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.

last week’s edition

    • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      21 hours ago

      How can we, as a community, talk about the existential risk of climate change or the benefits of adopting renewable energy or cheer the development of ever-more-efficient power consumption

      Well I have a good/bad news thing about that one

    • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      It’s as if, practically overnight, everyone went from, “we need to do everything we can to reduce our demands on the environment or we’re cooked” to “oooh, shiny new toy, and it only ruins everything around it, cool!”

      Definitely this one for me. I can only describe it as some fucked up denial psychology, the way people are pretending the environment isn’t collapsing, and the LLM boom on top of that is like a bad joke. Even in discussions critical of the tech sector this is treated as almost an afterthought—the very real, very violent damage done to all of us from poor countries by people in rich countries to prop up their toy fantasy schemes. Even if LLMs did everything they claim to do, it would still be a moral imperative to form insurgent guerillas to blow up these datacentres, on the environmental damage they do alone which is not a minor detail Karen it’s kind of a big deal

    • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      I hate LLMs because I am under enormous pressure, from many different angles, to also use them. I’m being asked – required, in some cases – to ignore all of my concerns about them and use them anyway because everyone else does and “obviously” they are the future. Because, somehow, all of my positions against LLMs make me unreasonable and a less valuable member of society.

      oof. yeah that’s me.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      Ooh. I love these. I’m “I don’t think Sam Altman or most of his social circle are good people and I don’t want to give them more wealth and power.”

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        14 hours ago

        I’ll go one step wider. It is not just Sam Altman or his social circle, but all the people most enriched by capitalism (and thus most able to exploit and benefit from a technology that shifts power away from labor and to capital) that I don’t want to see further empowered.