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.)

    • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      5 hours ago

      Oh god, so many horror quotes in there.

      With a community of 116 million users a month, Duolingo has amassed loads of data about how people learn

      …and that’s why I try to avoid using smartphone apps as much as possible.

      “Ultimately, I’m not sure that there’s anything computers can’t really teach you,”

      How about common sense…

      “it’s just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers.”

      Ugh. So terrible. Tech’s obsession with “scaling” is one of the worst things about tech.

      If “it’s one teacher and like 30 students, each teacher cannot give individualized attention to each student,” he said. “But the computer can.

      No, it cannot. It’s a statistical model, it cannot give attention to anything or anyone, what are you talking about.

      Duolingo’s CFO made similar comments last year, saying, “AI helps us replicate what a good teacher does”

      Did this person ever have a good teacher in their life

      the company has essentially run 16,000 A/B tests over its existence

      Aaaarrgh. Tech’s obsession with A/B testing is another one of the worst things about tech.

      Ok I stop here now, there’s more, almost every paragraph contains something horrible.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      7 hours ago

      Not really. If schools aren’t spending as much on teachers, they have more budget to spend on his slop. This way, he has a narrative for hitting the doubtlessly ridiculous future growth projections someone in his position is compelled to peddle.