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)

3 points

Pulling a random post from Bluesky:

The linked rant is a damn good read, BTW.

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16 points
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andrew tate’s “university” had a leak, exposing cca 800k usernames and 325k email addresses of people that failed to pay $50 monthly fee

entire thing available at DDoSectrets, just gonna drop tree of that torrent:

├── Private Channels
│   ├── AI Automation Agency.7z
│   ├── Business Mastery.7z
│   ├── Content Creation + AI Campus.7z
│   ├── Copywriting.7z
│   ├── Crypto DeFi.7z
│   ├── Crypto Trading.7z
│   ├── Cryptocurrency Investing.7z
│   ├── Ecommerce.7z
│   ├── Health & Fitness.7z
│   ├── Hustler's Campus.7z
│   ├── Social Media & Client Acquisition.7z
│   └── The Real World.7z
├── Public Channels
│   ├── AI Automation Agency.7z
│   ├── Business Mastery.7z
│   ├── Content Creation + AI Campus.7z
│   ├── Copywriting.7z
│   ├── Crypto DeFi.7z
│   ├── Crypto Trading.7z
│   ├── Cryptocurrency Investing.7z
│   ├── Ecommerce.7z
│   ├── Fitness.7z
│   ├── Hustler's Campus.7z
│   ├── Social Media & Client Acquisition.7z
│   └── The Real World.7z
└── users.json.7z

yeah i studied defi and dropshipping at andrew tate’s hustler university

statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

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8 points
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The word “deranged” is getting a workout lately, ain’t it?

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11 points

fwiw i attribute this to the stop doing x meme (that I believe skillissuer is referencing):

been thinking about making one for (memory) safe c++, but unfortunately I don’t know the topic deep enough to make the meme good

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3 points

magnificent!

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10 points
*

One of my favorite meme templates for all the text and images you can shove into it, but trying to explain why you have one saved on your desktop just makes you look like the Time Cube guy

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6 points

yeah that’s what i was going for

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10 points

“Yeah I thought about going into civil engineering but the department of hustling really spoke to me y’know?”

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9 points
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i have never felt imposter syndrome since

nikhil suresh, probably

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10 points

I’m just curious how many hits you would get if you searched for ‘4 hour work week’, as iirc that is where all these people stole the idea from. (well, not totally, the idea they are stealing is selling others the idea of the 4 hour work week, but I hope you get what I mean, 4 hour work weeks all the way down).

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10 points

See, isn’t the 4-hour work week one of those “just make other people work 50+hours a week on your behalf and take the money they’ve earned for it” schemes? This looks much broader rather than being married to a specific sub-scam. Like, if crypto is down they can sell drop shipping. If drop shipping is cringe they can sell AI slop monetization. If Amazon tightens their standards and starts locking out AI stuff they can go back to crypto.

It’s in the same genre of trying to monetize being a conspicuous asshole, but it is one of the more complex evolutions, at least compared to the standard grift-luencer.

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7 points

I think it is that book yes, it started a lot of these things, and a lot of these people (im generalizing here, but the Tates are imho part of a long line of manosphere people who all do this kind of stuff, selling others courses into dropshipping, courses into setting up passive income streams, courses into getting laid/mindset etc. And it seems like the only thing they manage to really sell is courses. I don’t think it is that complex an evolution more like the natural progression, of course they get into crypto and AI slop. I think the only real change of somebody like Tate vs the other weirdos who did this (somebody like Cernovic was also one of these people for example) is that Tate has a little bit of charisma for an important market segment (the under 18 year olds).

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7 points
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not many. 2 hits for “4 hour workweek” and 35 for “4 hour work week” another 4 for “4-hour workweek” and 5 for “4-hour work week”

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6 points

Thanks!

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7 points

alright it’s 14gb of json files let me figure out how to grep it in reasonable way and i’ll get there for now i’ll say that the biggest one (size) in private channels is “crypto trading” (2 gb) then “crypto investing” (1.6gb), while in public channels it’s “the real world” (1.7 gb) and “ecommerce” (0.87 gb)

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7 points

obligatory IBCK.

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4 points

that’s not even that, maybe with exception for tate &co. it’s just shilling shitcoins and selling hopes like that one tiktok spammer mussy described by 404media

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8 points

Ugh. Tangentially related: a streamer I follow has been getting lots of people in her chat saying that one of the taters wants to hire her. I’ve started noticing comments like “I love white culture” and weird fantasies about the roman empire. Historically she’s also been asked multiple times what her ethnicity is (she is white), specifically if she is scandanavian, which I am starting to view under some kind of white supremacist lens. I’ve told her to ignore anything mentioning the taters or “top g” as one of them is known.

Honestly, I’m worried that she could get brigaded by these creeps, even if she shows no response whatsoever.

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4 points

I mean, according to the charges Tate hiring young women usually meant some variety of sex trafficking and adult video that he took the money for. Tbh the whole space is sufficiently toxic that she ought to start dropping the banhammer judiciously, but IDK what situation is politically economically etc.

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12 points
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Oh hey looks like another Chat-GPT assisted legal filing, this time in an expert declaration about the dangers of generative AI: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/stanford-professor-lying-and-technology-19937258.php

The two missing papers are titled, according to Hancock, “Deepfakes and the Illusion of Authenticity: Cognitive Processes Behind Misinformation Acceptance” and “The Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political Attitudes and Behavior.” The expert declaration’s bibliography includes links to these papers, but they currently lead to an error screen.

Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.

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7 points

Interesting post and corresponding mastodon thread on the non-decentralised-ness of bluesky by cwebber.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698

The author is keen about this particular “vision statement”:

Preparing for the organization as a future adversary.

The assumption being, stuff gets enshittified and how might you guard your product against the future stupid and awful whims of management and investors?

Of course, they don’t consider that it cuts both ways, and Jack Dorsey’s personal grumbles about Twitter. The risk from his point of view was the company he founded doing evil unthinkable things like, uh, banning nazis. He’s keen for that sort of thing to never happen again on his platforms.

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6 points

note that cwebber wrote the ActivityPub spec, btw

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14 points

how come every academic I have worked with has given me some variation of

they already have all of my data, I don’t really care about my privacy

i’m in computer science 🙃

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8 points
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When people start going on about having nothing to hide usually it helps to point out how there’s currently no legal way to have a movie or a series episode saved to your hard drive.

I suspect great overlap between the nothing-to-hide people and the people who watch the worst porn imaginable but think incognito mode is magic.

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12 points

what’s wild is in the ideal case, a person who really doesn’t have anything to hide is both unimaginably dull and has effectively just confessed that they would sell you out to the authorities for any or no reason at all

people with nothing to hide are the worst people

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11 points

the marketing fucks and executive ghouls who came up with this meme (that used to surface every time I talked about wanting to de-Google) are also the ones who make a fuckton of money off of having a real-time firehose of personal data straight from the source, cause that’s by far what’s most valuable to advertisers and surveillance firms (but I repeat myself)

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6 points
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The thing is, I’m pretty sure the overwhelming majority of the data is effectively worthless out of the online advertising grift. It’s thoughtlessly collected junk sold as data for its own sake.

It works because no one working in advertising knows what a human beings is.

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5 points

my strong impression is that surveillance advertising has been an unmitigated disaster for the ability to actually sell products in any kind of sensible way — see also the success of influencer marketing, under the (utterly false) pretense that it’s less targeted and more authentic than the rest of the shit we’re used to

but marketing is an industry run by utterly incompetent morally bankrupt fuckheads, so my impression is also that none of them particularly know or care that the majority of what they’re doing doesn’t work; there’s power in surveillance and they like that feeling, so the data remains extremely valuable on the market

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