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

  • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    18 hours ago

    Biologist here.

    This REALLY reminds me of how jealously cells guard their genomic DNA from interaction with nucleic acids out in the environment.

    Most genetic information on Earth is malicious information, selfish replicators in the form of viruses or transposable elements or selfish elements. Things that subvert the signals within a cell for their own propagation and provide nothing productive that the cells care about. So cells jealously guard their own genomic DNA and have all kinds of checks to make sure that nothing other than that sequence gets used, and outside sequence does not get incorporated into it. ANY DNA in your cytplasm gets rapidly destroyed, double stranded RNA sets off your immune system like crazy, even RNA with sequence statistics that are not quite like that of your species can set off an inflammatory reaction, immune system cells seeing RNA inside them that is overly compact and optimized like viral RNA treat them as sources of antigen rather than self.

    I cannot help but think we are living through the transformation of our non-brain-information sphere into a state like that of the genetic information sphere. Most material out there being meaningless for our purposes and us needing to jealously guard the provenance of information we use so as to not use bull, or worse, huge amounts of malicious information made to subvert us to the purposes of the powers that be that generate it.

    Evolution makes parasites more reliably than anything else. How did we train text-generation systems? Basically, to mimic the written word on the page like a stick bug on a stick. They’re like those beetles that live in ant colonies, sending out social signals that make the ants see them as offspring that have to be babied rather than parasites that don’t contribute. They replicate the form while not being the thing that they have subverted the signals of being.

    • zenkat@sfba.social
      0·
      8 hours ago

      @BioMan @lagrangeinterpolator There are a few things we have forgotten as a species. Our forgetting will prove disastrous.

      1. The acquisition of knowledge is a *social* process. Truth does not exist is a vacuum. It is the outcome of social processes.

      2. Our default mental and social processes do not automatically produce objective truth. Far from it, in fact. Our default is mob consensus.

      3. Our current success rests upon the advancements of The Enlightenment, which developed social processes (like the Scientific Method) which tend, over the long run, to create local knowledge that approaches objective truth.

    • Javier@col.social
      0·
      18 hours ago

      @BioMan

      > even RNA with sequence statistics that are not quite like that of your species can set off an inflammatory reaction, immune system cells seeing RNA inside them that is overly compact and optimized like viral RNA treat them as sources of antigen rather than self

      I was aware of the other DNA/RNA recognition/defense mechanisms, but not of the ones I quote from your toot, here.

      May I kindly ask for some references/sources? I’m quite interested!