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.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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    3 days ago

    how come every academic I have worked with has given me some variation of

    they already have all of my data, I donā€™t really care about my privacy

    iā€™m in computer science šŸ™ƒ

    • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      When people start going on about having nothing to hide usually it helps to point out how thereā€™s currently no legal way to have a movie or a series episode saved to your hard drive.

      I suspect great overlap between the nothing-to-hide people and the people who watch the worst porn imaginable but think incognito mode is magic.

      • self@awful.systems
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        2 days ago

        whatā€™s wild is in the ideal case, a person who really doesnā€™t have anything to hide is both unimaginably dull and has effectively just confessed that they would sell you out to the authorities for any or no reason at all

        people with nothing to hide are the worst people

    • self@awful.systems
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      3 days ago

      the marketing fucks and executive ghouls who came up with this meme (that used to surface every time I talked about wanting to de-Google) are also the ones who make a fuckton of money off of having a real-time firehose of personal data straight from the source, cause thatā€™s by far whatā€™s most valuable to advertisers and surveillance firms (but I repeat myself)

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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        2 days ago

        The thing is, Iā€™m pretty sure the overwhelming majority of the data is effectively worthless out of the online advertising grift. Itā€™s thoughtlessly collected junk sold as data for its own sake.

        It works because no one working in advertising knows what a human beings is.

        • self@awful.systems
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          2 days ago

          my strong impression is that surveillance advertising has been an unmitigated disaster for the ability to actually sell products in any kind of sensible way ā€” see also the success of influencer marketing, under the (utterly false) pretense that itā€™s less targeted and more authentic than the rest of the shit weā€™re used to

          but marketing is an industry run by utterly incompetent morally bankrupt fuckheads, so my impression is also that none of them particularly know or care that the majority of what theyā€™re doing doesnā€™t work; thereā€™s power in surveillance and they like that feeling, so the data remains extremely valuable on the market