Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th April 2025 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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…)

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.systemsOPEnglish
    12·
    20 hours ago

    New thread from Dan Olson about chatbots:

    I want to interview Sam Altman so I can get his opinion on the fact that a lot of his power users are incredibly gullible, spending millions of tokens per day on “are you conscious? Would you tell me if you were? How can I trust that you’re not lying about not being conscious?”

    For the kinds of personalities that get really into Indigo Children, reality shifting, simulation theory, and the like chatbots are uncut Colombian cocaine. It’s the monkey orgasm button, and they’re just hammering it; an infinite supply of material for their apophenia to absorb.

    Chatbots are basically adding a strain of techno-animism to every already cultic woo community with an internet presence, not a Jehovah that issues scripture, but more something akin to a Kami, Saint, or Lwa to appeal to, flatter, and appease in a much more transactional way.

    Wellness, already mounting the line of the mystical like a pommel horse, is proving particularly vulnerable to seeing chatbots as an agent of secret knowledge, insisting that This One Prompt with your blood panel results will get ChatGPT to tell you the perfect diet to Fix Your Life

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      16 hours ago

      “are you conscious? Would you tell me if you were? How can I trust that you’re not lying about not being conscious?”

      Somehow more stupid than “If you’re a cop and I ask you if you’re a cop, you gotta tell me!”

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        8·
        16 hours ago

        "How can I trust that you’re not lying about not being conscious?”

        Its a silicon-based insult to life, it can’t be conscious