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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Friend-of-the-show JZW rips a YC backed startup a new one:
The terms, concerningly, don’t give a firm data retention time frame, and say that LineLeap may be “unable to fully delete or de-identify” user data due to “technical” or “other operational reasons.”
My villain arc is going to be turning into Thanos and collecting them stones just to enforce GDPR forever into cosmic law with a snap of my fingers.
the very first thing I thought of as I started reading this is this track by a small ZA artist I discovered a while back, and I started it to play as backtrack for reading
other-other-other-other scott tweeted again. apologies, it’s slightly US-pol
it’s a doozy:
spoiler of the image too, just in case
transcript of insane scott adams, creator of dilbert, tweet
I’m revising my debate scoring. My first impression was a tie, which I called a Harris victory.
But the only thing I recall about the debate today is “They’re eating the dogs.”
Visual. Scary. Viral. Memorable. Repeatable. And directionally correct in terms of unchecked immigration risk.
It’s the strongest play of the election.
Trump won the debate.
I gotta stop underestimating his game. Trump had no base hits in the debate but his long ball is still rising. Incredible. 6:32 :::
as a reminder, this is the same guy that’s so keen on thinking the llm can hypnotize him into orgasm
Saw this gem of a plaintive plea from a promptfan:
can’t you just train a LLM to only output “sorry, I can’t answer your question”?
The New Yorker gamely tries to find some merit, any at all in the writings of Dimes Square darling Honor Levy. For example:
In the story “Little Lock,” which portrays the emotional toll of having to always make these calculations, the narrator introduces herself as a “brat” and confesses that she can’t resist spilling her secrets, which she defines as “my most shameful thoughts,” and also as “sacred and special.”
I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel for extremely online ways to express the dull thud of banality here. “So profound, very wow”? “You mean it’s all shit? —Always has been.”
She mixes provocation with needy propitiation
Right-click thesaurus to the rescue!
But the narrator’s shameful thoughts, which are supposed to set her apart, feel painfully ordinary. The story, like many of Levy’s stories, is too hermetically sealed in its own self-absorption to understand when it is expressing a universal experience. Elsewhere, the book’s solipsism renders it unintelligible, overly delighted by the music of its own style—the drama of its own specialness—and unable to provide needed context.
So, it’s bad. Are you incapable of admitting when something is just bad?
“They would like you to believe that their indecision reflects a particular attunement to ambiguity and nuance. But in truth they just won’t know where they stand until they’ve figured out where you do.”
This is exactly why these people always feel so weird. Like, have you considered not hanging out with assholes?
Yeah, just give it to the feller who reviewed Guy Fieri’s restaurant. It’s better to just rip the bandaid off.
Sadly, he’s left the game just the last month: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/dining/pete-wells-how-restaurants-have-changed.html
I don’t think people get how reactionary the captain vimes books are. look at what’s happening in them. in plain english, you have a cop and his band of good apples + adorably bad apples saving the ass of a dictator again and again, because sometimes you just need a clever steady hand in charge. Pratchett was informed by liberal humanist values, and there’s plenty of great stuff about tolerance in there. but the foundation of any vimes novel is an institutionalist urge to bootlicking. it just has to be the right boot
I think Pratchett understood that, despite people romanticizing revolution, revolutions often end up opening the door to something as bad or worse. Especially in a place like Discworld.
In Night Watch:
“Vimes/Keel tells Ned Coates not to put his trust in revolutions “They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes” This is a common theme in Pratchett regarding authority figures”
That said Vimes does participate in a revolution of sorts in that book, as “John Keel”, in the past.
