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.systems
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    1 day ago

    Urgh over the past month I have seen more and more people on social media using chat-gpt to write stuff for them, or to check facts, and getting defensive instead of embarrassed about it.

    Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud – but I’d lie if I said I wasn’t worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population (and leading to me having to read slop all the time)

    • nightsky@awful.systems
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      1 day ago

      Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud

      Yell at cloud computing instead, that is usually justified.

      More seriously: it’s not at all that. The AI pushers want to make people feel that way – “it’s inevitable”, “it’s here to stay”, etc. But the threat to learning and maintaining skills is real (although the former worries me more than the latter – what has been learned before can often be regained rather quickly, but what if learning itself is inhibited?).

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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      1 day ago

      Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud – but I’d lie if I said I wasn’t worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population

      AI’s already destroying people’s cognitive abilities as we speak, I wouldn’t be shocked if language proficiency went down the shitter, too. Hell, you could argue it’ll fuck up human’s capacity to make/understand art - Nathan Hamiel of Perilous Tech already did.

      (and leading to me having to read slop all the time)

      Thankfully, I’ve managed to avoid reading/seeing slop for the most part. Spending most of my time on Newgrounds probably helped, for three main reasons:

      1. AI slop was banned from being uploaded back in 2022 (very early into the bubble), making it loud and clear that AI slop is unwelcome there. (Sidenote: A dedicated AI flag option was added in 2024)
      2. The site primarily (if not near-exclusively) attracts artists, animators, musicians, and creatives in general - all groups who (for obvious reasons) are strongly opposed to gen-AI in all its forms, and who will avoid anything involving AI like the fucking plague.
      3. The site is (practically) ad-free, meaning ad revenue is effectively zero - as such, setting up an AI slop farm (or a regular content mill) is utterly impractical, since you’d have zero shot of turning a profit.

      (That I’m a NEET also helps (can’t have AI bro coworkers if you’re unemployed :P), but any opportunity to promote the AI-free corners of the net is always a good one in my books :P)

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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        17 hours ago

        can’t have AI bro coworkers if you’re unemployed :P

        I’d certainly feel less conflicted yelling about AI if I didn’t work for a big tech company that’s gaga for AI. I almost wrote out a long angsty reply but I don’t want to give up too much personal details in a single comment.

        I guess I ended up as a boiled frog. If I knew how much AI nonsense I’d be incidentally exposed to over the last year I would have quit a year ago. And yet currently I don’t quit for complicated reasons. I’m not that far from the breaking point, but I’m going to try to hang in for a few more years.

        But yeah, I’m pretty uncomfortable working for a company that has also veered closer to allying with techo-fascism in recent years; and I am taking psychic damage.