Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    this article/dynamic comes to mind for me in this, along with a toot I saw the other day but don’t currently have the link for. the toot detailed a story of some teacher somewhere speaking about ai hype, making a pencil or something personable with googly eyes and making it “speak”, then breaking it in half the moment people were even slightly “engaged” with the idea of a person’d pencil - the point of it was that people are remarkably good at seeing personhood/consciousness/etc in things where it just outright isn’t there

    (combined with a bit of en vogue hype wave fuckery, where genpop follows and uses this stuff, but they’re not quite the drivers of the itsintelligent.gif crowd)

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        Transcript: a post by Greg Stolze on Bluesky.

        I heard some professor put googly eyes on a pencil and waved it at his class saying “Hi! I’m Tim the pencil! I love helping children with their homework but my favorite is drawing pictures!”

        Then, without warning, he snapped the pencil in half.

        When half his college students gasped, he said “THAT’S where all this AI hype comes from. We’re not good at programming consciousness. But we’re GREAT at imagining non-conscious things are people.”

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        yeah, was that. not sure it happened either, but it’s a good concise story for the point nonetheless :)