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.
turns out duckduckgo does AI search result summaries too, although at least you can turn the little bastards off
Off-the-cuff prediction: there probably won’t be one dominant search engine after Google stumbles, for a few reasons:
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All of them are making the exact same mistakes as Google, as self noted (when they aren’t having their own unique dumpster fires)
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AI has made it much easier to spam searches with SEO shite, so any attempts at algorithmic search risk being spammed to death in short order
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Public trust in tech is utterly shot to hell - not sure how much people trust search specifically, but I suspect people are currently trusting word-of-mouth (e.g. Reddit, TikTok) over whatever any of the major search engines are providing right now
In retrospect google since it’s inception, when it was still good, google always actually relied on human curation. Primary component of pagerank were:
- “how much have people linked to this?”
- “how much have reliable sites linked to this?”
- “how good quality are pages from this site usually?”
(Which is still a way to get value out of google by adding “site:www.reliable-website.example” tags)
It was definitely a useful product, but ultimately it relies on human labor to surface quality results closer to the top.
it’s unfortunate that all the Google alternatives big enough to matter are all-in on making the exact same mistakes as Google at roughly the same time, probably in hopes that one of them can swoop in and take the top dog spot when the monopoly ruling finally makes Google stumble
and if that sounds like a fucking stupid plan, you’re right, and that’s why neither of us are advertising executives
Unforeseen issues with training AIs using the internet: every LLM has been taught to Rickroll
See, I actually don’t hate the idea of engineering and automating away parts of work. Work, almost by definition, sucks. If it didn’t suck we wouldn’t think of it as “work.”
But the current model of AI is less trying to free humanity from work than it is freeing work from humanity. Take the important business of making the line go up away from the grubby hands of people who need things like “food” and “healthcare” as a necessary precondition for working, to say nothing of their desires for “dignity” or “respect”. Even creative and artistic work that gets underpaid in exchange for being something people can be innately passionate about can be taken away from those people and fed a diet of raw electricity and compute.
Yea, there’s a lot of work from which it’s quite worthwhile to free humanity. It’s just that an AI company having that as its tagline and full contents of its social media bio reads with a very particular anime villain cadence. Makes me think of Seymour Guado in Final Fantasy X vowing to “free the world of its sorrow”.,
I mean, “here’s the video you asked for” is a pretty standard setup for a Rick roll, so it’s definitely in the training data, and if it doesn’t have an actual URL to link it’s going to fill in something if it starts to spit out an affirmative response, which as we’ve seen is a really standard failure mode for these systems.
Nobody expects the spanish rickroll.
J, K. Rowling, skull enthusiast:
Khelif, who went on to win Olympic gold despite the harassment, reportedly filed a lawsuit alleging cyberbullying against Rowling (Elon Musk is also named in the suit). Shortly after the lawsuit became public on August 13, Rowling went silent on X, leading to speculation from many onlookers that she had pushed her transphobic narrative too far. On August 23, though, she again appeared on the platform, spreading more false and misleading commentary on Khelif. Her first post was a quote from a transphobic hit piece against Khelif by Colin Wright, the former managing editor of the far-right website Quillette.
lol, poor helpless joanne just can’t help but run headlong into the wall
saw something drift by that she’d also deleted a bunch of tweets in the quiet time, so her coming out swinging is doubly funny
I mean, does she actually write books anymore? Or is she a full time TERF now? Because that’s a direct conflict between what’s in her legal best interest and in her professional best interest.
Why not both? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Blood
Some media outlets regarded the male villain who dresses as a woman in order to kill women as transphobic, given the author’s past comments on transgender people.
one would think so, but as of a month or two ago she’s announced another book
request for admin input on how best to run a bracket without spamming up our microforum
that’s a good question! I’ll probably have to brainstorm this with @dgerard@awful.systems later today. in the meantime, is there any precedent for how to do it on Mastodon? we might be able to adopt whatever they do — or maybe at the very least, if there’s a good way to do it there, we could link to a Mastodon thread for the bracket and keep discussion on here.
nothing springs to mind. mastodon has polls, of a sort, if a bit weird in activitypub. here’s the lemmy bug.
i would say just make a thread here to fill with crap, see what happens
I mean, in the worst case, we find out if these database backups are worth a damn? but realistically, we see so much spam from activitypub already that it should be hard to make things fall over*
- unless you know which parts to push on, then it’s instant