Want to wade into the snowy 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.

(December’s finally arrived, and the run-up to Christmas has begun. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    1 hour ago

    something i was thinking about yesterday: so many people i respect used to respect have admitted to using llms as a search engine. even after i explain the seven problems with using a chatbot this way:

    1. wrong tool for the job
    2. bad tool
    3. are you fucking serious?
    4. environmental impact
    5. ethics of how the data was gathered/curated to generate[1] the model
    6. privacy policy of these companies is a nightmare
    7. seriously what is wrong with you

    they continue to do it. the ease of use, together with the valid syntax output by the llm, seem to short-circuit something in the end-user’s brain.

    anyway, in the same way that some vibe-coded bullshit will end up exploding down the line, i wonder whether the use of llms as a search engine is going to have some similar unintended consequences — “oh, yeah, sorry boss, the ai told me that mr. robot was pretty accurate, idk why all of our secrets got leaked. i watched the entire series.”

    additionally, i wonder about the timing. will we see sporadic incidents of shit exploding, or will there be a cascade of chickens coming home to roost?

    1. they call this “training” but i try to avoid anthropomorphising chatbots ↩︎