20

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.

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

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

we regret to inform you that mullenweg is still posting through it

no matter how unhinged you may expect this to be on starting to read it, you're probably guessing low

[-] mii@awful.systems 5 points 2 hours ago

[The] SEO space, an industry known for making the web better.

end_me_now.jpg

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 2 points 30 minutes ago

You could hook Cthulhu with bait that big.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

the sheer amount and rapidity of times it goes from "fucking wot m8" to moments where you can just see him cackling to himself, "hee heeeeee..... that'll teach 'em!", just constant whiplash

my neck hurts and I should've stretched

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 12 hours ago

[Fiction] [Comic] Effective Altruism and Rationality meet at a Secular Solstice afterparty

When the very first thing you say about a character is that they "have money in crypto", you may already be doing it wrong

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 4 points 2 hours ago

wow i hate this so much

it's neat how the cartooning gets lazier and lazier as it goes though

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 15 hours ago

"The Publisher of the Journal "Nature" Is Emailing Authors of Scientific Papers, Offering to Sell Them AI Summaries of Their Own Work", by Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism:

Springer Nature, the stalwart publisher of scientific journals including the prestigious Nature as well as the nearly 200-year-old magazine Scientific American, is approaching the authors of papers in its journals with AI-generated "Media Kits" to summarize and promote their research.

In an email to journal authors obtained by Futurism, Springer told the scientists that its AI tool will "maximize the impact" of their research, saying the $49 package will return "high-quality" outputs for marketing and communication purposes. The publisher's sell for the package hinges on the argument that boiling down complex, jargon-laden research into digestible soundbites for press releases and social media copy can be difficult and time-consuming — making it, Springer asserts, a task worth automating.

[-] saucerwizard@awful.systems 5 points 15 hours ago

OT: I remember linux on the desktop as a meme, but like, when did this actually happen? I don’t think ai noticed.

[-] mii@awful.systems 5 points 13 hours ago

At some point in the last years, playing games on Linux turned from fiddling three hours with a Wine config to maybe get an hour of 30fps before the next crash into a legit better experience than Windows that works out of the box in most cases. That did sell a lot of people on giving it a try.

I guess it happened when Valve went all-in on Proton. And Microsoft first adding ads into Windows and now forcing their autoplag on everyone helped a bit, too.

[-] saucerwizard@awful.systems 5 points 12 hours ago

That seems reasonable.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 17 hours ago

Thiel has fully lost it, and as I assume nobody around him has warned him about how crazy this ~~manifesto found after the shooting~~ oped in the ft makes him sound, so do the people around him.

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 3 points 2 hours ago

jesus christ

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

the amount of doublethink and newspeak this is attempting to push is remarkable

also afaik thiel isn't one to regularly demean himself to writing tidbits such as this, is he? I don't recall seeing nearly as many words from mr likes-it-private as I have from andreesen et al

[-] mii@awful.systems 5 points 13 hours ago

That reads like some bullshit you'd find on r/iamverysmart on Reddit.

Maybe side effects of all the substances he uses to become the Übermensch.

[-] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

Molly White on one of the more obvious problems with betting markets

Tried to add the screenshot in the post but it won't work for some reason.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 22 hours ago

With betting markets I often think, so they have all just forgotten the idea of assassination markets?

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

My favorite quote from flipping through LessWrong to find something passingly entertaining:

You only multiply the SAT z-score by 0.8 if you're selecting people on high SAT score and estimating the IQ of that subpopulation, making a correction for regressional Goodhart. Rationalists are more likely selected for high g which causes both SAT and IQ

(From the comments for "The average rationalist IQ is about 122".)

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

, and I say that as a person with a sat score of 1650!

E: ow god the first comments are 'actually you and scott underestimate the derived IQ'

E: in other related new turns out Cephalopods have a higher IQ that the people on themotte. Article unrelated, just thought it was neat.

[-] sinedpick@awful.systems 3 points 21 hours ago

I bet if they restricted the survey entrants to people who actually write on LW, the score would have been far lower. Has a single article on there contained even a twinge of a useful idea?

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 20 hours ago

Yes it has had good ideas. As rationalwiki said. The good ideas are not new, and the new ideas are not good.

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 23 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out it's much worse:

https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/

[Do not post} Insults, including those about [...] Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”

You can see the full diff from last version if you click "Jan 8, 2025" and yeah it's a doozy.

Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day. I couldn't really concentrate on work. It's hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isn't dunking on them for it.

On the bright side the policy technically lets you go around calling people insane for being straight or cisgender* if anyone is still on there and wants to get banned from that platform in a blaze of glory.

* or indeed simply having a gender and I'm not sure fascists know how to use words right.

[-] saucerwizard@awful.systems 4 points 16 hours ago

I’m pretty confident of a significant backlash against queer communities in North America in the near term.

[-] nightsky@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago

It is very disturbing and scary.

They're explicitly carving out an exception to target sexual/gender minorities. And I wonder, given how they are often among the first groups being targeted, and then other groups follow, how long until they add more exceptions? How long until Meta modifies the rules further to e.g. explicitly allow racism too?

Meta/Facebook has never been a good company. But the path they have actively chosen now is so much more evil than before.

[-] mii@awful.systems 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I've been around the internet a long time, and even back then when throwing slurs at each other and "making fun" of marginalized groups was, if not accepted, at least tolerated because it was considered some poor attempt at humor, I don't remember ever seeing a rule or passage in any netiquette stating it that explicitly.

It was always "we don't censor speech but don't be an asshole" with a giant asterisk about what both censoring and being an asshole meant, but I don't think I've ever seen even the worst places say, "we explicitly allow hate speech, go ahead".

Holy fucking shitballs.

[-] self@awful.systems 17 points 2 days ago

Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day.

same here. the thing is, I think a lot of us are on awful.systems because we’ve seen far too much of how fascism operates and spreads online. this is an antifascist place; it’s so core to the mission that we don’t publish it as a policy (because a policy can be argued against and twisted and the fash kids love doing that), we just demonstrate it in a way that can’t be ignored. so seeing the first or second (I don’t keep track of these things) most popular social media platform publish a policy whose only purpose is to be used as a weapon against marginalized people, for it to be written in a matter-of-fact “this is just how it is” way, and for essentially nobody outside of the fediverse to push back on it in any real way — that is shocking.

[-] self@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago
[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Now the new language merely bans “unsupported comparisons” between protected groups’ on the basis of their “inherent intellectual capacity”

Im sure we all noticed that this is also exactly one of those things which was allowed in the Rationalist places. And one of the reasons that it took them forever to get rid of slurinnameO on the ssc subreddit (E: He now moved to twitter where he has a terrifying 200k followers (cremieuxrecueil if you want to block the shithead)).

See this is why I try to do my reading here at night, because now when I feel sad and angry for the rest of the day it's gonna be like 5 hours tops.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yud is against seed oils, right? Or was that Siskind? I have a vague memory of the topic coming up but was unable to substantiate it in the 22 seconds of archive-searching that I was willing to do.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

yud, a technofascist, recently forming opinions against seed oils forms a poop ouroboros with the wellness to fascism pipeline.

[-] saucerwizard@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Its Yud I think. As someone from Canola-land this shit really grinds my gears.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
20 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

1512 readers
252 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS