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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
LessWrongers find cool reception for translated HPMOR copies sent to Russia’s highest IQ youth
I think it could be very valuable to alignment-pill these people.
Zoom and enhance!
alignment-pill
The inability to hear what their own words sound like is terminal. At this stage, we can only provide palliative care, i.e., shoving into lockers.
Man, now I’m bummed that I don’t have a cult trying to distribute translations of my Daria fic in which Jane becomes Hell Priest of the Cenobites.
Lmaou. “We need to alignment pill the Russian youth.” Fast forward to the year 20XX and the haunted alignment pilled adults are now ‘aligning’ their bots to the world’s top nuclear armed despot.
tony_soprano_how_could_this_happen.jpg (for some reason awful systems won’t let me upload pictures anymore (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ)
Holy Moses in heaven, iirc both Sam and Dario have said that their urge to build the torment nexus came from being inspired by online RAT forums. Maybe alignment ‘pilling’ youths is counterproductive to human flourishing? As the LWers say, “update your priors fuckheads”
Apparently, the OpenMandriva folk (the inheritors of the venerable mandrake/mandriva Linux distro) are now best buddies with Bryan Lunduke (right wing tech grifter and q-anon fan) are decrying the left wing bias of Linux projects with a hilarious “wokeOS shell”
Archive of openmandriva forum post: https://archive.is/2025.01.11-001057/https://forum.openmandriva.org/t/came-here-from-lunduke/5516/1
Lovely juxtaposition of “let’s stick it to the gay fags” and “we’re accepting of everyone and there’s no hate here”. Seems like a classy community all round. It’s a little sad to see how mandrake ended up, but there you go.
WokeOS here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250110234818/https://lindev.ch/wokeos.cpp
It’s pretty tedious and unimaginative. No idea who lindev are.
(eta: wasn’t me who originally found this, but I’m never quite sure whether it’s ok to include sources for this sort of thing given the subject. on the other hand, the op has it as public post that’s been boosted a bunch of times, so here it is: https://tech.lgbt/@GeopJr/113807022917800887)
please excuse me while I infinitely recursively scream into the void
Large Generative AI Models in telecommunications
(this shit has been getting airtime at a couple of different networking conferences, and it’s all as ridiculous and pointless as you’d blindly guess)
It still has to go through peer review, so I fully expect one (1) accepted paper with the title “Large Generative AI Models in Telecommunications - What? No. Why? No!”
Hit me up if you want to collaborate on one lol
Here’s a start:
Given their enormous environmental cost and their foundation upon exploited labor, justifying the use of Large Generative AI Models in telecommunications is an uphill task. Since their output is, in the technical sense of the term, bullshit, climbing that hill has no merit.
I love the leaves and gold meme and I use it constantly even though quite literally no one ever understands it, so, thank you, now I know there’s two of us.
i know it’s not a competition, but consider https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/01/generative-ai-virtual-cell/681246/
eyelid twitching
sure, we barely understand all applicable bio systems, let’s have some shitty model dream up answers on how things work! it’ll go great
Much as a chatbot can discern style and perhaps even meaning from huge volumes of written language,
going to have to add this author to the List, aren’t I
they are gonna bridge gaps in fundamental knowledge of cell biology using innovative approach of making shit up
An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out it’s much worse:
https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/
[Do not post} Insults, including those about […] Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”
You can see the full diff from last version if you click “Jan 8, 2025” and yeah it’s a doozy.
Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day. I couldn’t really concentrate on work. It’s hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isn’t dunking on them for it.
On the bright side the policy technically lets you go around calling people insane for being straight or cisgender* if anyone is still on there and wants to get banned from that platform in a blaze of glory.
* or indeed simply having a gender and I’m not sure fascists know how to use words right.
Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day.
same here. the thing is, I think a lot of us are on awful.systems because we’ve seen far too much of how fascism operates and spreads online. this is an antifascist place; it’s so core to the mission that we don’t publish it as a policy (because a policy can be argued against and twisted and the fash kids love doing that), we just demonstrate it in a way that can’t be ignored. so seeing the first or second (I don’t keep track of these things) most popular social media platform publish a policy whose only purpose is to be used as a weapon against marginalized people, for it to be written in a matter-of-fact “this is just how it is” way, and for essentially nobody outside of the fediverse to push back on it in any real way — that is shocking.
as usual, Nina said it more coherently than I did
Now the new language merely bans “unsupported comparisons” between protected groups’ on the basis of their “inherent intellectual capacity”
Im sure we all noticed that this is also exactly one of those things which was allowed in the Rationalist places. And one of the reasons that it took them forever to get rid of slurinnameO on the ssc subreddit.
I’ve been around the internet a long time, and even back then when throwing slurs at each other and “making fun” of marginalized groups was, if not accepted, at least tolerated because it was considered some poor attempt at humor, I don’t remember ever seeing a rule or passage in any netiquette stating it that explicitly.
It was always “we don’t censor speech but don’t be an asshole” with a giant asterisk about what both censoring and being an asshole meant, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen even the worst places say, “we explicitly allow hate speech, go ahead”.
Holy fucking shitballs.
It is very disturbing and scary.
They’re explicitly carving out an exception to target sexual/gender minorities. And I wonder, given how they are often among the first groups being targeted, and then other groups follow, how long until they add more exceptions? How long until Meta modifies the rules further to e.g. explicitly allow racism too?
Meta/Facebook has never been a good company. But the path they have actively chosen now is so much more evil than before.
I’m pretty confident of a significant backlash against queer communities in North America in the near term.
Thiel has fully lost it, and as I assume nobody around him has warned him about how crazy this manifesto found after the shooting oped in the ft makes him sound, so do the people around him.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s, also
There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.
did you get sucked up your ass so deep you forgot who’s on the reactionary side?
Depends on your perspective I guess, like if you imagine there are really ‘we should destroy the internet and go back to the imaginary golden age before the internet’ people those would be reactionary on that subject. I have never seen anybody honestly like that however.
On his reactionary side: I don’t get how his allies, he can stand them. I mean he must know they will come after him next. We know what they think of lgbt people.
i don’t know how much experience thiel has in actual politics, but chances are that he’ll be given dead in the water projects that will just keep him busy and distracted enough to not do anything, should trump admin choose so, like this https://youtu.be/xxVsS9ZNUOU?t=193 (start from beginning for nuclear grade sneer on musk)
That reads like some bullshit you’d find on r/iamverysmart on Reddit.
Maybe side effects of all the substances he uses to become the Übermensch.
the amount of doublethink and newspeak this is attempting to push is remarkable
also afaik thiel isn’t one to regularly demean himself to writing tidbits such as this, is he? I don’t recall seeing nearly as many words from mr likes-it-private as I have from andreesen et al
for someone that runs a surveillance company he sure as fuck can’t help yapping about his plans
they’re all just so fucking … smug
it appears they don’t think anything can possibly go wrong
