Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th April 2025 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this…)

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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this…)

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    Recently, I found myself dealing with a hallucinating Grok (as the xAI chatbot is known). I was working on an article […] I offered Grok a very specific query: […] What followed was like an argument with an especially lucid drunk.

    Imagine this, but everything and forever.

    Edit:

    The listeners did become suppliers, in line with Brecht’s democratic vision. Some of us are listening and hearing, but many more of us are shouting over one another, brought into relationships that are as likely to be conflictual as nourishing. That “vast network of pipes” pictured by Brecht turned out to be controlled by the same sort of venal moguls who gave us radio in the first place, and they lined those pipes with lead.

    I think calling the current model one where “the listeners became suppliers” is a misunderstanding of how we got here. If the point was to connect people in a two-way link then the context needs to shift away from a third party’s efforts to profit from it. Like, we don’t see all the crazies and grifters because we seek them out or what they’re trying to do, but because it’s profitable for the platforms and providers to connect us to them instead of the people we’re actually trying to reach, whether that be to hang out with friends/family, learn from a teacher/writer/journalist, or participate in an open society. Our ability to make those connections has been hijacked in order to boost the level of insanity because it’s more profitable to take advantage of both sides desire for connection without actually letting either one get what they want or need.