this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 18 August 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 3 months ago by froztbyte@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Google’s Search Dominance Leaves Sites Little Choice on AI Scraping (no archive - archive.ph appears to have died)

Because Google literally can't stop being evil even when the world's eyes are on it

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago (6 children)

OT: since we’ve occasionally featured a music thread and such, any interest in a music sub? it could be pair well with this, the awful pub.

the awful pub sub[0], if you will

this thought brought to you by prior threads as well as this that I’m listening to in late-afternoon 26C weather

[0] you know I had to, I couldn’t not

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Tangentially topical, here's a startup (of course) who offers CNC-milled marble statuary:

Bloomberg: This Startup Will Make a Sculpture of Your Dog for $10,000

https://archive.is/xHcHH

Via this HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41248112

Not really TESCREAL, more really really late stage capitalism.

Although weirdly I'd be up for one of those really cool late Roman Republic realist busts.

[–] jax@awful.systems 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

might involve some amount of hubris you say...

This really opened my eyes to some historical context I never thought of before.

My initial gut reaction was judgmental about the way billionaires spend their money; thinking it might involve some amount of hubris.

Then I realized I have no idea of how sculpture that are now show in museums as treasured historical art pieces were judge in the time they were created. Today we treasure them. But what did the general population think of them? I have no idea.

I imagine that at the time of their commissioning they were also paid by affluent people that could afford such luxuries. People that probably mirror today’s billionaires in influence and access. So what’s different about these?

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Tech guy can't figure out the difference between kitsch and actual art, what a shock.

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

brain throbbing furiously hang on... if artists produced what we say is moving and novel work WHILE wealthy people threw money at whatever bullshit they wanted, that must mean wealthy people throwing money at whatever bullshit they want is good

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Following up on this comment re: the TESCREAL wikipedia page https://awful.systems/comment/4332398

It's now been nominated for deletion (again), the discussion has blown up because it was noted on social media, and the nominator seems to be an... interesting... character

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/TESCREAL_(2nd_nomination)

Edit I now see they have admitted conflict of interest and visually downgraded their "Delete" nomination (I have no fucking clue if that actually affects anything, it would not surprise me that Wikipedia considers strong formatting a valid signal for determining weight of opinion)

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

glancing at their profile, they have "what if I were king tho", something that claims to focus on "sensitive use of language" (it links to "wokism")

oh and to really add that flavour, they have this at the very top of their profile:

As of 26 Jul 2024, I have a new plan to get a job in 2025, a new plan to save democracy from itself, …, and …. And it all started on Wikipedia.

Applications of genetics, such as exploring ethical boundaries related to Eugenics... and maybe someday doing it right.

just a real winner of a human being that everyone would definitely want to be around

(e: jesus fuck I just looked at that political party too. wat.)

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[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (7 children)

It's the weekend B) time to check in on the doomers w/ Dr. Torres...

Oh damn! I missed the irrefutable evidence of LLM reasoning. They must have done a series of replicable experiments that contradicts the overwhelming evidence that LLM reasoning is more or less a series of pattern matching heuristics. Let's take a look together at their data lads, let the scales fall from our eyes.

... this is their confirmation of reasoning? And they say we are the ones who are fucking coping, lmaou.

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 3 months ago

Tangentially related. In 1878, some asshole exhumed 25 human skulls from an abandoned cemetery in far Northern Sweden and took them to Helsinki, where he and his buddies measured them to "prove" that people from the region were less advanced.

Now the skulls are finally being re-interred thanks to pressure from the local community.

Here's a background on the cemetery and the skull-snatching (in Swedish):

https://kulturmiljonorrbotten.com/2023/09/29/akamella-odekyrkogard/