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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

23 points
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snrk

https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/113228461302575676

I’m going to start replying to everything like I’m on Hacker News. Unhappy with Congress? Why don’t you just start a new country and write a constitution and secede? It’s not that hard once you know how. Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

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8 points

Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

I’m dead. At least the Rust Evangelism Strike Force finally got to have their theocracy

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2 points

Um, actually it’s called a typestate.

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20 points
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from this post (archive)

App developers think that’s a bogus argument. Mr. Bier told me that data he had seen from start-ups he advised suggested that contact sharing had dropped significantly since the iOS 18 changes went into effect, and that for some apps, the number of users sharing 10 or fewer contacts had increased as much as 25 percent.

aww, does the widdle app’s business model collapse completely once it can’t harvest data? how sad

this reinforces a suspicion that I’ve had for a while: the only reason most people put up with any of this shit is because it’s an all or nothing choice and they don’t know the full impact (because it’s intentionally obscured). the moment you give them an overt choice that makes them think about it, turns out most are actually not fine with the state of affairs

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9 points
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@froztbyte @blakestacey

There are so many features of modern applications and platforms that I have to wonder why anybody would have thought it was a good idea, this is just one of them. Sharing your contacts shouldn’t even be an option. As somebody else in this thread put it, it’s not your data.

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9 points

@froztbyte @jwz Not the biggest Apple fan, but you got to give them credit: with privacy changes in their OSs, they regularly expose all the predatory practices lots of social media companies are running on.

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4 points

@fleg @froztbyte @jwz There’s also the possibility that Apple is doing this for themselves, for example, I bet iMessage still has access to all contacts?

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8 points

That has been Apple’s model for a long time. Privacy restrictions for thee in my walled garden, but I am the benevolent overlord that sees all.

Still, in the current system Apple is the only thing holding back the floodgates? If there was no Apple in the committee to tell Google to go fuck themselves on their insane browser proposals we’d all be stuck in the all-encompassing Google walled garden. It’s better for us to have two monarchs battling it out than one insane absolutist.

I have no idea what could be done to break this walled bullshit altogether, though, much less what any of us individually could do. Like a completely open-source (both software and hardware) smartphone that is actually usable and multiple bank robberies to finance marketing and sales for it?

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4 points

@bullspit @froztbyte @jwz Well, it‘s the „SMS“-app on iOS, so it should have access to the contacts?
I believe they made their bet on privacy (since competing on features, UX and especially price is a loosing game).

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4 points
Deleted by creator
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8 points

Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps?

I doubt it, unfortunately.

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10 points

sickos yes energy if true, sigh

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6 points

@froztbyte exactly. I resisted for years using WhatsApp because it wouldn’t even run without full access to your address book (this has now changed). I mean, I have client contacts on my phone, I (and they) don’t want to share them with a random social network that will probably resell them. Also a dodgy legal situation, esp. re GDPR: those people in your address book didn’t give you permission to share their contacts with a 3rd party company.

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5 points

@froztbyte I’m so unsympathetic to that notion.

Also, literally zero of my friends here came via my phone’s contacts.

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5 points

@froztbyte @blakestacey
Let me play world’s saddest song…

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4 points

@froztbyte @blakestacey they fat-finger it and regret it later

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3 points

wut

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3 points

@froztbyte @blakestacey I really need to get on the apple ecosystem

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19 points
8 points

A medium nation’s worth of electricity!

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18 points

I wanted to see how much lactose was in Monterey Jack, and this was the very first result on bing for:

monterey jack lactose per 10 grams

https://thekitchencommunity.org/the-nutritional-profile-of-monterey-jack-cheese/

It’s absolutely over. This is why every other search I make has “site:reddit.com” attached to it.

And no, the site didn’t tell me how much lactose there was per gram

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11 points

I can’t decide if calimisinit is better pronounced in a surfer bro or British accent, so my brain combined the two and I hate it

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9 points

it’s actually a function call, calimisInit()

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8 points
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calimis.innit()?;
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5 points

i think it might be latin

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10 points

“My name is Scroder Cher. I take care of the place while the Master is away.”

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6 points
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StrokeSimulatorGPT

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18 points

Found while poking around today: the Wikipedia club for cleaning up after AI.

Example: the article Leninist historiography was entirely written by AI and previously included a list of completely fake sources in Russian and Hungarian at the bottom of the page.

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8 points

@blakestacey Super depressed that people were using the rubbish plagiarism machines to edit Wikipedia anyway. I don’t understand the point of contributing if you don’t think *you* have anything to contribute without that garbage.

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8 points

There are the weirdest people who make ‘content’ out there. For example, I saw a ‘how to start the game’ joke guide on steam, so I went to their page to block them (to see if this also blocks the guides from popping up, doesn’t seem so) and they had made hundreds of these guides, all just copy pasted shit. And there were more people doing the exact same thing. Bizarre shit. (Prob related to the thing where you can give people stickers, gamification was a mistake).

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5 points

@Soyweiser @RubyJones I recently stumbled upon a YouTube channel that is just a guy reading specs of some obscure electronics/computer parts. Not a review, the guy is just reading stuff with no hint of emotion; the guy is on PiP video on the corner, but he might as well be AI generated at this point

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7 points

@blakestacey

I am disappoint.

“The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.”

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6 points

psst it’s to search and destroy

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7 points

no one has seen this coming, no one

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5 points

@blakestacey @hipsterelectron what if we all make Gee Pee Tee promise to never edit any Wiki ever again.

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3 points

@blakestacey heroes

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