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.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    24·
    4 months ago

    not only are the DCs burning water and harming ears, we’re on to the stage of taiwan not farming rice in service of making more chips

    She shows us one of her rice paddies. It used to hold enough water to raise ducks. Now it’s nothing but cracked earth and a few crispy flowers.

    I’m neither a climate nor agriculture scientist so I can’t guess the longer term impact of this; I immediately wonder whether the soil could get harmed by disuse over years, along with other warming-related problems

    I’m too angry to even sneer properly at this. it’s so fucking obviously nuts, but perverse incentives roll right ahead unchecked.

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
    22·
    4 months ago

    I think some people are from hell

    Here is the worst thing I didn’t have to read today from a transhumanist:

    Yes but laws are often outpaced, presumably having your dog walk in and say he liked it is a pretty good reason to have your bestiality charge thrown out and perhaps move on to the discrimination countersuit.

    .

    Also this may have historic reasons, as the first futa was drawn centuries ago, long before the technology that enabled transgenderism, with breasts being the key difference.

    Bonus round:

    spoiler

    What percentage of homeless people do you think would be worthwhile having as slaves? Many of them are broken people who can’t reasonably support themselves in their current state, nor do anything to fix it.

    This is vaguely similar to my idea for how to fix homelessness, build a community for them on a large scale, either state or national, where property is cheap and low skill jobs are abundant. Then you build a prison there, and everyone guilty of a ‘crime of homelessness’ such as trespassing, illegal camping, stealing food, etc. Then they get put in jail for a few days, probably put through some level of rehab, given basic medical care, and eventually a job for the massive debt they’ve just wracked up. What work it would be is the hard question, but the benefits to everyone else would pay for them to dig holes to fill back in if needed. Maybe have them sort recycling or something.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      17·
      4 months ago

      how to fix homelessness, build a community for them on a large scale, either state or national, where property is cheap and low skill jobs are abundant

      Okay, I mean, there’s no indication as to how you’d achieve this, but yes, community help and cheap rent are absolutely a good ideal to aim at…

      Then you build a prison there.

      Aaaand you’re a cartoon villain. What the absolute fuck.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        4 months ago

        just want to make sure this is on the record

        those suggestions (from the deranged OP) are basically segregationist: “you take all the poor, you give them their own little world [and then they’re no longer here, where we have to look at them]”. there’s a long track record of awful enterprises that have been done with that spirit. they carry names like Apartheid, ghetto, etc.

        (there are occasionally serious well-meaning suggestions on how to provision for the poor and unfortunate in ways that allow improving lives, but those don’t tend to handwave the details, and never (afaict) involve the “make them go over there” step)

    • Aoife@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      14·
      4 months ago

      Holy shit every one of those was like getting ounched in the head from a completely random direction

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
    19·
    4 months ago

    https://bsky.app/profile/jonpennington.bsky.social/post/3kxqkmezcwe2o

    I went to college with him. Yarvin is curdled nerd rage personified. He also lies about his age. He’s older than me & claims a birth date that would make him younger than me.

    I was on a Quiz Bowl team with him & whenever he would buzz in for an answer, he would jerk his body spasmodically, which the other people on the team called “Yarvinating.”

    He’s the kind of player that other Quiz Bowl players hate, known in the subculture as a “pickoff lord.” That is to say, he’s the kind of guy who would pad his stats by diving in to buzz on easy questions, make wild guesses on intros so he could get more points than teammates, etc.

    Hand to God. If anybody disputes me, I’ve got at least one other person who would remember the “Yarvinating” anecdote. I’ve got legit Quiz Bowl cred. I used to play against Ken Jennings before he was even a Jeopardy! contestant, let alone host.

    I connected on Facebook with a former classmate, somebody else from that team who once appeared in a College Jeopardy! tournament. We’re both kind of just gobsmacked that we were there for somebody else’s Lex Luthor origin story.

    Another bit of tea… He lies about his age. He was an upperclassman at Brown when I was a freshman & he claims to be younger than me.

    see also https://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

    Yarvin played on the College Bowl-only team for Brown from 1989 to 1992. In 2021 he published a poem[2] stating that “No one can fucking touch me / In College Bowl.” Brown failed to advance out of the Region 1 tournament for all four years of Yarvin’s participation, making his lifetime record at intercollegiate tournaments 0-4 and demonstrating that, at a minimum, the Brandeis, MIT, and Williams teams were capable of “touching” his performance.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      4 months ago

      I’d never looked into how old the clown is, but

      He also lies about his age. He’s older than me & claims a birth date that would make him younger than me.

      wait what? what does he claim? is the indicated year on wikipedia accurate? why the hell?

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      4 months ago

      He also lies about his age.

      I also knew somebody who did that, but it was done as a joke, he obv picked an age much much younger and everybody new he was older, it was just a funny joke. (With a small layer of disliking getting older, which is understandable) From the way this is written, it seems to me this isn’t like that at all.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        4 months ago

        I like answering ludicrously old whenever this stupid shit comes up

        or picking timestamps that make devs wonder whether they had a value handling bug (such as 1/1/1970, the asp.net default 0, etc ec)

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      18·
      4 months ago

      we still keep a proportion of Proton’s financial reserves in Bitcoin.

      further down the page

      Proton is not a crypto company. We do not speculate in crypto

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        16·
        4 months ago

        so I’ve accidentally been paying shitheads who speculate on crypto to speculate on crypto. I’m kinda angry at myself for not catching this.

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      4 months ago

      The fuck is happening over there?

      I could have “excused” the AI bullshit as “we did it to appease the corporate customers who make us money” but there’s no way you can spin this.

      I’m canceling my account. At this point I might just say fuck it and use my Yahoo mail for everything again.

      (And this time the Reddit thread is the dumpster fire I’ve been expecting the last one to be lol)

    • earthquake@lemm.eeEnglish
      10·
      4 months ago

      Can’t blame this shit on the survey!

      I checked, crypto shit was not in any of the top 8 results (top 5 broken out, and they mentioned 3 more, which are surely #6 through #8).

    • ShakingMyHead@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      4 months ago

      Bosses are urging employees to increase their output with the help of AI tools (37 percent), to expand their skill sets (35 percent), take on a wide range of responsibilities (30 percent), return to the office (27 percent), work more efficiently (26 percent), and work more hours (20 percent).

      Stop working from home because AI.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    4 months ago

    Japan supermarket chain uses AI to gauge staff smiles, speech tones in quality service push (South China Morning Post).

    Called “Mr Smile”, it was developed by the Japanese technology company InstaVR and is said to be able to accurately rate a shop assistant’s service attitude.

    It has also been designed with “game” elements that invite staff to improve their attitude by challenging their scores.

    The company said its goal was to “standardise staff members’ smiles and satisfy customers to the maximum”.

    Thanks I hate it

    Press release here: https://www.aeonretail.jp/pdf/240701R_1.pdf or here: https://www.instavr.co.jp/news/aeon-retail-smile-2024-07-01/ (Lots of big words so I didn’t try to read it)

    InstaVR’s English website here: https://www.instavr.co/

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      4 months ago

      What if instead of making robots better we just made interacting with a real person indistinguishable by demanding they conform to arbitrary metrics that the brain-slugs that control our minds think look like genuine human warmth and kindness?

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      Previous workplace merged with a US company that among other things offered “sentiment analysis” for call centers - the software was supposed to detect if someone was upset or irate. Could be used to help employees deal with irate customers, but could also detect if an employee was rude or stressed. Same software could be used to ensure employees used certain stock phrases like “welcome to InitTech, how may I help you?”

      Point is, tech has been used to enforce conformity since well forever.

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
      5·
      4 months ago

      @cstross

      Looks like someone took the wrong lesson from Quantum of Nightmares!

      Edit: Enjoyed the book, btw. Felt weird about shopping for groceries for most of a year afterward. A++

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    4 months ago

    No idea how true it is but apparently crowdstrike fired some of their QA and replaced it with AI, anybody heard about this? (source bsky) (Also ‘AI’ is doing a lot of work here, that could be anything)

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      16·
      4 months ago

      I am attempting to track down this precise story.

      • They are gung ho on AI
      • They laid off a pile of their QA
      • They have a “virtual security analyst” which is an LLM
      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        4 months ago

        iirc Crowdstrike does use regular ML for security, or at least a lot of security companies, I think they might have talked about it on the risky business podcast, so you might want to look at their (many iirc) crowdstrike sponsored parts. No episode directly springs to mind however.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          14·
          4 months ago

          This can also be an area where ML is an appropriate and useful tool. You’ll see it used to establish a statistical baseline for what traffic should look like and then it can flag when it detects something that doesn’t match that as suspicious and worth further investigation. In this space there is actually a lot of value in some of the statistical modeling techniques, though generative AI is obviously a very different and less useful beast.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      4 months ago

      Amazing how many of them eventually morph into somebody else. Trained on celeb faces, and still cannot keep a consistent facial shape. One more dataset bro.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      One, this looks like absolute dogshit. Two, this looks like an ad campaign for a celebrity cloning service for spare organs. Three, with the music it sounds like a drug ad in the US. It just needs a voiceover telling you the monkey paw side effect you’ll inflict upon yourself in return for eternal youth.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        4 months ago

        Three, with the music it sounds like a drug ad in the US

        as I remarked to a friend elsewhere, there’s something I’ve noticed in a couple of these things now, and that’s how “cutesy” they’re made to be

        this one for example: it’s so clearly intended to be as unnatural as possible (based on the pairings presented), while trying to sell it as cozy as possible - all the gestures/poses, the music, the lighting, the clothing, the who’s-picked-for-portrayal

        obviously there’s going to be some kind of observation bias etc involved here (of however many of these things get created, only some with some x property end up crossing my feed/radar somehow) but still. it doesn’t even have artistic shock dimensions value - it’s just creepycopy.

        which has led me to wonder: what is it about genml tech specifically that makes this kind of bullshit the thing produced so frequently?

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          11·
          4 months ago

          One answer perhaps would be that anyone who thinks AI art is good probably lacks the taste to appreciate anything beyond the generic, and the discernment to tell that it is submerged in the depths of uncanny valley. So you have a bunch of AI chuds sharing this creep shit without realising it’s creepy and that it looks terrible.

            • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
              8·
              4 months ago

              Yeah also people that like AI are already willing to overlook its ethical issues, which parlays into obliviousness about why it’s all so fucking creepy. Again, musk.

          • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            4 months ago

            One answer perhaps would be that anyone who thinks AI art is good probably lacks the taste to appreciate anything beyond the generic, and the discernment to tell that it is submerged in the depths of uncanny valley.

            Very true - arguably truer today than it was earlier, if DALL-E’s declining quality is any indication.

            DALL-E 2 had some degree of artistic talent (in the loosest sense), but because DALL-E was made and run by creatively sterile techbros without a shred of art skill, that talent was drowned very fucking quickly.