Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    okay at this point I should probably make a whole-ass perplexity post because this is the third time I’m featuring them in stubsack but 404media found yet more dirt

    … which included creating a series of fake accounts and AI-generated research proposals to scrape Twitter, as CEO Aravind Srinivas recently explained on the Lex Fridman podcast

    According to Srinivas, all he and his cofounders Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho wanted to do was build cool products with large language models, back when it was unclear how that technology would create value

    tell me again how lies and misrepresentation aren’t foundational parts of the business model, I think I missed it

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      How can someone implement that and not just be constantly thinking “I really really really do not want to be prosecuted under the CFAA, I should not be doing this”.

      Ethics clearly don’t really work in this profession, so schools should hammer home legal liability as well.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        Ethics clearly don’t really work in this profession, so schools should hammer home legal liability as well.

        I’ve thought about this a bunch in the past, and tbh the only answer I’ve come to over many forms of it is “fuck the fucking USA”

        it’s a place that is structurally built to allow for that kind of evasion and abuse to happen

        • mountainriver@awful.systems
          English
          1·
          5 months ago

          As long as line goes up nobody knows how rich the perps will be.

          And if you don’t know how rich the perps will be, how will you know if and how hard they should be punished?

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      A couple of examples Srinivas gave on the podcast is “Who is Lex Fridman following that Elon Musk is also following,” or “what are the most recent tweets that were liked by both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.”

      Questions asked by the terminally deranged.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        Or somebody looking for ‘the worst posts online’ cringe compilation. Musks CEOs must be able to build their companies products not be able to read spreadsheets was a good example.