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…)

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    4 days ago

    Oh no I was looking for more German flashcard programs (my favorite flashcard website, Seedlang, went down hopefully temporarily) and pretty much everything is forcing AI integrations of some sort.

    For example Memrise goes so far as to be condescending and user hostile to people who ask for no AI: https://memrisebeta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24937487873937-Can-I-disable-Conversations-the-AI-chatbot

    It’s not possible to disable the suggestions to do Conversations. […] So, the reason it might seem like we are pushing conversation exercises is that we truly believe immersion is the key to successfully acquiring a language.

    2 out of 19 found this helpful

    Well excuse me for wanting to get immersion by talking to actual humans and not your shitty chatbot.

    I might have to just use Anki like everyone says (my problem with Anki is I spend more time fiddling with database entries and JavaScript than actually studying)

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      4 days ago

      that “immersion” line is the same shit their support gave me ~3y ago when I opened the app and suddenly got a surprise switch to a new UI (which also put that front and center)

      nice to see it hasn’t at least gotten worse

  • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    4 days ago

    While browsing some german news media outside my usual territorry (DW and tagesschau), and was fooled by this chameleon of an ad on the front page of WELT (trying for classy, but obvious conservative bias).

    The heading means “Bitcoin could protect from inflation”. If you want to check out some retail investor shilling in the wild, here you go!

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    4 days ago

    Not strictly related to our normal fare, but it is on a website. HHS has been stepping up their search for snitches on people who provide gender-affirming care to trans kids. I don’t know exactly what they’re going to do with those reports, but it’s feeling real bleak.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    5 days ago

    I just got shown a link to someone’s post entitled “When Gandhi met Satoshi”, and it is pretty vacuous and predictable (and probably llm generated). A quick search though shows that this isn’t isolated… there’s another post by an ostensibly different author called “When Gandhi met Spinoza” from back in the pre-llm days of 2018 which is actually about satoshi-fantasies and bitcoin, and contains delightful lines like

    The crypto-currency movement is a Gandhian civil disobedience movement of the 21st century led by peer to peer networks that closely resemble Spinoza’s multitudes

    and… wtf? coincidental crankery, or some weird marketing ploy for cryptocurrency in India?

  • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    5 days ago

    Great piece by Jacob Silverman about the growing shittyness of the day-to-day internet experience

    https://archive.is/20250419163054/https://www.ft.com/content/5d06bbb4-0034-493b-8b0d-5c0ab74bedef#selection-2009.350-2009.663

    Can we find a way back to an internet that puts people in lucid conversation with one another, where books are published after they are written, where anger and insanity aren’t the dominant modes of thought and the defining editorial values are more meaningful than a chumbox of clickbait nonsense? I’m not sure.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      5 days ago

      Recently, I found myself dealing with a hallucinating Grok (as the xAI chatbot is known). I was working on an article […] I offered Grok a very specific query: […] What followed was like an argument with an especially lucid drunk.

      Imagine this, but everything and forever.

      Edit:

      The listeners did become suppliers, in line with Brecht’s democratic vision. Some of us are listening and hearing, but many more of us are shouting over one another, brought into relationships that are as likely to be conflictual as nourishing. That “vast network of pipes” pictured by Brecht turned out to be controlled by the same sort of venal moguls who gave us radio in the first place, and they lined those pipes with lead.

      I think calling the current model one where “the listeners became suppliers” is a misunderstanding of how we got here. If the point was to connect people in a two-way link then the context needs to shift away from a third party’s efforts to profit from it. Like, we don’t see all the crazies and grifters because we seek them out or what they’re trying to do, but because it’s profitable for the platforms and providers to connect us to them instead of the people we’re actually trying to reach, whether that be to hang out with friends/family, learn from a teacher/writer/journalist, or participate in an open society. Our ability to make those connections has been hijacked in order to boost the level of insanity because it’s more profitable to take advantage of both sides desire for connection without actually letting either one get what they want or need.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    9·
    5 days ago

    New piece from Brian Merchant: The fury at ‘America’s Most Powerful’

    The piece primarily focuses around a parody of the “Iraqi Most Wanted” playing cards that were made for the invasion of Iraq, which feature the faces and home addresses of various tech billionaires (well, the “art” decks do - the “merch” decks feature their publicly listed office addresses instead), and uses that to talk about the boiling rage against the elites that has become a defining feature of the current American political climate.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    5 days ago

    TIL Richard fucking Hanania is a Rationalist, at least according to this excrescence from LW

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tKhbDBkstMJuBv7jg/three-months-in-evaluating-three-rationalist-cases-for-trump

    The left-wing monoculture catastrophically damaged institutional integrity when public-health officials lied during the pandemic and when bureaucrats used threats and intimidation to censor speech on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere—in the long-term this could move the country toward the draconian censorship regimes, restrictions on political opposition, and unresponsiveness to public opinion that we see today in England, France, and Germany.[1]

    Yeah I’m sure trying to dictate to Harvard who they can hire and what courses they can teach is not leading to a “draconian censorship regime”

    [1] to be clear this is attributed to Richard Ngo, not Hanania

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      5 days ago

      To summarize that blog post and the three “Rationalist cases for Trump” that it points to: “We made up a Trump to like and a bunch of Democrats to get mad at”.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      5 days ago

      “Lied during the pandemic” wait what? Did LW do a 180 on covid, or is this a “they gave advice without knowing everything that was later shown wrong?” Because that is quite a dumb thing to say, also calling that leftwing is nuts. And last, did they memoryhole that Scott lied about the pandemic? He said people should stop smoking because it helped with covid. Not because he had proof, just because he thought it would be good if less people smoked.

      E: oops wrong person.

      E2: 100 upvotes, the conspiracy weird far right people have taken over.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        5 days ago

        Yeah, the whole “they lied!” nonsense is deeply frustrating. People simultaneously want experts to be responsive and provide information immediately but have no tolerance for “as best we now know” or “given the current circumstances” advice. You can’t simultaneously get the most recent cutting-edge information and only get what’s been long-settled and validated.

        • aninjury2all@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          5 days ago

          Thing is, you can legit criticize Fauci for his bad communication on masking in the early days of COVID! But it’s not gonna land b/c the anti-mask/vax/etc crowd also hate Fauci for the most deranged reasons

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      5 days ago

      When exactly did that “left-wing monoculture” flex its muscles? During Trump 1.0? During the first two years of the Biden administration, when leftists and progressives were criticizing that administration every day for not doing enough on, well, anything? During the second half of the Biden administration, when Republicans controlled the House and leftist criticism of the administration, um, did not grow quiet?

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        5 days ago

        I also want to know what this “draconian censorship regime” is in Europe, because it isn’t like they’re falling over themselves to take care of trans people or immigrants. Unless he’s supporting the freedom to blatantly lie in order to incite violence against minorities.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          5 days ago

          You still can’t be an outright Nazi without people getting mad at you. Obviously unacceptable.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    7 days ago

    JZW link but meat is a 404 article, don’t wanna bypass their paywall

    Hello fellow kids! Doing crimes is TIGHT!

    American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers […]

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      6 days ago

      This shit os going to drive so many amateur pedo/etc hunters (who already are not the people who are good at being normal) into absolute crazy conspiracy theory land. Esp when they cant get the fake pimps (yeah pimps really, these cops seem to be like the military dude in the intro of ideocracy) arrested or banned.

      E: on that note, saw somebody explain that their previous slightly hysterical, ‘facebook is claiming searching for the concentration camps is a search for csam’ was made in error as it was the word ‘mega’ (and another word) which seemed to trigger the warning. And below that people were still making up some crazy palantir is going to get everyone jailed for clicking a csam link conspiracy bullshit. I worry for the sanity of a lot of online people. People are so afraid they are blueanoning themselves

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      21·
      10 days ago

      I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.

      My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.

      Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy’s public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I’ve been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).

      Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!

    • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      9 days ago

      It really looks like it’s on an awful trajectory.

      In my teens I read about how Leo Szilard took a train out of Germany the day after the Nazis took power. Passed the border before border checks had time to come into force. Seemed obvious then, now I am all to aware of the problems of such a “simple” plan and the ties that binds you, not least family. And of course not knowing in advance how bad it will be, until after. And not knowing if you jump from the ashes and land in the fire, lots of countries are on the same trajectory but further back. Fascism is yet again the choice, the owners choice in the face of climate change.

      I’m rambling and it’s late. Sympathies and solidarity.

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        9 days ago

        Even with a lot of resources and options and money, and not a lot to tie me down, I have been working to move out of the US since January and it’ll take me at least two more months before I actually manage it (longer if my first attempt falls through). It is a lot. Lots of work, lots of waiting, and lots of fretting along the lines of “oh my gosh what am I even doing”, lots of trying to figure out where I fit in the world after I’ve rejected my homeland in my heart.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      9 days ago

      Yeah, it is fucking scary. My sympathies and solidarity. Small thing, perhaps a good reminder for everybody to check their opsec (esp if you are an administrator of things, check which data you do not need, or should not fall into the current (or future) us/other fascist administrations hands. And remember while spying on Americans by the various orgs is illegal, trading for information on them with other countries is not. Don’t forget backups). It is horrible that it has come to this. One small point of light is that they are fools and can’t shut up or be subtle. At least that has a chance to motivate more people to do something, which if it gets to the worst (and it is getting close) more people will actually resist (sadly a lot of people will have to realize that the point becomes not to win, but to impose costs/friction, and any wins are a bonus, which is a horrible realization in itself). Really hope this doesn’t make things worse mentally btw.

    • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      9 days ago

      It’s a complete shitshow and very scary, even just looking at it from the outside, can’t imagine what it must feel like from the inside. I keep having to remind myself that all these things that currently happen are real.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      10 days ago

      I can only offer my solidarity and sympathies. If I were still living in the US, I’d probably have started taking firearms training and bought some by now.

  • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
    20·
    8 days ago

    404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can’t Be Bothered

    It’s a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you don’t have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.

    I really didn’t think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, “an insult to life itself”.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    19·
    11 days ago

    Today in relevant skeets:

    transcript

    Skeet: If you can clock who this is meant to be instantly you are on the computer the perfect amount. You’re doing fine don’t even worry about it.

    Quoted skeet: ‘Why are high fertility people always so weird?’ A weekend with the pronatalists

    Image: Egghead Jr. and Miss Prissy from Looney Tunes Foghorn Leghorn shorts.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        10 days ago

        Every 3 months! Every 3 months fucking hell. (I know because last time they came in the news I opened a tab with them in it, and their faces was the last I saw before my monitor exploded, like literally suddenly I sat in darkness.

        • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          10 days ago

          All I’ve learned from the most recent round of publicity is that herself has a new hat. It looks stupid

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            12·
            10 days ago

            A new hat let me check almost clicks wait a minute, I can’t afford a new monitor, you are trying to trick me!

            • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
              8·
              10 days ago

              Just close your eyes and imagine a mediaeval yokel who has accused her sister’s girlfriend of being a witch so she can take over her turnip patch. No need for a new monitor

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    8 days ago

    jesus christ:

    transcript

    Kyle Langford, a 20-something Nick Fuentes acolyte, is running for governor of California on a platform of deporting all male undocumented immigrants and then giving all the females one year to marry a “Californian incel” to avoid deportation.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    9 days ago

    previous stubsack guest star Cursor rejoins the show, using a shitty liarsynth to automatically tell users broken behaviour is expected (cw: orange site), followed by people mass-killing their subscriptions

    Earlier today Cursor, the magical AI-powered IDE started kicking users off when they logged in from multiple machines. Like,you’d be working on your desktop, switch to your laptop, and all of a sudden you’re forcibly logged out. No warning, no notification, just gone.

    Naturally, people thought this was a new policy.

    So they asked support.

    And here’s where it gets batshit: Cursor has a support email, so users emailed them to find out. The support peson told everyone this was “expected behavior” under their new login policy

    One problem. There was no support team, it was an AI designed to ‘mimic human responses’

    haven’t gotten into the replies to look for sneers yet but I bet there will be some

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      8 days ago

      That feels like a fitting ironic fate, a company selling AI slopcode generation looses a bunch of users from believing their own bullshit and using an LLM as customer support. Hopefully that story repeated a few dozen times across other businesses and the business majors stop pushing LLM usage.

      Edit… looking at the orange site comments… some unironically cited Anthropic research marketing hype, which (correctly) shows “Chain-of-Thought” is often bullshit unrelated to the final answer (but it’s Anthropic, so the label it as deception and unfaithfulness instead of the entire approach being bullshit in general).

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      6 days ago

      This is really weird because every single person in academia I talked to about non-CS stuff is either a perfectly median centrist social-democrat or literally a member of the local communist party, with zero variation in between those two.

      Like it’s either you’re a young idealist that still believes the world can be better, or you’re 40 with three kids and a mortgage that just wants the government to be relatively stable and not fuck shit up for you.

      I know zero Americans though, so maybe there’s a skew there.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      8 days ago

      Not sure why anyone thought CS as a community can “save us”. It’s just as likely to be red/black-pilled (gold/black-pilled?) as any other heavily male tech adjacent community. The idea that nerds should be politically liberal because they were bullied in 80 high-school comedies is ludicrous.