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.)
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.
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
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)
[Fiction] [Comic] Effective Altruism and Rationality meet at a Secular Solstice afterparty
When the very first thing you say about a character is that they “have money in crypto”, you may already be doing it wrong
wow i hate this so much
it’s neat how the cartooning gets lazier and lazier as it goes though
holy shit you really weren’t kidding about how lazy it gets. there’s a bunch of frames that are just text I’m not gonna read on a black background???
evil regulators prevent sv megaminds from unrestricted access to adderall probably
idk what specifically, there has been a thing with anti-cavity bacteria that didn’t work or maybe that’s about some transhumanist bs
I remember from my misspent youth reading Scott’s ramblings a fair bit of antipathy towards FDA regulations in particular. What I can only attribute to ignorance of history makes them fall prey to the standard libertarian talking points about slowing down drugs that could improve people’s lives, never mind the fact that in the absence of those regulations everybody who could hypothetically benefit from psychedelic nootropics or whatever would have been too busy dealing with phocomelia to care.
we regret to inform you that mullenweg is still posting through it
no matter how unhinged you may expect this to be on starting to read it, you’re probably guessing low
[The] SEO space, an industry known for making the web better.
end_me_now.jpg
SEOs match quality websites to those users trying to find them. As much as Google and Bing like to pretend that they’re perfect there are very real indexing issues that crop up and need experts to debug, mitigate, and prevent; so in a very real way the SEOs do make the web better for users.
[comment continues below the ad]
For example let’s say there was a user who wanted to read a website full of LLM written articles and ads but they keep stumbling across low quality websites with poor SEO practices like Wikipedia instead, why that would be terrible. In order to prevent this terrible possiblity it is the noble duty of SEOs to buy well respected high ranking domain names so that users get a brand they can trust. Like Forbes. Or Radioshack.
[comment continues below the ad]
Sincerely, the myseonews.now “staff”.
To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.
The passive-aggressive language and the pettyness is such a combination.
“The Publisher of the Journal “Nature” Is Emailing Authors of Scientific Papers, Offering to Sell Them AI Summaries of Their Own Work”, by Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism:
Springer Nature, the stalwart publisher of scientific journals including the prestigious Nature as well as the nearly 200-year-old magazine Scientific American, is approaching the authors of papers in its journals with AI-generated “Media Kits” to summarize and promote their research.
In an email to journal authors obtained by Futurism, Springer told the scientists that its AI tool will “maximize the impact” of their research, saying the $49 package will return “high-quality” outputs for marketing and communication purposes. The publisher’s sell for the package hinges on the argument that boiling down complex, jargon-laden research into digestible soundbites for press releases and social media copy can be difficult and time-consuming — making it, Springer asserts, a task worth automating.
ah yeah exactly what i needed: a button that burns a square km of rainforest with every press, that might generate an abstract (that i’ve already wrote) but wrong, or fake press release that goes nowhere and also is wrong, while at the same time sending what might be restricted data fuck knows where with pinky promise that they won’t blend it and force feed their imagined machine god
Earlier this week, for instance, the massive publishing body announced in a press release that it would be deploying a “new AI-driven tool” crafted to automate “editorial quality checks” and notify editors to “potentially unsuitable manuscripts”. The announcement adds that manuscripts may be held back from peer review if the AI tool deems them editorially unfit.
watch this to be used as a bludgeon against ESL authors. oh noes poor country people, go somewhere else because Computer Says No. then they decrease acceptance rate on their website
A Guy in India (specialist) approach to detection of slop will still work, but it’s not resistant to office politics of complaining that it’s not web scale and such. i can’t wait for collapse of this bubble
