Data points are distributed similarly to normal distribution, the center being more concentrated than the extremes. Caption: "What people think the political spectrum is vs What it actually is".
Below: A two-dimensional scatter plot. The ends of the horizontal axis are labeled "Left" and "Right" and the vertical axis is labeled "Independent Thought" at the top and "Groupthink" at the bottom. The data points are evenly distributed inside a bell curve shape, with the peak of the hump at Independent Thought and between Left and Right, and the wide bottom of the bell spanning the whole Left-Right axis at maximum Groupthink.
Data points near the top of the bell (Independent-Center) labeled '"Un-intentional moderates" (from Paul Graham's The Two Kinds of Moderate)'. [Original image uses double quotes around the term Un-intentional moderates and single quotes around the title of Paul Graham's shitpost.]
Data points at the bottom center of the bell (Groupthink-Center) labeled "Intentional moderates".
In the bottom corner a watermark crediting the image to "@shw1nm".
I love the implication that being an independent thinker means agreeing with both the majority and other independent thinkers.
My University Keeps Sending Me Stupid Emails About AI, a continuing series:
From the email:
The debate will be chaired by Michael Pike. Speaking for the motion are Prof. Gregory O'Hare (TCD), Maeve Hynes, Prof. Gary Boyd and Chatgpt assisted by Student Curator Ruan McCabe, all UCD. Speaking against the motion are David Capener (UU), Lucy O'Connell, Peter Cody and Meabh O'Leary, all UCD.
Artificial Intelligence is the future of climate resilient design in the same way that asian pseudo-medicinal ED treatments are the future of the white rhinoceros.
Notwithstanding the subject matter, I feel like I've always gotten limited value from these Oxford-style university debates. KQED used to run a series called Intelligence Squared US that crammed it into an hour, and I shudder to think what that's become in the era of Trump and AI. It seems like a format that was developed to be the intellectual equivalent of intramural sports, complete with a form of scoring. But that contrivance renders it devoid of nuance, and also means it can be used to platform and launder ugly bullshit, since each side has to be strictly pro- or anti-whatever.
Really, it strikes me as a forerunner of the false certainty and point-scoring inherent in Twitter-style short-form discourse. In some ways, the format was unconsciously pared down and plopped online, without any sort of inquiry into its weaknesses. I'd be interested to know if anyone feels any different.
I would also like to complain that I have finally started getting AI summaries in Google, and I may have to switch to a different search engine. Neither wanted nor needed!
AI-Powered Wi-Fi 7 Versatile Outdoor/Indoor Mesh AP
we're at the "the washing machine without a dateclock is marked millenium-bug safe in its marketing brochures" level of stupid
(that might seem like a stupid comparison but it's one of the things I most viscerally remember seeing from that time (when I was still a youngin who was still largely years away from computertouching))
An AI faceswapper/nudifier's database got leaked thanks to its nonexistent security - unsurprisingly, its loaded with explicit images, including massive amounts child porn and almost certainly some revenge porn.
NaNoWriMo? Na, No Mo'. Does this have anything to do with their bungled AI policy? Maybe, maybe not, but hey, the news article that I saw this announcement in thought that it was pertinent to mention.
Not dating your press releases on your own site is a choice. (Lot more places do this and it is driving me slowly mad) So, did they drop this yday? Some weird schrodingers april fools joke deflection attempt?
I am fairly certain that their stupid AI stance at least played a role. I’m part of a largish writing community, where at least several hundred people did NaNo each year, a good part of them donated too. Last year, no one partook, instead we did our own internal thing.
If this happened across other communities too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it did, they must have felt it financially.
It is a CIA psyop to prevent revolutionary thought from arising in written media, in that it's a self-inflicted PIP that makes you feel inadequate in your creative writing ability. CIA funding (obviously funneled through NGOs via CIA front USAID) is how it's survived so long with such a stupid name. Of course, now that government spending on the CIA is going down, so is NaNoWriMo. All that's left is for it to be supplanted by some benevolent Chinese competitor that people will say steals your data, or something.
I've been doing some micro tasking to train LLM's the last few months to earn some extra cash, the last month it's all dried up, no tasks available. I can't help thinking that is a sign of a bubble deflating.
SMBC using the ratsphere as comics fodder, part the manyeth:
transcription
Retrofuturistic Looking Ghost: SCROOOOOGE! I am the ghost of christmas extreme future! Why! Why did you not find a way to indicate to humans 400 generation from now where toxic waste was storrrrrrrred! Look how Tiny Tim's cyborg descendant has to make costrly RNA repaaaaaaairs!
Byline: The Longtermist version of A Christmas Carol is way better.
bonus
transcription
Scrooge: I tried, but no, no, I just don't give a shit.
Additional "points" for the commenting system using local times in the user's browser, thereby timestamping further unfunny AFJ at 2 Apr in my timezone.
A recent chapter of one of the official Touhou Project manga had a jab at crypto schemes. This isn't one of the works of art I expected to so explicitly dunk on these unscrupulous scams, but I welcome it all the more for that.
This isn’t one of the works of art I expected to so explicitly dunk on these unscrupulous scams, but I welcome it all the more for that.
Crypto is nigh-universally hated outside of the techbrosphere (doubly so for NFTs) - they are synonymous with scams and cringe in the public eye. I'd be more shocked if you found a work which presents crypto without immediately dunking on it.
I knew the HN reaction to Marine Le Pen being banned from being elected to public office would be unhinged, but weirdly I did not have "good, she's a woman and weak so now a strong man can lead RN to glorious victory" on my bingo card. More fool me, misogyny is always on the card.
There's a comment in there about how well it reflects on the British system that Bobby Sands was allowed to stand as an MP for Sinn Féin despite being an IRA member and a prisoner. This ignores that a) Sinn Féin policy was and is not to take seats in the British parliament, so he wouldn't have been voting or sitting on any committees, and b) Bobby Sands died in prison on hunger strike.
Why yes, I'm sure 29 year old Jordan "El italiano 93" Bardella, who 10 years ago was uploading Call of Duty videos to youtube, is a much stronger candidate.
Ok. Full disclosure. When you said “Shad”, I thought you meant a different internet person who is shitty for creating morally degenerate art, so when I read this I thought that they had pivoted to AI and was like, I guess that tracks. But no, different shithead.
Anyway. Bland and uninspired? All actual art is inspired, just by default. If it were truly bland, you wouldn’t be able to discern anything from it, which is just not the case. So Shad isn’t actually giving a valid opinion, he’s throwing out an insult, just so that he can elevate AI slop.
Now AI slop, on the other hand, is uninspired and bland. It is uninspired because machines do not have the ability to be inspired. It is bland because it has no intention to be discerned, so contains nothing of substance.
Not that you, under any circumstances, "have to hand it to" alleged convicted assaulter Shädman, but at least he drew his immature shock porn using his own mid artistic skills.
I've been browsing bluesky a fair amount recently and it's chock full of artists making non-AI Ghibli inspired art in response to the AI trend. Which is neat.
That’s great. In a better world, all genAI users would become black goo-producing inhuman monsters to reflect their inner selves, but I suppose this is as much justice as we’ll get
Turns out rebranding even the genuinely useful Machine Learning as “AI” doesn’t help them get funding. The only beneficiaries of the bubble seem to be volatile media synthesis engines
You want my opinion, future machine learning research is probably gonna struggle to get funding once the bubble bursts, both due to the "AI" stench rubbing off on the field, and due to gen-AI sucking up all of the funding that would've gone towards actually useful shit. (Arguably, its already struggling even before the bubble's burst.)
Another good older vid mostly about Grummz, buy youtube essayist Shaun: Stellar Blade: The Fake Outrage. A bit on the more twitch/video game side of things.
It must be nice not being so terminally online as myself, for reasons which at least partially escape my ken, I occasionally visit Twitter, and I am subscribed to it's dear leader, I get to enjoy a lot of the boosted nazi nonsense. (His account is followed by Elon)