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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st June 2025 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 month ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] rook@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

Interesting (in a depressing way) thread by author Alex de Campi about the fuckery by Unbound/Boundless (crowdfunding for publishing, which segued into financial incompetence and stealing royalties), whose latest incarnation might be trying to AI their way out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves.

From the liquidator’s proposals:

We are also undertaking new areas of business that require no funds to implement, such as starting to increase our rights income from book to videogaming by leveraging our contacts in the gaming industry and potentially creating new content based on our intellectual property utilizing inexpensive artificial intelligence platforms.

(emphasis mine)

They don’t appear to actually own any intellectual property anymore (due to defaulting on contracts) so I can’t see this ending well.

Original thread, for those of you with bluesky accounts: https://bsky.app/profile/alexdecampi.bsky.social/post/3lqfmpme2722w

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago (28 children)

I regret to inform you that, once again, aella (via this)

fucked that this is at least moderately honest

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

currently reading https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17570

this is PsiQuantum, who are hot prospects to build an actually-quantum computer

no, they have not yet factored 35

but they are seriously planning qubits on a wafer and they think they can make a chip with 1m noisy qubits

anyone know more about this? does that preprint (from last year) pass sniff tests?

(my interest is journalistic, and also the first of these companies to factor 35 gets all the VC money ever)

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 1 month ago

New Blood In The Machine: The "AI jobs apocalypse" is for the bosses

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