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.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    23·
    4 months ago

    not only are the DCs burning water and harming ears, we’re on to the stage of taiwan not farming rice in service of making more chips

    She shows us one of her rice paddies. It used to hold enough water to raise ducks. Now it’s nothing but cracked earth and a few crispy flowers.

    I’m neither a climate nor agriculture scientist so I can’t guess the longer term impact of this; I immediately wonder whether the soil could get harmed by disuse over years, along with other warming-related problems

    I’m too angry to even sneer properly at this. it’s so fucking obviously nuts, but perverse incentives roll right ahead unchecked.

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
    21·
    4 months ago

    I think some people are from hell

    Here is the worst thing I didn’t have to read today from a transhumanist:

    Yes but laws are often outpaced, presumably having your dog walk in and say he liked it is a pretty good reason to have your bestiality charge thrown out and perhaps move on to the discrimination countersuit.

    .

    Also this may have historic reasons, as the first futa was drawn centuries ago, long before the technology that enabled transgenderism, with breasts being the key difference.

    Bonus round:

    spoiler

    What percentage of homeless people do you think would be worthwhile having as slaves? Many of them are broken people who can’t reasonably support themselves in their current state, nor do anything to fix it.

    This is vaguely similar to my idea for how to fix homelessness, build a community for them on a large scale, either state or national, where property is cheap and low skill jobs are abundant. Then you build a prison there, and everyone guilty of a ‘crime of homelessness’ such as trespassing, illegal camping, stealing food, etc. Then they get put in jail for a few days, probably put through some level of rehab, given basic medical care, and eventually a job for the massive debt they’ve just wracked up. What work it would be is the hard question, but the benefits to everyone else would pay for them to dig holes to fill back in if needed. Maybe have them sort recycling or something.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      4 months ago

      how to fix homelessness, build a community for them on a large scale, either state or national, where property is cheap and low skill jobs are abundant

      Okay, I mean, there’s no indication as to how you’d achieve this, but yes, community help and cheap rent are absolutely a good ideal to aim at…

      Then you build a prison there.

      Aaaand you’re a cartoon villain. What the absolute fuck.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        4 months ago

        just want to make sure this is on the record

        those suggestions (from the deranged OP) are basically segregationist: “you take all the poor, you give them their own little world [and then they’re no longer here, where we have to look at them]”. there’s a long track record of awful enterprises that have been done with that spirit. they carry names like Apartheid, ghetto, etc.

        (there are occasionally serious well-meaning suggestions on how to provision for the poor and unfortunate in ways that allow improving lives, but those don’t tend to handwave the details, and never (afaict) involve the “make them go over there” step)

    • Aoife@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      13·
      4 months ago

      Holy shit every one of those was like getting ounched in the head from a completely random direction

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
    18·
    4 months ago

    https://bsky.app/profile/jonpennington.bsky.social/post/3kxqkmezcwe2o

    I went to college with him. Yarvin is curdled nerd rage personified. He also lies about his age. He’s older than me & claims a birth date that would make him younger than me.

    I was on a Quiz Bowl team with him & whenever he would buzz in for an answer, he would jerk his body spasmodically, which the other people on the team called “Yarvinating.”

    He’s the kind of player that other Quiz Bowl players hate, known in the subculture as a “pickoff lord.” That is to say, he’s the kind of guy who would pad his stats by diving in to buzz on easy questions, make wild guesses on intros so he could get more points than teammates, etc.

    Hand to God. If anybody disputes me, I’ve got at least one other person who would remember the “Yarvinating” anecdote. I’ve got legit Quiz Bowl cred. I used to play against Ken Jennings before he was even a Jeopardy! contestant, let alone host.

    I connected on Facebook with a former classmate, somebody else from that team who once appeared in a College Jeopardy! tournament. We’re both kind of just gobsmacked that we were there for somebody else’s Lex Luthor origin story.

    Another bit of tea… He lies about his age. He was an upperclassman at Brown when I was a freshman & he claims to be younger than me.

    see also https://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

    Yarvin played on the College Bowl-only team for Brown from 1989 to 1992. In 2021 he published a poem[2] stating that “No one can fucking touch me / In College Bowl.” Brown failed to advance out of the Region 1 tournament for all four years of Yarvin’s participation, making his lifetime record at intercollegiate tournaments 0-4 and demonstrating that, at a minimum, the Brandeis, MIT, and Williams teams were capable of “touching” his performance.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      I’d never looked into how old the clown is, but

      He also lies about his age. He’s older than me & claims a birth date that would make him younger than me.

      wait what? what does he claim? is the indicated year on wikipedia accurate? why the hell?

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      4 months ago

      He also lies about his age.

      I also knew somebody who did that, but it was done as a joke, he obv picked an age much much younger and everybody new he was older, it was just a funny joke. (With a small layer of disliking getting older, which is understandable) From the way this is written, it seems to me this isn’t like that at all.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        4 months ago

        I like answering ludicrously old whenever this stupid shit comes up

        or picking timestamps that make devs wonder whether they had a value handling bug (such as 1/1/1970, the asp.net default 0, etc ec)

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      18·
      4 months ago

      we still keep a proportion of Proton’s financial reserves in Bitcoin.

      further down the page

      Proton is not a crypto company. We do not speculate in crypto

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        16·
        4 months ago

        so I’ve accidentally been paying shitheads who speculate on crypto to speculate on crypto. I’m kinda angry at myself for not catching this.

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      4 months ago

      The fuck is happening over there?

      I could have “excused” the AI bullshit as “we did it to appease the corporate customers who make us money” but there’s no way you can spin this.

      I’m canceling my account. At this point I might just say fuck it and use my Yahoo mail for everything again.

      (And this time the Reddit thread is the dumpster fire I’ve been expecting the last one to be lol)

    • earthquake@lemm.eeEnglish
      10·
      4 months ago

      Can’t blame this shit on the survey!

      I checked, crypto shit was not in any of the top 8 results (top 5 broken out, and they mentioned 3 more, which are surely #6 through #8).

    • ShakingMyHead@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      4 months ago

      Bosses are urging employees to increase their output with the help of AI tools (37 percent), to expand their skill sets (35 percent), take on a wide range of responsibilities (30 percent), return to the office (27 percent), work more efficiently (26 percent), and work more hours (20 percent).

      Stop working from home because AI.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    4 months ago

    Japan supermarket chain uses AI to gauge staff smiles, speech tones in quality service push (South China Morning Post).

    Called “Mr Smile”, it was developed by the Japanese technology company InstaVR and is said to be able to accurately rate a shop assistant’s service attitude.

    It has also been designed with “game” elements that invite staff to improve their attitude by challenging their scores.

    The company said its goal was to “standardise staff members’ smiles and satisfy customers to the maximum”.

    Thanks I hate it

    Press release here: https://www.aeonretail.jp/pdf/240701R_1.pdf or here: https://www.instavr.co.jp/news/aeon-retail-smile-2024-07-01/ (Lots of big words so I didn’t try to read it)

    InstaVR’s English website here: https://www.instavr.co/

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      4 months ago

      What if instead of making robots better we just made interacting with a real person indistinguishable by demanding they conform to arbitrary metrics that the brain-slugs that control our minds think look like genuine human warmth and kindness?

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      Previous workplace merged with a US company that among other things offered “sentiment analysis” for call centers - the software was supposed to detect if someone was upset or irate. Could be used to help employees deal with irate customers, but could also detect if an employee was rude or stressed. Same software could be used to ensure employees used certain stock phrases like “welcome to InitTech, how may I help you?”

      Point is, tech has been used to enforce conformity since well forever.

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
      5·
      3 months ago

      @cstross

      Looks like someone took the wrong lesson from Quantum of Nightmares!

      Edit: Enjoyed the book, btw. Felt weird about shopping for groceries for most of a year afterward. A++

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    4 months ago

    No idea how true it is but apparently crowdstrike fired some of their QA and replaced it with AI, anybody heard about this? (source bsky) (Also ‘AI’ is doing a lot of work here, that could be anything)

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      16·
      4 months ago

      I am attempting to track down this precise story.

      • They are gung ho on AI
      • They laid off a pile of their QA
      • They have a “virtual security analyst” which is an LLM
      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        4 months ago

        iirc Crowdstrike does use regular ML for security, or at least a lot of security companies, I think they might have talked about it on the risky business podcast, so you might want to look at their (many iirc) crowdstrike sponsored parts. No episode directly springs to mind however.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          14·
          4 months ago

          This can also be an area where ML is an appropriate and useful tool. You’ll see it used to establish a statistical baseline for what traffic should look like and then it can flag when it detects something that doesn’t match that as suspicious and worth further investigation. In this space there is actually a lot of value in some of the statistical modeling techniques, though generative AI is obviously a very different and less useful beast.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      Good grief, I know. It was bad enough when SBF hit the headlines, but now, it feels like the next news cycle will involve explaining how Thielbux funded a performance art piece in Dimes Square about Nikolai Fyodorov’s Cosmism.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        4 months ago

        Yeah Dreher used to be a staple at LGM but some time ago I think they decided he was struggling so much with mental health they decided to lay off him.

        I hope he accepts he’s gay and does some sort of repentance for all the stuff he’s said over the years.

    • vulture_god@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      11·
      4 months ago

      Great article. It’s always fun to read about smart people lionizing a terrible person like Aleister Crowley and inevitably going insane (or dead, in Jack Parson’s case).

      The article never discussed the topic directly, but for others interested in esoterica would probably enjoy reading about the concept of egregores.

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        4 months ago

        terrible person like Aleister Crowley

        Wait, why is Crowley terrible? Wasn’t he basically an overly enthusiastic cosplayer that did all the drugs and all the sex? So basically an occult hippy? Am I just unaware of him abusing people or some other dark shit?

          • Mike@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            4 months ago

            Claim to fame! Aleister Crowley was born a short walk from the house where I grew up, although then he was plain old Edward Crowley. My home town isn’t that keen to be associated with him, largely because of the above - at a superficial level he was a harmless crank, a rich kid who decided to start his own religion and dress up in robes, but once you dig down into the history he was a pretty unpleasant, exploitative man - a classic cult leader.

        • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          4 months ago

          I mean, I really don’t think you can have a sex cult without at the very least some abuse. It’s also good practice to treat occultism as weirdo fascism.

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
            8·
            4 months ago

            It’s also good practice to treat occultism as weirdo fascism.

            the coincidence happening over and over is a tad unfortunate

        • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          4 months ago

          I read his Wikipedia recently and he just seemed like a user who was careless with the people in his life. His philosophy was “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”, which is obviously open to abuse and exploitation.

          • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            4 months ago

            Ye that’s why I’m asking, cause even RationalWiki doesn’t have a chapter on abuse or anything.

            • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
              9·
              4 months ago

              Here are some bits from Wikipedia:

              He offered a libertine education for the children, allowing them to play all day and witness acts of sex magic. He occasionally travelled to Palermo to visit rent boys and buy supplies, including drugs; his heroin addiction came to dominate his life, and cocaine began to erode his nasal cavity. There was no cleaning rota, and wild dogs and cats wandered throughout the building, which soon became unsanitary. Poupée died in October 1920, and Ninette gave birth to a daughter, Astarte Lulu Panthea, soon afterwards.

              New followers continued to arrive at the Abbey to be taught by Crowley. Among them was film star Jane Wolfe, who arrived in July 1920, where she was initiated into the A∴A∴ and became Crowley’s secretary. Another was Cecil Frederick Russell, who often argued with Crowley, disliking the same-sex sexual magic that he was required to perform, and left after a year.

              Subsequently, a young Thelemite named Raoul Loveday moved to the Abbey with his wife Betty May; while Loveday was devoted to Crowley, May detested him and life at the commune. She later said that Loveday was made to drink the blood of a sacrificed cat, and that they were required to cut themselves with razors every time they used the pronoun “I”. Loveday drank from a local polluted stream, soon developing a liver infection resulting in his death in February 1923.

              Employing a local boy, Mohammad ben Brahim, as his servant, Crowley went with him on a retreat to Nefta, where they performed sex magic together.

              Crowley was intrigued by the rise of Nazism in Germany, and influenced by his friend Martha Küntzel believed that Adolf Hitler might convert to Thelema; when the Nazis abolished the German O.T.O. and imprisoned Germer, who fled to the US, Crowley then lambasted Hitler as a black magician.

              Pasi described Crowley’s fascination with the extreme ideologies of Nazism and Marxism–Leninism, which aimed to violently overturn society: “What Crowley liked about Nazism and communism, or at least what made him curious about them, was the anti-Christian position and the revolutionary and socially subversive implications of these two movements. In their subversive powers, he saw the possibility of an annihilation of old religious traditions, and the creation of a void that Thelema, subsequently, would be able to fill.” Crowley described democracy as an “imbecile and nauseating cult of weakness”, and commented that The Book of the Law proclaimed that “there is the master and there is the slave; the noble and the serf; the ‘lone wolf’ and the herd”.

              It’s always the same boring old squalid shit with these basic nietzschean bitches. Not many people I have less respect for.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      4 months ago

      you know, I’d wondered previously about the higher-than-average divinity-and-spirits obsession among TPOT. between some of the history of land/ccru there, the other shit previously observed in the stubsack (iirc?) about rightoids and aliens/fairies (and ofc the nazi history of occultism)… what a fucking faith to make

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        4 months ago

        Truly the weirdest consequence of crank magnetism and conspiracy syncretism is the kinds of bedfellows you find. UFO cults align with Christian dominionists because the aliens are actually demons (or vice versa - which direction isn’t important).

        It feels like modern fascism is less driven by orthodoxy (right belief) than they are by orthopraxy (right action) to the degree that as long as they aren’t actually in power anyone who hates on the right people and rejects the right facts can join the same club regardless of what they actually think. The weirdo occultism of the Nazis was largely tied to the project of reifying their racial hierarchy in all aspects of society by establishing that the Aryan race had the best religion and the best history in addition to the best genes and the best country. The weirdo occultism of modern fascism doesn’t have that kind of thread to it that I can see, and I don’t know what that means for ongoing development. Does it turn into a source of internal strife as they get closer to having actual influence? Do they settle into a more specific doctrine and cull the ranks of those who don’t adopt it? Or is accepting a consensus reality actually the optional part here as long as the group can broadly agree on what to do?

        • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          4 months ago

          Helena Blavatsky and Rudolph Steiner made up much of what went on to constitute esoteric Hilterism ab nihilo.

          Blavatsky, in particular, was a prolific bullshitter in the Frankfurtian sense. She invented the notion of the Aryan master race as a thing that exists in the future, which white europeans should strive to bring into the world.