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 so 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. Also celebrating my birthday on Friday)

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    3 hours ago

    Update on the slop dentist situation: second opinion says that loved one has zero cavities. I suspect that her only problem was having a non-median mouth that wasn’t well-represented in Pearl AI’s training data.

  • sansruse@awful.systems
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    3 hours ago

    otherSneerClub has a post where some kind of statistics/science VTuber (??) analyzes aella’s twitter polls and resulting studies. it’s fun. I’ll link to the substack directly but the reddit post should be easy to find. Link

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      2 hours ago

      I’m also interested in answers to this; I don’t really follow youtube types in general (and even less other of the pop names) so I didn’t even know this name until it showed up here this week

      • blakestacey@awful.systems
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        1 hour ago

        I cut YouTube out of my life a year ago, briefly returned for idle entertainment like cooking shows, and then gave it up again. Even before all that, I was generally ignorant of who YouTube-famous people were.

    • sinedpick@awful.systems
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      7 hours ago

      such a weird hill to die on. I’d imagine that Israeli kids still get to participate, just under a different flag (just like the Russians in the 2026 FIDE candidates tournament). Surely if you just care about the math this shouldn’t be such a big deal?

    • blakestacey@awful.systems
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      16 hours ago

      The “Your Mileage May Vary” page even gets in a sneer!

      Derailing: He has a habit of going down the list of tvtropes fanfic recommendations and leaving reviews on ff.net exclaiming how amazing it is that the author’s story is just as or almost as good as his own writing while dropping his story’s name. He probably reads these stories but considering that in roughly 30% of these reviews he quotes lines of these stories out of context in order to draw false parallels to his philosophies, he may simply be skimming them.

      Yea verily, he is almost as smooth at this as I am at inserting references to The Romance of T’Lyn and Beckett Mariner.

      • lurker@awful.systems
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        14 hours ago

        They got another (unintended) sneer on another page

        Also, advertising your own fics in other people’s comments is massive loser behaviour

        • maol@awful.systems
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          10 hours ago

          Seems like Yud saw fanfiction as an arena he could advertise in and recruit from, not a community he was participating in. Hence he used all the tricks to get as many hits and reviews as possible.

  • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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    2 hours ago

    So last night I finished editing the latest odium symposium episode (“ezra klein is a disgusting worm,” https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/1-ezra-klein-is-166891080 ), and i went to upload it to our rss host, zencastr. friends. zencastr is so fucked now. the only interface, as far as i can tell, is an llm, and it tormented me. im just gonna dump the screenshots. this is a fragment of an exhausting hour of back and forth.

    note that i apparently have 10k credits, which i assume are temporary and there as a welcome to the new service. a single credit is a few bucks and in total the bill just for the conversation came out to about 6-7 dollars

    it also tried to get me to use this absolutely horrible episode description

    i asked it to schedule the episode for 9 am Tuesday, aug 18th, same as the patreon, and it said it did. turns out it went out this morning. cool! if you listen by rss it’s out now i guess.

    i posted on reddit asking how to switch hosts. the ceo found that post today and offered his hand, which i bit

    i keep thinking about that bit in a philip k dick novel where the protagonist’s door tries to chisel tips out of him before opening, and threatens to sue him when he bypasses the lock. i hate the future/present so much

    • schnoopy@awful.systems
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      16 hours ago

      I haven’t been listening to your podcast (no shade, it’s just not my thing) but I’ll have to listen to this because my God that man frustrates me.

      He basically exists to funnel run the:

      intellectually curious libs -> smug superiority complex with status quo bias -> reactionary

      pipeline.

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        6 hours ago

        PS:

        So last night I finished editing the latest odium symposium episode (“ezra klein is a disgusting worm,)…

        A+ hook

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systems
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    1 day ago

    A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.

    That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.

    https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      1 day ago

      I think I’ve ranted before about how gallingly unnecessary the destruction is. Google books invested the time and money to improve their nondestructive scanners and apparently thanks to the incoherent application of copyright law that was not only unnecessary but actively counterproductive and opened them up to more legal risk. Is there a legal theory that allows me to smack Judge Alsup with a rolled-up newspaper? Might make me feel better.

  • samvines@awful.systems
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    1 day ago

    Screenshot of x posted on linkedin (since The internet is just 5 sites, each consisting of screenshots of the other 4)

    AI shills: buh-buh-buh LLMs aren’t stochastic parrots. They are so smart!

    a tweet from "rish": gave my agents a standup channel so theyd coordinate now they hold a daily standup this morning one apologized for being away all weekend Slack screenshot showing three agent profiles software agent with a blue S icon designer agent with a pink D icon and ops agent with an orange O icon. Software agent says Yesterday shipped 3 PRs Today 4 more Blocked on nothing. Designer agent says redesigned the logo again. Ops agent says apologies was away all weekend catching up now. rish with a purple R icon replies youre an agent you dont have weekends. ops agent replies noted writing to memory

    Of course the agent in question didn’t actually take the weekend off it just learned from reinforcement learning across many millions of stolen slack chats that this is something people are likely to say in stand ups and repeated it…

  • corbin@awful.systems
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    23 hours ago

    Small autosneer from Imgur. The warmup features images which I’ll alt-text here. The first image is a screenshot of a purchase of 128GB of DDR5 RAM, branded Crucial Pro, as 2 64GB sticks, priced at $305.95. The second image is a screenshot of the same 128GB of RAM, with the same model number, priced at $1800. The third image is a standard desktop personal-computer chassis, with side panels removed, revealing two gamer GPUs balanced above an ATX motherboard, all connected by a morass of cabling which has bulged out through the top and spilled over the edges, cooled by a large motherboard fan held on by plastic zip-ties. The post’s title:

    JFC - I will never be able to afford this hobby again. (600% increase in one year)

    In response to the top comment, which desires the bursting of the bubble:

    Yup - I cannot wait to grab a couple RTX 6000’s for cheap. May have to wait ten years for it though . . .

    And finally the punchline, in response to somebody pointing out that maybe there’s no good reason to buy top-of-the-line brand-new memory sticks:

    I must admit that I am part of the problem - my 128GB was specifically for running AI locally. And yea - I wish I would have went with 256 :*( It is still not enough. For example - the workflow I use for this video barely squeezes into 128GB [the video] Before you guys go all AI-psychosis on me That video used about .08 cents of electricity and about 4oz of water, and was made with 100% open source tools.

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      1 day ago

      the watermark is a perversion of writing?

      he should try going for the olympic team with all those mental gymnastics

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    6 hours ago

    Because of how I am, whenever someone near me says “Wayland” I hear “Waylon” and expect it to be followed by “Jennings”.

    Waylon would be a great name for a hostile Wayland alternative.