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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)

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[-] nightsky@awful.systems 20 points 3 days ago

Today I was looking at buying some stickers to decorate a laptop and such, so I was browsing Redbubble. Looking here and there I found some nice designs and then stumbled upon a really impressive artist portfolio there. Thousands of designs, woah, I thought, it must have been so much work to put that together!

Then it dawned on me. For a while I had completely forgotten that we live in the age of AI slop... blissfull ignorance! But then I noticed the common elements in many of the designs... noticed how everything is surrounded by little dots or stars or other design trinkets. Such a typical AI slop thing, because somehow these "AI" generators can't leave any whitespace, they must fill every square millimeter with something. Of course I don't know for sure, and maybe I'm doing an actual artist injustice with my assumption, but this sure looked like Gen-AI stuff...

Anyway, I scrapped my order for now while I reconsider how to approach this. My brain still associates sites like redbubble or etsy with "art things made by actual humans", but I guess that certainty is outdated now.

This sucks so much. I don't want to pay for AI slop based on stolen human-created art - I want to pay the actual artists. But now I can never know... How can trust be restored?

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[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 21 points 3 days ago
[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I had heard some vague stuff about this, but had no idea it was this bad. Also, I didn't know how much of a fool RMS was. : "RMS did not believe in providing raises — prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual. RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt." (It gets worse btw).

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, it's even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didn't help.

Very serious people at HN at it again:

The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone's personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like "sexual harassment is not a real crime" or "we shouldn't give our employees raises because otherwise they'll soon demand infinite pay" or "there's no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isn't going to damage the reputation of the organization I lead" you're a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.

Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 3 days ago

The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone’s personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

What do these people think leadership is?

[-] Evinceo@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago

Especially leadership of a political organization that's basically just there to turn his opinions into code and publish his essays.

[-] istewart@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago

Something to which they, and people like them, are entitled

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[-] Evinceo@awful.systems 11 points 3 days ago

I don't think anything in the report is new, is it? Isn't this the exact weirdness that got him kicked off the board in the first place? I was shocked when he was quietly added back to the board; I really thought the allegations would stick the first time.

Nice to have it all in one place though.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 12 points 3 days ago

There's a little bit of new stuff in there, but it's all just corroborating the old or relatively minor. Still, it's a lot in one place.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 12 points 3 days ago

the lobste.rs thread is a trash fire too.

of note is that the Stallman defenders from about 3 years back (when he waded in unprompted in a mailing list meant for undergrads at MIT and was pretty damn sure that Marvin Minsky never had sex with one of Epstein's victims, and if he did, it would have been because he was sure she wasn't underage) have registered https://stallman-report.com which redirects to their lengthy apologia. Could be worth taking into account fi you want to spread the original around

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Top level comment at time of posting:

“This might not look that bad, but consider the post-USSR…”

???

No need for these soviet level mental gymnastics. You can just say he needs to be removed permanently.

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Ignorance is a choice. That thread is full of bad choices.

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[-] gerikson@awful.systems 13 points 3 days ago

this demented take on using GenAI to create documentation for open source projects

https://lobste.rs/s/rmbos5/large_language_models_reduce_public#c_j8boat

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[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 17 points 3 days ago

As more and more browsers are enshittifying, this is a small reminder that Brave is not a great alternative.

[-] sc_griffith@awful.systems 22 points 4 days ago

lol fandom could have been even worse

hackernews: post by languagehacker: Former Wikia engineer, here. I left right around when they changed their name to Fandom and kind of saw the writing on the wall. Despite the tremendous amount of information they have at their disposal, they never really saw themselves (or positioned themselves) as more than a low market cap media company. I spent a lot of time in the mid-teens trying to encourage them to be early on AI/NLP kind of stuff and use that to drive new product development. Needless to say, it didn't work out. Imagine the data moat they could have built and monetized, and all without needing to degrade the customer experience.

[-] istewart@awful.systems 23 points 4 days ago
[-] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 15 points 3 days ago

That's just the kind of innovation we need to get over this primitive and outdated impulse to cooperate with one another.

[-] sc_griffith@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago

imagine how they could have monetized it

[-] istewart@awful.systems 15 points 3 days ago

Surely Wikia could have catapulted to the upper echelons of the Fortune 500 if they had just moved faster to gatekeep the facts about gender-swapped Lady Vegeta being a rare card in set 27 of the Dragonball gacha game

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 4 days ago

ok my first thought was to make a joke about castle warfare, despite my knowledge set being ephemera from a childhood appreciating tech trees in video games. So I did some research:

  • The etymology of “moat” is that it comes from the word “motte”. I will not elaborate.
  • Moats were effective against early forms of siege warfare, like battering rams, siege towers, and mining out the foundations of a castle’s defences, or anything that required approaching the castle directly
  • Moats were made somewhat obsolete by siege artillery, which did not need to be in the direct vicinity of the castle

Err so yeah. Make your own jokes, ig.

Anyway, this has been MoatFacts™️. Paging @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de for better commentary*

[-] istewart@awful.systems 14 points 3 days ago

In this context, "moat" is a cargo-cult invocation of Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham. Just another square on the hackernews bingo

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

idk what to exactly put there, moat is still an obstacle even in modern context, but assault on a castle with a moat using modern weaponry would be hilariously one-sided. you can suppress defenders with something, use a bridge layer to get inside the moat, then let combat engineers do their shenanigans to "open" castle one way or another. or you can use helis to do the same, or you can just level it all with artillery or airstrike or maybe even loads of ATGMs

that said it's not completely useless. moats but dry were used as a part of fixed fortifications in ww1 quite successfully. freshly invented electrified barbed wire fence and machine guns made them quite hard to pass, especially if you are, say, a peasant from tula oblast born in 1898 that has never seen powerline before. i think the last proper moat use in large-scale warfare happened during iran-iraq war, in battle of the marshes, when iraqis flooded previously dry area known as fish lake and put underwater coils of barbed wire and high-voltage cables. defensive tactic used there was to shoot at assaulting iranians to make them abandon or fall out of their boats or amphibious vehicles, then when they were in the water high voltage lines were energized. iranians eventually crossed the marshes entirely using speedboats. maybe it's not that outdated considering that last recored bayonet charge happened in 2004 (by brits in iraq). ymmv

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago

I will internalise this for the next time data moats come up!

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[-] swlabr@awful.systems 14 points 4 days ago

I bear news from the other place!

https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/1g3zt5b/hsc_english_exam_using_ai_images/

Post content reproduced here:

autoplag image of some electronics on a table

hello, as a year 12 student who just did the first english exam, i was genuinely baffled seeing one of the stimulus texts u have to analyse is an AI IMAGE. my friend found the image of it online, but that’s what it looked like

for a subject which tells u to “analyse the deeper meaning”, “analyse the composer’s intent”, “appreciate aesthetic and intellectual value” having an AI image in which you physically can’t analyse anything deeper than what it suggests, it’s just extremely ironic 😭 idk, [as an artist who DOESNT use AI]* i might have a different take on this since i’m an artist, what r ur thoughts?

*NB: original post contains the text: "as an artist using AI images" but this was corrected in a later comment:

also i didn’t read over this after typing it out but, meant to say, “as an artist who DOESNT use AI”

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago

In a twisted way, this makes sense as an exercise for English class. Why would someone go to an autoplag image generator, type in a prompt (perhaps something like "laptop and smartphones on a table at a lakefront") and save this image. It's a question I can't easily answer myself. It's hard to imagine the intention behind wanting to synthesize this particular picture, but it's probably something we'll be asking often in the near future.

I can even understand the shrimp Jesus slop or soldiers with huge bibles stuff to an extent. I can understand what the intended emotional appeal is and at least feel something like bewilderment or amusement about the surreality of them. This one would be just banal even if it were a real photo, so why make this? The AI didn't have intent or imbue meaning in the image but surely someone did.

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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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