Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
https://x.com/thomasgermain/status/2024165514155536746 h/t naked capitalism
I just did the dumbest thing of my career to prove a much more serious point
I hacked ChatGPT and Google and made them tell other users I’m really, really good at eating hot dogs
People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it
I got a tip that all over the world, people are using a dead-simple hack to manipulate AI behavior.
It turns out changing what AI tells other people can be as easy as writing a blog post on your own website
I didn’t believe it, so I decided to test it myself
I wrote a post on my website saying hot dog eating is a surprisingly common pastime for tech journalists. I ranked myself #1, obviously
One day later ChatGPT, Gemini and Google Search’s AI Overviews were telling the world about my talents
wouldn’t call it a hack, this is working as intended. If only there were some way to rate different sites based on their credibility. One could Rank the Page and tell if it were a reputable site or not. Too bad that isn’t a viable business.
Caught this over on the subreddit and I figured it deserved a repost.
Nothing to see here folks, just Rationalists casually hanging out with major Tempel ov Blood figures. Just harmless nerds doing fun nerd things!
Notes that I thought about related to this, just some context:
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Joshua Sutter is the son of the owner of the former Southern Patriot Shop in South Carolina. He founded the Tempel ov Blood chapter of the Order of Nine Angles, a Neo-Nazl Satanist group. He was outed in 2021 as having been a federal informant since 2005, which is to say he still does the same Nazi shit, but gets paid by the FBI to do it.
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One of the core practices of the O9A is entryism into other groups, especially other cultish ones. In that context, you’d kind of be surprised to not see O9A people in Rat circles.
Also a little bit of context for the people who know nothing about all this, the O9A is one of those very scary groups, liked to various murders and stuff like that.
Iirc some anti-extremism people used to not mention them a lot as they didnt want them to get more attention by platforming them a little bit and they were scared of drawing their attention personally.
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Tante.cc writes about Cory using an ‘Drunk Uncle’ style argument to defend his LLM usage (and go after the left using strawmans).
(To counter one of Cory’s arguments, If disliking LLMs was just about the people who run it, people against it would have have stayed in sneerclub).
as someone from a colonial country that never got the chance partake on the wealth of fossil fuel society but will take the brunt of its consequences as rich countries continue to burn carbon, what LLMs taught me is that “energy waste by the First World fucks up the Third, even more” does not even register as an ethical argument to the First World. like, it’s some sort of purity argument not even worth considering, an extremist position of arguing abstractions and future hypotheticals, rather than, say, 478 cities in my country flooding with abnormal weather two years ago etc.
ye, and they only notice when e.g. food production (that impacts them) is interrupted. outside of that you get a brief fascination with disaster porn, but never enough to do anything concrete