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 - this one was a bit late, I got distracted)

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      3 days ago

      And if you think about it you can literally get one of these PCs for one month and then win a Fortnite tournament or something and have enough money to buy your own PC.

      Marketing to pre-teen gamers must be like shooting fish in a barrel.

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        4·
        3 days ago

        Marketing to pre-teen gamers must be like shooting fish in a barrel.

        Don’t even need to do much - Stellar Blade threw some fanservice their way and laughed all the way to the bank. Gamers are stupid.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          2 days ago

          Capital G gamers think they are mega smart and some sort of consumer powerhouse who cannot be scammed, and like a lot of people who think they are too smart to be scammed they fall for everything, preorders, fanservice, horse armor, DLC etc etc it all gets gobbled up like slob, no wonder so many fall for the ragebait.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago

    The old place on reddit has a tweet up by aella where she goes on a small evo-psych tirade about how since there’s been an enormous amount of raid related kidnapping and rape in prehistory it stands to reason that women who enjoyed that sort of thing had an evolutionary advantage and so that’s why most women today… eugh.

    I wonder where the superforecasters stand on aella being outed as a ghislain maxwell type fixer for the tescreal high priesthood.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      5 days ago

      1.2 thousand upvotes for the LLM equivalent of adding a little astrology to your holistic medicine. reddit ain’t ok

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      5 days ago

      Promptfondlers too lazy to even fondle prompts anymore. I’m sure this is the prime target demographic for Elon’s brain chips.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    10·
    5 days ago

    New post from Brian Merchant: No thanks to generative AI, which is about AI-run publisher Spines and their attempt to enshittify the literature world. Pulling a paragraph near the end here:

    For another, the needle can move here; if the noise is loud enough, AI publishing can get slapped with a stigma that can at least help slow the erosion of the industry. Public shame can be a powerful tool, when warranted! So yeah: This is why I’m thankful that we’re building this community, and that there are people out there willing to go to the mat to oppose things like the AI-enabled automation of book production. (I fully resent that ‘AI enabled automation of book production’ is a phrase I had to write in 2024.)

    Giving my thoughts, I feel Merchant and co. have a headstart when it comes to moving the needle here, for two main reasons:

    • AI has been thoroughly stripped of whatever “wow factor” - showing off that your gen-AI system can make books isn’t gonna impress Joe Public the way it would’ve back in '22 or '23.

    • The one-two punch of the slop-nami and the plagiarism lawsuits have indelibly associated “AI” as a concept with “zero effort garbage made of stolen shit” - as a consequence, using or supporting it will immediately disgust a good portion of the crowd right out of the gate

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    5 days ago

    NASB does anybody else think the sudden influx of articles (from kurzgesagt to recent wapo) pushing the idea that you can’t lose weight by exercise have anything to do with Ozempic being aggressively marketed at the same time?

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      4 days ago

      Most likely. Not trying to be conspiratorial, but it’s been deeply disheartening to see some of the toxic rhetoric around weight loss get high-profile pushback only in the context of pushing ozempic and friends, which means leaving the ideological frame that infantilizes and demonizes fat people in place and adds it’s own brand of misinformation.

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    6 days ago

    I listen to a podcast about black/african american conspiracy theories, and I got a podcast ad from Ed Zitron, so there’s that.

    • raoul@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      7·
      6 days ago

      Musk also called out the Department of Energy’s chief climate officer in its loan programs office. The office funds fledgling energy technologies in need of early investment and awarded $465 million to Tesla Motors in 2010, helping to position Musk’s electric vehicle company as an EV industry leader.

      It seems that Tesla was estimated at 1.35B in 2010.. I don’t know how to curse this guy anymore.

      A senior adviser to climate at the Department of Housing and Urban Development was also singled out. The original X post said the woman “should not be paid $181,648.00 by the US taxpayer to be the ‘Climate advisor’ at HUD.” Musk reposted with the comment: “But maybe her advice is amazing.” Followed by two laughing emojis.

      What a fucking elon musk thing to say. And of course this leads to harassment.

      It is depressing to see he will become the first lady soon.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        6 days ago

        No no, the first lady is still Melania, at least assuming her documentation is in order. Elon’s status as a little bitch doesn’t overrule Melania’s green card.

        Also my newest conspiracy theory is that this whole presidency and all the anti-immigrant shit is actually the most expensive and destructive divorce since Henry VIII.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          6 days ago

          Elon’s status as a little bitch doesn’t overrule Melania’s green card.

          This is correct, and there is also a little bit of misogyny in people calling him the first lady.

          But what is known is that he is technically illegal, as apparently he we illegally in the country when he got his citizenship papers, which makes them revocable. If only Biden had a bit of guts.

          divorce

          So much of Musk shit points back to his first divorce how it went and how he never got over it. Including the hateboner he now has for adhd meds (which would prob help him actually stay on a project, and not just play diablo), his hate for therapy and everything else. But self awareness is not a family trait the have, if read the highlights of this interview with his dad.

          • raoul@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            6·
            5 days ago

            there is also a little bit of misogyny in people calling him the first lady.

            You are right. I’m sorry, I didn’t think about that.

  • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    7 days ago

    someone pointed out that (paraphrasing) “yeah, you and I are never gonna care for autoplag output but kids are gonna grow up on it and expect it for everything” and that makes me want to do bad things.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      7 days ago

      ehh i don’t know, as a child i’d occasionally get a vhs with weird cheap counterfeit cartoons on it and they just creeped me out. children can actually tell imo.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        6 days ago

        I can see the challenge in sorting out AI slop from actual art or writing being normalized in the same way that occasionally having to check your spam filter in case an important work email got filed alongside “GrOwYoUrEgGpLaNtEmOjIfOrChEaP”, but there’s a difference between a world where AI slop exists and AI slop itself actually being worth a damn.

  • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    7 days ago

    The promptfans testing OpenAI Sora have gotten mad that it’s happening to them and (temporarily) leaked access to the API.

    https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/26/artists-appears-to-have-leaked-access-to-openais-sora/

    “Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the [Sora early access] program for a $150B valued [sic] company,” the group, which calls itself “Sora PR Puppets,” wrote in a post …

    “Well, they didn’t compensate actual artists, but surely they will compensate us.”

    “This early access program appears to be less about creative expression and critique, and more about PR and advertisement.”

    OK, I could give them the benefit of the doubt: maybe they’re new to the GenAI space, or general ML Space … or IT.

    But I’m not going to. Of course it’s about PR hype.

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      7 days ago

      I’d say lol but I’m like 72% sure this is straight out of the video game industry’s playbook and very much intentional to create hype because everyone has forgotten this shit even exists.

      Also, I’m still waiting for just one use case for video-generating autoplag that is, even in theory, not either morally reprehensible or outright criminal.