Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
From https://bsky.app/profile/thefinancenewsletter.com/post/3mek7wsqgkk26
Tag the most ridiculous entry, I am curious of your choices.
To me it has to be fucking historians. Arriving at new conclusions by looking at available evidence and/or finding obscure references that are not well known to the public – CLASSIC THING LLMS ARE GOOD AT.
@V0ldek @cstross I couldn’t even read the whole list after seeing “CNC Programmers” on it. That may not be the most absurd, but the idea of “here’s a robot with a sharp blade spinning at high RPM that we’re using to make a physical object with extreme precision, so we fired the human who knows how it works and gave their job to the hallucination box” makes Willy’s Chocolate Experience seem like a warmup. I just hope there’s video. Lots of video. Ideally from behind safety glass.
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984
better read the study yourself, here https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935
@V0ldek Oh no, what will happen to the ::checks notes:: switchboard operation industry??
before you order the cavalry charge, fwiw this skeet misrepresents the actual study topic rather badly, as another bluesky commenter notes.
this doesn’t mean that the paper is any good or doesn’t deserve mockery (i don’t know, i didn’t read it yet, and i’m not sure i have apparatus to make other than esthetic judgements), just that the conclusions the og skeet author attributes to the paper aren’t the paper’s conclusions.
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Models?! The very form that captures AI and large language?! Models?!
So AI LLMs are at risk of destroying themselves?
How poetic.
@BlueMonday1984 @V0ldek
Historians definitely stood out to me, but also data scientists. The glorified grammar auto-complete that can’t do math is expected to do statistical analysis??
@V0ldek yeah, who needs historians anyway. nobody listens to them or watches their tiktok feed …
but “hosts an hostesses” … what do they mean by this?
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Lol at “historians”
@dajb @V0ldek @BlueMonday1984
“He who controls the past controls the future.” much?
(This is the run-up to that: “Who controls the present controls the past.”)
Passenger Attendants
Hosts and Hostesses
Just what you want when you pay for a nice travel experience or night out, a fucking ipad on a stick rolling up to you and trying to be of service.
LLMs came up with this list, prove me wrong
“these ai girls with 3 boobs really puts strain on the fashion model industry”
CNC Tool Programmer is a good one and shows that Microsoft, a company that probably has paid for someone to run CNC tooling for prototyping AND supposedly makes software, didn’t do the bare minimum to understand complexeties involved by talking to that someone.
Yeah, you can make mistakes with programming this thing, it’ll happily destroy hundreds of thousands of dollars in tooling as well as potentially maiming or killing anyone standing too close while the machine is actually physically crashing. It will friction-weld your nice, expensive carbide cutting tool with cooling channels to your work piece (even if they are dissimler metals) by taking too big of a cut because it does exactly as it’s instructed.
someone on HN or LW posted a piece about how they’d tried to get chatgpt to design a machine part, and it had hilariously failed (impossible machine paths, too thin material etc)
some nimrod suggested skilled machinists be outfitted with pressure sensing gloves and cameras and patiently explain eahc machining step so the LLMs could take their jobs
That’s not just smart, that’s capital-J Jenius.
Oh this is hard. “Political Scientists” on that list is dystopian as fuck.
“Writers and Authors”… seriously, do they believe everyone will just read slop novels in the future? I think this is my top ridiculous pick.
Oh, and “Customer Service Representatives”. I guess for them these are lowly unimportant jobs that could be replaced by fucking chatbots. I wonder: who do they have more disdain for, the people working in customer service, or the customers?
@nightsky @V0ldek Well to be honest I think they just have general disdain for us subhumans for not scamming or inheriting our way to fortune.
On a lighter note, cool Turrican avatar. Loved that game as a kid.
Yesss, and it’s still worth playing today!
Switchboard operators?