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.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      4 months ago

      If this wasn’t Scott Adams I’d have assumed this was fetish content. Now I don’t know what to think.

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        16·
        4 months ago

        explaining these things to normal humans is how you turn them into humans with years of psychic damage, and I support that mission wholeheartedly

        an attempt at a summary:

        the dilbert guy, who believes he can hypnotize women into having sex with him, now also believes he knows a magic incantation to teach hypnosis to a chatbot, and heavily implies the chatbot was able to hypnotize him in turn (presumably into having sex with it)

        • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          4 months ago

          who believes he can hypnotize women into having sex with him

          Wait I missed this, he believes what?

          Now this is doubly funny.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            4 months ago

            Content warning for this post, you will get psychic damage.

            It is worse, he believes he can hypnotize people over the internet into having orgasms. Here is a link to a screenshot, not sure if I’m able to find a archive link. I think he deleted his blog.

            E: a tumblr has archive links but it seems he managed to delete the first post.

            • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
              8·
              4 months ago

              Hey, haven’t seen a proof of god’s non-existence today yet, thanks!

              extreme psychic damage trap

              Submissives, I want you to start planning your New Year’s Eve now. Make sure you have some time alone, or some time with a partner who fully accepts your wonderful nature. But most of all, I want you wet, or hard, and especially obedient, starting now. And I want you to know how much I enjoy putting you in this state of mind. It starts now, but will get more intense by Thursday night. Expect to be a quivering, throbbing, wet mess by then.

              How did that make you feel?

              Queasy.

              This is quite literally “creep discovers dirty-talking, thinks it’s a superpower even though he’s terrible at it”.

              EDIT: From Part 3:

              So today I am only talking to the perhaps 20% of you who were turned off by this series.

              Bwahahahaha! That’s some funny shit mate, I’ve seen many bollocks number straight from between them buttocks, but this is fuckin’ choice.

              If you see a train entering a tunnel, think of it as nothing but transportation.

              Hey mate, I think… I think that’s what most normal people do? I sometimes imagine an action hero standing on top and fighting a villain before the tunnel slams them in the heads but that’s just me. What do you think about, Scott? Don’t answer that. please

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        4 months ago

        It told him he was very smart and correct so he had an hypnogasm yes.

        (For the people not in the know and who want some more psychic damage, look up Scott and his ‘I can hypnotise you into having orgasms’ blog posts, the man is utterly nuts, and it is really scary how many people seriously follow him).

        • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          4 months ago

          Looks like he confused “tantrum” with “tantric”

          No shame, happens to guys all the time

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      I saw people making fun of this on (the normally absurdly overly credulous) /r/singularity of all places. I guess even hopeful techno-rapture believers have limits to their suspension of disbelief.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    17·
    4 months ago

    imagine one day buying some shitpost novelty stickers from that one site you heard a friend mention sometime, and then getting them and laughing about it and forgetting it

    all too rapidly the years pass: young trees shoot up, older trees start boughing their way past electrical lines, the oldest all already in their position of maximum comfort. whole generations of memes have been born and died. you no longer even get to make fun of your weird aunt for still sending the dancing baby gif (these days it’s all about the autotune clips of a decade ago…)

    and then one day you get reminded that the shitpost novelty sticker web store exists by receiving an email from them

    what the fuck.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      4 months ago

      In his twitter thread he’s attempting to troll people in the replies. And not even doing a particularly good job at it. A bold business strategy.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        4 months ago

        Apparently they also once chained a design into ‘liberal moron’ from what was some political message once in the past, so it isn’t coming from nowhere. Guess it wasn’t an innocent mistake.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    4 months ago

    In the spirit of the fondly-remembered “Cloud-to-Butt” plugin, I propose a new tool that transforms mentions of AI and LLMs to something else. But what shape should our word transformer take? While scatology is good shit, I bet we can come up with something more clever than “ChatGPT-to-Poop”

    BTW, take 1d6 psychic damage when you realize that Cloud-to-Butt was released more than ten years ago

    Edit: Favorite suggestions so far:

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      4 months ago

      there’s so much quantum woo in that article I want to sneer at, but I don’t know anywhere close to enough about quantum physics to do so without showing my entire ass

      • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        4 months ago

        To me, the most sneerable thing in that article is where they assume a mechanical brain will evolve from ChatGPT and then assume a sufficiently large quantum computer to run it on. And then start figuring out how to port the future mechanical brain to the quantum computer. All to be able to run an old thought experiment that at least I understood as highlighting the absurdity of focusing on the human brain part in the collapse of a wave function.

        Once we build two trains that can run near the speed of light we will be able to test some of Einstein’s thought experiments. Better get cracking on how we can get enough coal onboard to run the trains long enough to get the experiments done.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        4 months ago

        Well a good thing to remember re quantum mechanics, Schrödinger Cat is intended as a thought experiment showing how dumb the view on QM was. So it is always a bit funny to see people extrapolate from that thought experiment without acknowledging the history and issues with it. (But I think that also depends on the various interpretations, and this means I’m showing a cheekily high amount of ass here myself).

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          4 months ago

          Pretty much any mention of a thought experiment in the wild gets my hackles up. “Isn’t it cool that the cat is alive and dead at the same time?” Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up!!! Tho to be honest it might just be schrodinger’s cat that comes up. I wish they’d leave the poor cat alone, and stop trying to poison it.

          • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            4 months ago

            I have a whole series of rants about that cat, starting with how it doesn’t illuminate anything about quantum theory specifically — as opposed to probabilistic or stochastic theories in general — and culminating in “Hey, maybe we should stop naming things after pedo creeps.”

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        4 months ago

        There are some interesting ideas in that general direction (wrapping Bell inequalities within different new types of thought experiment, etc.), but some of the people involved have done rather a lot of overselling, and now bringing in talk of “AI” just obscures the whole situation. Which was already obscure enough.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      Can an observer be a single photon, or does it have to be a conscious human being?

      The former. I’m glad we can stop the article right there and go home.

      What the fuck is this question even? What the fuck is “conscious”? Do you think in the double-slit experiment we closed a guy inside the box to watch?

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        4 months ago

        Under this, let’s charitably call it, “interpretation”, the Schrödinger cat analogy makes no sense, surely THE CAT is bloody conscious about ITSELF BEING ALIVE??

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      4 months ago

      According to one story at least, Wigner eventually concluded that if you take some ideas that physicists widely hold about quantum mechanics as postulates and follow them through to their logical conclusion, then you must conclude that there is a special role for conscious observers. But he took that as a reason to question those assumptions.

      (That story comes from Leslie Ballentine reporting a conversation with Wigner in the course of promoting an ensemble interpretation of QM.)

    • aio@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      4 months ago

      I honestly think anyone who writes “quantum” in an article should be required to take a linear algebra exam to avoid being instantly sacked

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      4 months ago

      Ah yes, Alexander’s unnumbered hordes, that endless torrent of humanity that is all but certain to have made a lasting impact on the sparsely populated subcontinent’s collective DNA.

      edit: Also, the absolute brain on someone who would think that before entertaining a random recent western ancestor like a grandfather or whateverthefuckjesus.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        No, it wasn’t a massive impact by numbers but that superior euro genetics has been floating around waiting to be born like the Kwasitz Haderach.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      4 months ago

      But but, tracingwood told us that claiming NRx is close to Rationalism is a lie made up by the evil David G.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      4 months ago

      I really should write more about technofascism while I still have electricity, clean water, a relatively unfractured global information network, and there aren’t too many gunshots outside

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          4 months ago

          I have an extremely rough draft up on our writing community MoreWrite: here it is. it very much deserves to be restructured and expanded; I wrote this first draft in a hurry, and since then I’ve both gotten some very solid recommendations for prior work in the area to read and cite from @dgerard@awful.systems and I’ve experienced more instances where technofascist methods were used to take control over open source projects away from their communities.

            • self@awful.systemsEnglish
              4·
              4 months ago

              nah all good! our writing community isn’t meant to be containment, it’s just a different category with different expectations (mainly that feedback should be constructive, since MoreWrite is for writers posting their own work)

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      4 months ago

      God damn, I don’t think I’ve read an article with that many name drops in a while. It’s like a Marvel film but with techfash assholes.

      “JD Vance is pro-OSS [open source] AI,” Verdon tweeted. “We are so unfathomably back.”

      It’s actually impressive how this guy is able to make me despise him even more every single time he opens his mouth.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      4 months ago

      she is, regrettably, a fascist who reputedly still hides right-wing conspiracy shit in her projects

      I unfortunately know that startled feeling well; I used to be a fan of the work she did with sectorlambda and similar projects

  • flavia@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    7·
    4 months ago

    LessWrong doesn’t let you download if your user agent isn’t a browser. Did y’all know about this?

    $ curl https://www.lesswrong.com
<html>
<head><title>403 Forbidden</title></head>

    $ curl https://www.lesswrong.com -A "Mozilla"
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    HN: I am starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs.

    Their goal: robo-feynman:

    For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way. Unfortunately, subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world’s languages are also very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand. However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable.

    NGL though mostly just sharing this link for the concept art concept fart which features a three-armed many fingered woman smiling at an invisible camera.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      But just focus on the vibes. This diverse group of young mutants getting an education in the overgrown ruins of this university.

      Not sure how it ties into robo-feyman at all but the vibes