Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)

  • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    15 hours ago

    So they made an AI restaurant! It has a manifesto!

    It’s… a printer for QR codes. That a guy who is reallly not equipped for sticking QR codes to bowls has to peel and stick onto bowls. And then they get filled by hilariously imprecise cereal dispensers.

    They’re building an empire, yall.

    (Via Jonty)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      6 hours ago

      Taxis dating and food. Love how the ‘innovation’ of AI is now just going after the uberfication targets of last time.

      And the manifesto but just makes me think that this will be the first AI to attempt a mass shooting. Unhinged ahistorical manifesto usually precludes that. ‘Roman siegeworks’ what? (This isnt about siegeworks, it is about roman discipline, they should have thought about a defensive wall from the start. (It even has a technical name which I have forgotten). Literally the wrong conclusion imho. And if you look at the wiki page, the whole story about them building the defenses in the night is just made up (also the word is ‘Contravallation’ (which was also in the manifesto image, I need new glasses)).

      Also think the step from ‘victorious empire’ to ‘empire laying in ruins’ the next paragraph is just bad writing.

      And a last thing, the whole fadeing in of the text/images on the site is annoying, and also breaks for me at times. Causing the images to fade in and out randomly. “Made by sleep-deprived engineers and sheer will” that tracks.

      “Behind a one-way mirror,” They are watching you eat.

    • misterbngo@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      12 hours ago

      So this is literally a rehash of Spyce, a CambridgeMA based startup whos first restaurant was in the old chipotle in harvard square. They had a similar setup but one that was able to make actually-hot food instead of salad bowls which were decent. (they ironically sold to sweetgreen in 2021)

    • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      14 hours ago

      Most restaurant origin stories involve someone sharing their favorite taco recipe or whatever. These guys start off with a bad pop-history explanation of the battle of Alesia. That’s how you know their food is great.

      There’s more where the founder of the company talks about how he really hated working at his family’s restaurant while growing up (good sign). Knowing that his family came from China adds another layer of weirdness, in my opinion. The characters where the company name comes from (改革) can be read in both Chinese (gǎigé) and Japanese (kaikaku) and mean the same thing (reform) in both languages. It just feels so weird that he talks so much fluff about Julius Caesar, mentions his family from China and then, out of the blue, uses a Japanese name for the company. What is with these people fetishizing ancient Rome and Japan so much?

      • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        11 hours ago

        Also the random Bernard Arnault mention (CEO of LMVH occasionally the richest man in the world depending on how strong the stocks are) at the end is a bit odd, I’m guessing added by an LLM because of the Alesia (~Paris) angle.

        • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          14 hours ago

          Alesia was the turning point. With the fall of Gaul, Julius Caesar became the most powerful man in the Roman world.

          We conveniently forgot about all the civil wars that happened afterwards that resulted in the dismantling of the Roman republic and Caesar taking absolute power. Oh yeah, I see it now.