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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

25 points
*

Kicking off the sack with something light.

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16 points

I see RicksCEO.eth has since quietly removed the “.eth” part of his name. Presumably it was way more embarrassing than being a strip club tycoon.

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14 points

Headcanon: he changed it as a result of this epic bonnie slam

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12 points

it looks like checkmarks retailated

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11 points

unlike Rick, she did get laid

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9 points

some years ago I wanted to build a bot that tracks all these loons, but the twitter API reqs are onerous as fuck so I never bothered

feel like there’s probably still a need for something like that. perhaps even more so than before, given how mask-off the snakepit is getting

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8 points

Considering API access is now I think 40k a month + you pay for usage, prob good you never got into that. So the time doesn’t feel wasted.

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9 points

Godspeed, Bonnie. I’m gonna call this a good omen for the week.

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22 points

I wonder if the OpenAI habit of naming their models after the previous ones’ embarrassing failures is meant as an SEO trick. Google “chatgpt strawberry” and the top result is about o1. It may mention the origin of the codename, but ultimately you’re still streered to marketing material.

Either way, I’m looking forward to their upcoming AI models Malpractice, Forgery, KiddieSmut, ClassAction, SecuritiesFraud and Lemonparty.

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17 points

i used to be the sysadmin for lemonparty

it was quite a surprise when i found out i can tell you

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9 points

…I feel like there’s a story here.

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12 points

camping out on a friend’s box, two others had root, but they effectively never bothered. the disk filled one day and i went looking for stuff that wasn’t useful. found that site, found it really was where DNS pointed.

my current box is the descendant of that one

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18 points

NASB, I had a jarring experience this morning watching Patrick Boyle’s latest video “Big Tech is Going Nuclear!” (not gonna link it) where 5 mins in he introduces the sponsor and it’s an AI presentation slide generator, which he said he used for the images in his video. This after he mentioned the data on generating one image using the same amount of energy as charging a smartphone. The thing is he seems careful to not mention that it is a gen ai product–he never says AI–rather a piece of software that helps making presentations.

It kinda made me panic stop the video, like an instant “well, done with you” - not sure if he continued to make a joke of it or anything. I mean, I’m sure (I hope) he was given a lot of money for the spot, but damn! Just when I thought I had a foundational understanding of people

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15 points

The thing is he seems careful to not mention that it is a gen ai product–he never says AI–rather a piece of software that helps making presentations.

The term “AI” damages sales when used in advertising - whatever script Boyle got was definitely written by people who knew that fact.

I also predicted something like this would happen (though within a very specific context) a while ago - seems my prediction’s coming true.

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6 points

Ok, but are you suggesting he was duped?

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8 points

The guy seems shrewd enough to know publicly supporting anything AI will shred his reputation - I suspect he might have been duped.

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4 points

And this puts the bit from the other video with the referral links into context. It’s not a joke, he actually expects to be making money off of people :(. I found the vagueness in the ad jarring too. There’s this thing called sponsorblock, a database of timestamps for videos that skips useless stuff. The downside is you don’t find out if the guy that you’re watching is a shill.

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16 points

Two of the major donors pushing to recall the mayor of Oakland, CA are cryptocurrency “executives.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/billionaires-oakland-mayor-sheng-thao-recall

Over the summer, Jesse Pollak, a cryptocurrency investor and executive at Coinbase, launched Abundant Oakland, an advocacy organization that funds “moderate” candidates running in Oakland races. The organization is explicitly linked to similarly named entities in San Francisco and Santa Monica.

Abundant Oakland has a related political action committee, Vibrant Oakland, which, campaign filings show, has received donations from Pollak ($115,000), the Oakland police officers association ($50,000), cryptocurrency executive Konstantin Richter ($60,000), the northern California carpenters regional council ($150,000) and a Pac controlled by Piedmont landlord Chris Moore ($100,000).

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16 points

Talk with PM went nowhere. Very nice guy, but was insistent on giving the reviewer the benefit of the doubt. I just wanna die.

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9 points

That fucking sucks, esp as you put a lot of time into it.

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8 points

oof, I’m sorry. it’s so hard to get capitalists to understand the nature of what they’re enabling, especially if it seems to be working in the short term. it’s the most frustrating thing during a bubble — it taints every decision the executive class makes, and enables grifters to get away with obvious shit even over objections from people who know better.

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8 points

I’m really sorry. I know how frustrating all of this bullshit is. Here for you. <3

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8 points

oof :x

what’s the next step on that?

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