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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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    3 months ago

    Ran across a pretty solid sneer: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too.

    Found a particularly notable paragraph near the end, focusing on the people focusing on “prompt engineering”:

    In fear of being replaced by the hypothetical ‘AI-accelerated employee’, people are forgoing acquiring essential skills and deep knowledge, instead choosing to focus on “prompt engineering”. It’s somewhat ironic, because if AGI happens there will be no need for ‘prompt-engineers’. And if it doesn’t, the people with only surface level knowledge who cannot perform tasks without the help of AI will be extremely abundant, and thus extremely replaceable.

    You want my take, I’d personally go further and say the people who can’t perform tasks without AI will wind up borderline-unemployable once this bubble bursts - they’re gonna need a highly expensive chatbot to do anything at all, they’re gonna be less productive than AI-abstaining workers whilst falsely believing they’re more productive, they’re gonna be hated by their coworkers for using AI, and they’re gonna flounder if forced to come up with a novel/creative idea.

    All in all, any promptfondlers still existing after the bubble will likely be fired swiftly and struggle to find new work, as they end up becoming significant drags to any company’s bottom line.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      Promptfondling really does feel like the dumbest possible middle ground. If you’re willing to spend the time and energy learning how to define things with the kind of language and detail that allows a computer to effectively work on them, we already have tools for that: they’re called programming languages. Past a certain point trying to optimize your “natural language” prompts to improve your odds from the LLM gacha you’re doing the digital equivalent sot trying to speak a foreign language by repeating yourself louder and slower.

  • smiletolerantly@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    ChatControl is back on the table here in Europe AGAIN (you’ve probably heard), with mandatory age checking sprinkled on to as a treat.

    I honestly feel physically ill at this point. Like a constant, unignorable digital angst eating away at my sanity. I don’t want any part in this shit anymore.

  • Seminar2250@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    is anyone else fucking sick and tired of discord? it’s one thing if it’s gaming-related[1], but when i’m at a repo for some non-gaming project and they say “ask for help in our discord server”, i feel like i’m in a fever dream and i’m going to wake up and discover that the simulation i was in was managed by chatgpt


    1. i guess. not really, fuck discord. ↩︎

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      Yeah, for multiple reasons. Mostly because all the information in there isn’t accessed or searchable from the outside, and technically not even from the inside because Discord’s search feature fucking sucks.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        Also logging is hard, all the various channels are annoying (esp as th, and having to jump through various hoops just get into channels (hoops for which the instructions can be outdated/bad (one of them used a feature that was disabled on my machine for some reason, but nobody had realized that was possible)) is just nuts. And then there is the whole thing that Discord itself wants to make the platform as busy as possible by adding more and more moving things. I just want to chat.

    • istewart@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      This is just haplessly comical. The AI-generated sinister hijab lady, the attempts at algorithm-compliant YouTube face, the fact that they’re doing this instead of raising their kids (which may be beneficial for the kids in the long run…) Who do they imagine they’re convincing?