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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    2 months ago

    (Another post so soon? Another post so soon.)

    “Gen AI competes with its training data, exhibit 1,764”:

    exhibit 1764

    Also got a quick sidenote, which spawned from seeing this:

    This is pure gut feeling, but I suspect that “AI training” has become synonymous with “art theft/copyright infringement” in the public consciousness.

    Between AI bros publicly scraping against people’s wishes (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C), the large-scale theft of data which went to produce these LLMs’ datasets, and the general perception that working in AI means you support theft (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), I wouldn’t blame Joe Public for treating AI as inherently infringing.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      10·
      2 months ago

      I researched cool topics using ChatGPT, Claude, Google

      That’s not what research means, you embossed carbuncle.

      I linked NotebookLM to the Wikipedia entry of each topic and generated the podcast audio

      It’s fucking James Somerton with extra steps!

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 months ago

      The horror. Replacing the joy of looking into something and making your findings available in your own style to others replaced by autogenerated slop. And soon this will be all over the place, we will look back on the past period of low effort clickbait with nostalgia.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 months ago

      “curated”

      it shouldn’t surprise me that the dipshit who was massively involved in “solving language” doesn’t understand the meaning of words, but grrrrr

      (and I say that as an armchair linguist who understands that language is as people use it (fuck prescriptivism))

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        2 months ago

        dipshit who was massively involved in “solving language”

        “In the what now?”, he said, voice trembling with a mixture of horror and excitement

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          2 months ago

          2015 - I was a research scientist and a founding member at OpenAI.

          proudly displayed on his blog timeline

            • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
              7·
              2 months ago

              no, that’s a personal extrapolation/framing characterising some of the shit I’ve seen from these morons

              (they engaged with very few linguists in the making of their beloved Large Language Models, instead believing they can just data-bruteforce it; this plan gone as well as has been observed)