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.

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    I think some people are from hell

    Here is the worst thing I didn’t have to read today from a transhumanist:

    Yes but laws are often outpaced, presumably having your dog walk in and say he liked it is a pretty good reason to have your bestiality charge thrown out and perhaps move on to the discrimination countersuit.

    .

    Also this may have historic reasons, as the first futa was drawn centuries ago, long before the technology that enabled transgenderism, with breasts being the key difference.

    Bonus round:

    spoiler

    What percentage of homeless people do you think would be worthwhile having as slaves? Many of them are broken people who can’t reasonably support themselves in their current state, nor do anything to fix it.

    This is vaguely similar to my idea for how to fix homelessness, build a community for them on a large scale, either state or national, where property is cheap and low skill jobs are abundant. Then you build a prison there, and everyone guilty of a ‘crime of homelessness’ such as trespassing, illegal camping, stealing food, etc. Then they get put in jail for a few days, probably put through some level of rehab, given basic medical care, and eventually a job for the massive debt they’ve just wracked up. What work it would be is the hard question, but the benefits to everyone else would pay for them to dig holes to fill back in if needed. Maybe have them sort recycling or something.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      how to fix homelessness, build a community for them on a large scale, either state or national, where property is cheap and low skill jobs are abundant

      Okay, I mean, there’s no indication as to how you’d achieve this, but yes, community help and cheap rent are absolutely a good ideal to aim at…

      Then you build a prison there.

      Aaaand you’re a cartoon villain. What the absolute fuck.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        just want to make sure this is on the record

        those suggestions (from the deranged OP) are basically segregationist: “you take all the poor, you give them their own little world [and then they’re no longer here, where we have to look at them]”. there’s a long track record of awful enterprises that have been done with that spirit. they carry names like Apartheid, ghetto, etc.

        (there are occasionally serious well-meaning suggestions on how to provision for the poor and unfortunate in ways that allow improving lives, but those don’t tend to handwave the details, and never (afaict) involve the “make them go over there” step)

    • Aoife@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      Holy shit every one of those was like getting ounched in the head from a completely random direction

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    not only are the DCs burning water and harming ears, we’re on to the stage of taiwan not farming rice in service of making more chips

    She shows us one of her rice paddies. It used to hold enough water to raise ducks. Now it’s nothing but cracked earth and a few crispy flowers.

    I’m neither a climate nor agriculture scientist so I can’t guess the longer term impact of this; I immediately wonder whether the soil could get harmed by disuse over years, along with other warming-related problems

    I’m too angry to even sneer properly at this. it’s so fucking obviously nuts, but perverse incentives roll right ahead unchecked.

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    I’m not familiar with Indian politics but I’m curious if anyone understands what this site is or what its politics are https://democracycollective.in (I’m just nosy and curious, I saw this pop up out of nowhere)

    Though maybe I already have an idea:

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      You can read a blog post from the dude who started that site here: https://rushabh-mehta.medium.com/starting-a-new-political-party-28a2e70cc8c3 I didn’t spot any huge red flags, but I didn’t dig too deep (nor do I know the first thing about Indian politics).

      Apparently he aims to start an online political party without any leaders or hierarchy where everything gets voted on. Not to be too cynical, but looking at how small it is right now I imagine they won’t get far enough to see why that doesn’t really work.

        • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Ahh, Movement Now. The vanity hobby horse of one Hjallis Harkimo, best known for playing Donald Trump’s role in the second season of the Finnish version of The Apprentice, as well as selling half a hockey team and the arena he built to Russian oligarchs.

          I hadn’t connected the dots from M5S to Liike Nyt before, but I guess it makes a modicum of sense as an inspiration.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    NASBLOL (I’m not sure this abbreviation will work out): “Investors in anti-Biden cryptocurrencies are getting absolutely destroyed.” (Source)

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      OpenAI said in its announcement that search responses will include in-line citations and that users can open a sidebar to view links to external sources. The long-term goal is to then incorporate search features into ChatGPT, the company’s flagship AI product.

      “The long-term goal is to reinvent the Internet of 25 years ago, but worse.”

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    Not a sneer, but [a mildly interesting open letter(https://noml.info/):

    A specification for those who want content searchable on search engines, but not used for machine learning.

    The basic idea is effectively an extension of robots.txt which attempts to resolve the issue by providing a means to politely ask AI crawlers not to scrape your stuff.

    Personally, I don’t expect this to ever get off the ground or see much usage - this proposal is entirely reliant on trusting that AI bros/companies will respect people’s wishes and avoid scraping shit without people’s permission.

    Between OpenAI publicly wiping their asses with robots.txt, Perplexity lying about user agents to steal people’s work, and the fact a lot of people’s work got stolen before anyone even had the opportunity to say “no”, the trust necessary for this shit to see any public use is entirely gone, and likely has been for a while.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      OpenAI is creating the trustless economy that makes bitcoin necessary. taps forehead

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      The best proposal I’ve seen so far short of destroying all AI scrapers, and essentially what anyone familiar with the specs would come up with.

      The only thing I’d add is an analogue to data-nosnippet to exclude only specific sections of the HTML document (w/o needing to reach for an entire iframe); though that’s harder to implement on the crawler end so maybe that’s for the best.

      Google uses a second User-Agent directive; while Bing suggests using noarchive. Both of these are pretty hacky and not general, so it’d be good to see the industry standardize on the above proposal.

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        The proposal itself does still assume that AI scrapers are being run by decent human beings with functioning moral compasses, which is why I feel its inadequate.

        This take might be overly harsh on AI/tech as a whole, but at this point I’ve run out of patience regarding this bubble and see no reason to believe anyone in the AI space is a decent human being, at least for the time being.

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        At this point, I wouldn’t fault anyone for blanket-blocking all scrapers/robots - sure, doing that will make you unfindable by search engines, but search is basically useless nowadays for finding anything actually interesting, and trying to play whack-a-mole with AI scrapers just means you’re gonna get your shit stolen.

        Might as well go back to word-of-mouth.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    No idea how true it is but apparently crowdstrike fired some of their QA and replaced it with AI, anybody heard about this? (source bsky) (Also ‘AI’ is doing a lot of work here, that could be anything)

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      I am attempting to track down this precise story.

      • They are gung ho on AI
      • They laid off a pile of their QA
      • They have a “virtual security analyst” which is an LLM
      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        iirc Crowdstrike does use regular ML for security, or at least a lot of security companies, I think they might have talked about it on the risky business podcast, so you might want to look at their (many iirc) crowdstrike sponsored parts. No episode directly springs to mind however.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          This can also be an area where ML is an appropriate and useful tool. You’ll see it used to establish a statistical baseline for what traffic should look like and then it can flag when it detects something that doesn’t match that as suspicious and worth further investigation. In this space there is actually a lot of value in some of the statistical modeling techniques, though generative AI is obviously a very different and less useful beast.

    • ShakingMyHead@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      Bosses are urging employees to increase their output with the help of AI tools (37 percent), to expand their skill sets (35 percent), take on a wide range of responsibilities (30 percent), return to the office (27 percent), work more efficiently (26 percent), and work more hours (20 percent).

      Stop working from home because AI.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    Libertarian nerds run straight into actual California, not the AI-generated dreamland they imagine

    Mercury news: “Billionaires’ utopia company California Forever scraps plan for ballot initiative in wake of damning report”

    https://archive.ph/UbdBw

    The report released late last week by Solano County said the proposed new city of 50,000 — possibly up to 400,000 decades from now — would likely cost the county billions of dollars and create substantial annual financial deficits, while slashing agricultural production, damaging climate-change resilience, and potentially threatening local water supplies. The project, according to the report, “may not be financially feasible.”

    HN shows what they think of the 3 people with actual thoughts on the issue by downvoting them to death

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047746

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      Who could have predicted this except for everybody ! There’s a reason none of these galt gulches ever get built.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      which spent more than $800 million buying more than 60,000 acres of mostly agricultural land near Fairfield

      Marc Andreessen and Reid Hoffman, just in case anyone thought there was a difference