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.)
Sometimes, I get to peer into the AI pilled brain, and it is… uh… not good.
But now if I suffer from Imposter syndrome I can remind myself that some other people take advice from clankers.
https://bsky.app/profile/carnage4life.bsky.social/post/3m634z3r7kk2l
Transcript:
slightly OT veering to the point: I try to maintain a relatively diverse set of feeds on muh socials, including finding people from other cultures and backgrounds in that. and yet I’d ended up muting this person some months ago for constantly being very Thotleader with borderline populist “edgy” takes that always have some pernicious shit wrong with it
this skeet is a perfect example of it.
Yeah, I found his credulousness about "AI"quite amusing. Like when he went to a wrong station in Japan, because he asked ChatGPT. And posted about it, not realizing how much of a dumbass it made him look like. But it’s starting to wear off.
But hey, he at least admits there is a bubble.
And also, I haven’t unfollowed/muted/blocked Mike Masnick yet. And he’s at least twice as annoying about AI.
Unrelated: Did chrome just detect me writing about AI to shill Gemini to me? (puts on tinfoil hat)
I unfollowed masnick but haven’t muted yet. been close tho
They say the unexamined life isn’t worth living, but outsourcing the examination to an LLM gives you more time to hustle and grind, maximizing financial returns. That’s what they mean, right?
relatedly, Josh Johnson’s video about this is pretty great. I’m afk rn but I’ll get a link soon and update
e: link
Of course! It’s to know less and less, until truly, the only thing they know is that they know nothing.
I keep wondering: is this really a need which many people fundamentally have, or is AI usage doing something to their brains?
Most likely the latter - Gerard’s already done a couple Pivot to AI posts about AI’s ability to lobotomise its users (Exhibit A, Exhibit B). Someone else has noted their coworker admitting to the lying machine ruining their Google-fu, too (source):
Recently my research lead recounted a meeting among the senior people, where they hammered out a bunch of project pitches. Some of the wording was still a little rough, but they were going to pass it all through DeepL anyway, to make it read good. Also everyone’s bad at spellling these days, since you got a thing that autocompletes for you, right? They were proud they remembered how to spell “continuous”.
Sure, everyone has days they can’t word good, but this starts sounding like worrying de-skilling. These people spend a good portion of their paid time working on and arguing over wording.
To be fair though it’s not just their brains turning to mush, google has genuinely been getting worse too.
i don’t remember who said it, but they described genai as in some way reverse bayesian spam filter - so if spam filter can adapt to variety of spams, now there’s automated tool to flood the zone with spam that does pass the filter. this was used for seo with predictable results
feel like I’ve seen variations on that in a few places myself. would be interested in seeing a source, if anyone has. could be an interesting piece by itself
Found the original source
That’s a one-two punch of Prabhakar Raghavan publicly executing it for profit and the slop-nami drowning out human-made work via SEO-optimised garbage (indirectly assisting Google’s enshittification efforts in the process).
Publishers have been reportedly readjusting their businesses to account for this shit - combined with Google’s enshittifcation and the slop-nami, we may see Google (if not search engines in general) lose a lot of relevance due to AI.