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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    24Ā·
    4 months ago

    not only are the DCs burning water and harming ears, weā€™re on to the stage of taiwan not farming rice in service of making more chips

    She shows us one of her rice paddies. It used to hold enough water to raise ducks. Now itā€™s nothing but cracked earth and a few crispy flowers.

    Iā€™m neither a climate nor agriculture scientist so I canā€™t guess the longer term impact of this; I immediately wonder whether the soil could get harmed by disuse over years, along with other warming-related problems

    Iā€™m too angry to even sneer properly at this. itā€™s so fucking obviously nuts, but perverse incentives roll right ahead unchecked.

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
    21Ā·
    4 months ago

    I think some people are from hell

    Here is the worst thing I didnā€™t have to read today from a transhumanist:

    Yes but laws are often outpaced, presumably having your dog walk in and say he liked it is a pretty good reason to have your bestiality charge thrown out and perhaps move on to the discrimination countersuit.

    .

    Also this may have historic reasons, as the first futa was drawn centuries ago, long before the technology that enabled transgenderism, with breasts being the key difference.

    Bonus round:

    spoiler

    What percentage of homeless people do you think would be worthwhile having as slaves? Many of them are broken people who canā€™t reasonably support themselves in their current state, nor do anything to fix it.

    This is vaguely similar to my idea for how to fix homelessness, build a community for them on a large scale, either state or national, where property is cheap and low skill jobs are abundant. Then you build a prison there, and everyone guilty of a ā€˜crime of homelessnessā€™ such as trespassing, illegal camping, stealing food, etc. Then they get put in jail for a few days, probably put through some level of rehab, given basic medical care, and eventually a job for the massive debt theyā€™ve just wracked up. What work it would be is the hard question, but the benefits to everyone else would pay for them to dig holes to fill back in if needed. Maybe have them sort recycling or something.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      17Ā·
      4 months ago

      how to fix homelessness, build a community for them on a large scale, either state or national, where property is cheap and low skill jobs are abundant

      Okay, I mean, thereā€™s no indication as to how youā€™d achieve this, but yes, community help and cheap rent are absolutely a good ideal to aim atā€¦

      Then you build a prison there.

      Aaaand youā€™re a cartoon villain. What the absolute fuck.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        10Ā·
        4 months ago

        just want to make sure this is on the record

        those suggestions (from the deranged OP) are basically segregationist: ā€œyou take all the poor, you give them their own little world [and then theyā€™re no longer here, where we have to look at them]ā€. thereā€™s a long track record of awful enterprises that have been done with that spirit. they carry names like Apartheid, ghetto, etc.

        (there are occasionally serious well-meaning suggestions on how to provision for the poor and unfortunate in ways that allow improving lives, but those donā€™t tend to handwave the details, and never (afaict) involve the ā€œmake them go over thereā€ step)

    • Aoife@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      14Ā·
      4 months ago

      Holy shit every one of those was like getting ounched in the head from a completely random direction

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
    19Ā·
    4 months ago

    https://bsky.app/profile/jonpennington.bsky.social/post/3kxqkmezcwe2o

    I went to college with him. Yarvin is curdled nerd rage personified. He also lies about his age. Heā€™s older than me & claims a birth date that would make him younger than me.

    I was on a Quiz Bowl team with him & whenever he would buzz in for an answer, he would jerk his body spasmodically, which the other people on the team called ā€œYarvinating.ā€

    Heā€™s the kind of player that other Quiz Bowl players hate, known in the subculture as a ā€œpickoff lord.ā€ That is to say, heā€™s the kind of guy who would pad his stats by diving in to buzz on easy questions, make wild guesses on intros so he could get more points than teammates, etc.

    Hand to God. If anybody disputes me, Iā€™ve got at least one other person who would remember the ā€œYarvinatingā€ anecdote. Iā€™ve got legit Quiz Bowl cred. I used to play against Ken Jennings before he was even a Jeopardy! contestant, let alone host.

    I connected on Facebook with a former classmate, somebody else from that team who once appeared in a College Jeopardy! tournament. Weā€™re both kind of just gobsmacked that we were there for somebody elseā€™s Lex Luthor origin story.

    Another bit of teaā€¦ He lies about his age. He was an upperclassman at Brown when I was a freshman & he claims to be younger than me.

    see also https://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

    Yarvin played on the College Bowl-only team for Brown from 1989 to 1992. In 2021 he published a poem[2] stating that ā€œNo one can fucking touch me / In College Bowl.ā€ Brown failed to advance out of the Region 1 tournament for all four years of Yarvinā€™s participation, making his lifetime record at intercollegiate tournaments 0-4 and demonstrating that, at a minimum, the Brandeis, MIT, and Williams teams were capable of ā€œtouchingā€ his performance.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      10Ā·
      4 months ago

      Iā€™d never looked into how old the clown is, but

      He also lies about his age. Heā€™s older than me & claims a birth date that would make him younger than me.

      wait what? what does he claim? is the indicated year on wikipedia accurate? why the hell?

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8Ā·
      4 months ago

      He also lies about his age.

      I also knew somebody who did that, but it was done as a joke, he obv picked an age much much younger and everybody new he was older, it was just a funny joke. (With a small layer of disliking getting older, which is understandable) From the way this is written, it seems to me this isnā€™t like that at all.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        10Ā·
        4 months ago

        I like answering ludicrously old whenever this stupid shit comes up

        or picking timestamps that make devs wonder whether they had a value handling bug (such as 1/1/1970, the asp.net default 0, etc ec)

    • ShakingMyHead@awful.systemsEnglish
      15Ā·
      4 months ago

      Bosses are urging employees to increase their output with the help of AI tools (37 percent), to expand their skill sets (35 percent), take on a wide range of responsibilities (30 percent), return to the office (27 percent), work more efficiently (26 percent), and work more hours (20 percent).

      Stop working from home because AI.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      17Ā·
      4 months ago

      we still keep a proportion of Protonā€™s financial reserves in Bitcoin.

      further down the page

      Proton is not a crypto company. We do not speculate in crypto

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        16Ā·
        4 months ago

        so Iā€™ve accidentally been paying shitheads who speculate on crypto to speculate on crypto. Iā€™m kinda angry at myself for not catching this.

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      13Ā·
      4 months ago

      The fuck is happening over there?

      I could have ā€œexcusedā€ the AI bullshit as ā€œwe did it to appease the corporate customers who make us moneyā€ but thereā€™s no way you can spin this.

      Iā€™m canceling my account. At this point I might just say fuck it and use my Yahoo mail for everything again.

      (And this time the Reddit thread is the dumpster fire Iā€™ve been expecting the last one to be lol)

    • earthquake@lemm.eeEnglish
      10Ā·
      4 months ago

      Canā€™t blame this shit on the survey!

      I checked, crypto shit was not in any of the top 8 results (top 5 broken out, and they mentioned 3 more, which are surely #6 through #8).

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      8Ā·
      4 months ago

      Iā€™m sorry, whatā€™s a 1-2-punch, idgi šŸ¤”šŸ¤”šŸ¤”

      (big fat fucking /s ofc)

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    14Ā·
    4 months ago

    Japan supermarket chain uses AI to gauge staff smiles, speech tones in quality service push (South China Morning Post).

    Called ā€œMr Smileā€, it was developed by the Japanese technology company InstaVR and is said to be able to accurately rate a shop assistantā€™s service attitude.

    It has also been designed with ā€œgameā€ elements that invite staff to improve their attitude by challenging their scores.

    The company said its goal was to ā€œstandardise staff membersā€™ smiles and satisfy customers to the maximumā€.

    Thanks I hate it

    Press release here: https://www.aeonretail.jp/pdf/240701R_1.pdf or here: https://www.instavr.co.jp/news/aeon-retail-smile-2024-07-01/ (Lots of big words so I didnā€™t try to read it)

    InstaVRā€™s English website here: https://www.instavr.co/

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      16Ā·
      4 months ago

      What if instead of making robots better we just made interacting with a real person indistinguishable by demanding they conform to arbitrary metrics that the brain-slugs that control our minds think look like genuine human warmth and kindness?

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      9Ā·
      4 months ago

      Previous workplace merged with a US company that among other things offered ā€œsentiment analysisā€ for call centers - the software was supposed to detect if someone was upset or irate. Could be used to help employees deal with irate customers, but could also detect if an employee was rude or stressed. Same software could be used to ensure employees used certain stock phrases like ā€œwelcome to InitTech, how may I help you?ā€

      Point is, tech has been used to enforce conformity since well forever.

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
      5Ā·
      4 months ago

      @cstross

      Looks like someone took the wrong lesson from Quantum of Nightmares!

      Edit: Enjoyed the book, btw. Felt weird about shopping for groceries for most of a year afterward. A++

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    13Ā·
    4 months ago

    No idea how true it is but apparently crowdstrike fired some of their QA and replaced it with AI, anybody heard about this? (source bsky) (Also ā€˜AIā€™ is doing a lot of work here, that could be anything)

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      16Ā·
      4 months ago

      I am attempting to track down this precise story.

      • They are gung ho on AI
      • They laid off a pile of their QA
      • They have a ā€œvirtual security analystā€ which is an LLM
      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        10Ā·
        4 months ago

        iirc Crowdstrike does use regular ML for security, or at least a lot of security companies, I think they might have talked about it on the risky business podcast, so you might want to look at their (many iirc) crowdstrike sponsored parts. No episode directly springs to mind however.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          14Ā·
          4 months ago

          This can also be an area where ML is an appropriate and useful tool. Youā€™ll see it used to establish a statistical baseline for what traffic should look like and then it can flag when it detects something that doesnā€™t match that as suspicious and worth further investigation. In this space there is actually a lot of value in some of the statistical modeling techniques, though generative AI is obviously a very different and less useful beast.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            9Ā·
            4 months ago

            Yes indeed. Which is iirc what people talked about re ML before the current hype cycle started.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    12Ā·
    4 months ago

    NASBLOL (Iā€™m not sure this abbreviation will work out): ā€œInvestors in anti-Biden cryptocurrencies are getting absolutely destroyed.ā€ (Source)