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.

18 points
*

Dear ~Sneerclub TechTakes, will you be my ‘Friend’? :)

AI ‘Friend’ Company Spent $1.8 Million and Most of Its Funds on Domain Name (404 media, archive)

AI Companion Device Releases Diss Track Against ‘Friend’ (404 media, archive, diss track on twitter)

Here’s Friend’s advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4 . The music choice and general vibe is… unsettling.

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14 points

“It’s real! Premium domains are expensive, but it’s worth it,” Schiffman told me in an email after I reached out to ask if it was true.

[…]

“People just don’t get consumer, I view this as saving money. Much less money needs to be spent on marketing, it’s a one time thing,” Schiffmann said.

there’s an entire type of startup guy embodied by Schiffmann, and I can’t be the only one who’s met this type more than once

The company advertises the device as “always listening” when connected to bluetooth. “When connected via bluetooth, your friend is always listening and forming their own internal thoughts. We have given your friend free will for when they decide to reach out to you.”

presented without comment

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11 points

We have given your friend free will

Wow that was easier than expected, we can’t get philosophers to agree what that would even mean but it’s done folks

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9 points

Enough money to blow it all on a domain name. Not enough money to port their chatbot-app from iPhone to Android, or pay someone to resolve customer issues. (twitter.com, xcancel.com)

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6 points

people just don’t get consumer, I said, as the unfulfilled refund requests continued to rack up

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6 points

Also doxxing them when giving their refund.

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10 points
*

Forget the diss track person, I’ve tracked down the true origin of Friend:

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9 points
*

the ad alone should be a thread it’s the most insane thing I’ve seen in years

the yt comments are brutal btw definitely check them out

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7 points

The yt comments are indeed delightful

Was the pitch what if A24 made commercials?

MidsommAir

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8 points

I like how the advertisement’s URL opens with a fucking O_Q like even its unsettled by this shit

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7 points

It’s like how can we make a depressing tamagotchi?

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7 points

Here’s Friend’s advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4 . The music choice and general vibe is… unsettling.

This hast the same vibe as a trailer for shows like Black Mirror. I actually feel sad for the people they’re targeting with this, holy shit.

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6 points

unsettling.

Indeed.

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16 points

In other news, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 got sent a viewpoint article with the title “Can Artificial Intelligence Speak for Incapacitated Patients at the End of Life?”.

I will give MAIHT3K credit for managing to get through that shit, because what the actual fuck.

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11 points

Ugh, just reading the summary made me want to puke. What the fuck is wrong with those people. Who the fuck thinks that delegating the responsibility to computers is a good idea. Can’t they cope with the outcomes of their choices and need to outsource that responsibility to some magick software

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9 points

wait wait wait wait this it not substack of some deranged fash techbro ghoul like balaji srinivasan, that’s JAMA, are you sure these are actual MDs and not three techbros in a stolen labcoat

one of them - first author - has three fluff pieces on genai in similar tone to their name, the other two, it seems to me, didn’t wrote a thing about ai earlier

then again scott siskind exists, but this is not something that i’d expect even from him

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6 points

JAMA article’s not in scihub, anyone got a copy?

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7 points

anything newer than 2022? won’t be on scihub, because scihub got in a court case in india, that they hope they can win and secure reasonably stable place where they can operate from

tho it seems to me that the entire article is that three screens of text

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6 points

that’s fuckin grim.

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15 points

Linking without factchecking or any due diligence. This appears to have been making the rounds:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1ecshvh/elon_tried_to_enter_the_babyfur_community

https://xcancel.com/christiolson/status/1817349838444667034#m

OT: https://xcancel.com/bnuuyhopper/status/1816574082588246342#m

Note: reposted from last week’s Stubsack :)

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11 points

this is the first thing i see on lemmy this week and i think it’s already enough internet for me today, basilisk have mercy

also musk’s downfall probably started the moment he became buddies with thiel

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11 points

even failed to kill him in his dumb vanity car purchase, i mean

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11 points

The upshot of this is that if acausalrobotgod ever gives us a time machine, you just need to plant one tree on your way to killing hitler, and you solve so many problems.

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9 points

I aim to displease!

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5 points

It’s been 3 days, my hope that this is real is fading :(

Musk will always own that hilariously disturbing baby roleplay Twitter alt though

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15 points

Does TP0 have an point he’s trying to push with this thread? It’s disingenuous enough that it feels like there’s an agenda, but at the same time what could the point even be? Fuck cancer patients?

https://xcancel.com/St_Rev/status/1817261327628587225

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21 points

Possibly anti-universal-healthcare fearmongering. This stat’s been going around US conservative circles. And I even typed that before seeing the thread ended with:

Remember the lopsidedness of health spending and need when talking reform.

“Dear healthy people: don’t let the sickly suck away all your money”

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18 points

I mean, you know what the point is.

It’s eugenics. It’s always eugenics.

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13 points
*

Leukemia patients are always over-represented in their data because it’s so much easier to use the calipers on people with no hair.

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11 points

Okay first of all what the fuck is a TP0? I swear you guys just make those people up and they’re lazier and lazier written each time.

Second, what’s the point here? Like, is either of the tweets making a point? Cause it just sounds like someone discovered why universal healthcare is a good idea? The fact that spending is so unequal is quite literally the entire point in favour of having universal insurance?

Also

1% is responsible for 24% of medical expenses

Now do how much of the population gets 24% of the income :)

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14 points
*

Cremieux used to post to Reddit as user Tr***yPornO (with the slur instead of the asterisks). Nobody here wanted to call him that, so it was rapidly abbreviated TPO or TP0. He posted the same breathtaking racist shit with low quality cites that didn’t check out as he has since. He also told all manner of inconsistent lies about who he was.

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10 points

Speaking of breathtaking racism with low quality cites, does anyone remember ebola chan? He was my favorite because he was a reactionary with 4chan temperament, so he’d mald when pushed instead of spewing out word salad.

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5 points

At least he wears his kink proudly, not many rightwing weirdoes would just admit they’re really into that.

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10 points
*

TP0 is the OSI connection-mode transport layer protocol’s transport protocol class 0 duh.

Transport Protocol Class 0 (TP0), the simplest OSI transport protocol, performs segmentation and reassembly functions. TP0 requires connection-oriented network service.

(source)

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7 points

I thought it meant “thread poster zero” because I never really understood the order in which one reads tweets and replies, so when I saw “TP0”, three frames later I already deduced an entire vocabulary of terms to designate each persona in a twitter screenshot

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7 points

from the top down with either dfs or bfs depending on how you found the thread to spread, or from the inside out (by clicking through QTs until you get to the root). because twitter totally made browsing this shit easy.

what’s hard.

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10 points
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oh man i’d forgotten St Rev, a favourite minor nrx from the mid-2010s

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13 points

I’d never heard of him. His latest tweet is complaining about the left wing slant on his thread and he says that you can’t “get away from the culture war I guess”. Yet every fifth post below is a rage post about libs and lefties.

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6 points

It’s like how all topics are either the cishet white standard quo or “political.” Raging about libs and lefties is standard quo and telling a dimwit they are a dimwit is “culture war.”

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9 points

christ and it’s always the fucking bad-faith bullshit arguments. I bet if you pulled another dimension to the same fucking numbers there you’d instantly find some Rather Interesting correlations with income brackets, and if you pulled a dimension for care/spend class you’d find Another interesting correlation

I wish these people just fucking wouldn’t, gah

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9 points

that’s just “poors don’t deserve healthcare” what else

otoh aren’t they going against their benefactors (old rich ghouls)?

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14 points

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

(Tweet source)

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12 points
*

Well, history sure does fucking repeat itself again, doesn’t it?

At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)

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11 points

At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)

I expect history to repeat itself quite soon - where previously using the term “artificial intelligence” got you looked at as a wild-eyed dreamer, now, using that term’s likely getting you looked at as an asshole techbro, and your research deemed a willing attempt to hurt others.

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8 points

asshole or scammer or grifter. so many possibilities

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7 points

This does suck for all the non-LLM ML stuff that has actual usage. (Even if a percentage of that was also snake oil, or had dubious success rates).

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11 points

Ehh, if you’re calling your ML stuff AI then that’s on you (and you’re probably not technically serious about what you’re doing anyway). Other people are pointing out that AI isn’t a term that many compsci/software people would use, and neither the article (or afaict the study) or my experience suggest that ML has the same negative association as AI.

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7 points

AI has been and always will be the term for making the computer play a game against you. A search tree with some prunning is not ML, but if you use it to implement a chess bot then it is AI in the game sense.

If you’re not doing video games then the term is essentially meaningless

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