Feel like you want to sneer about something but you don’t quite have a snappy post in you? Go forth and be mid!
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 here 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.
petition to have these threads sorted by new by default, if that technology exists
new might be a good global default for everything local to our instance, given the traffic patterns of our threads. unfortunately it might take some doing to make that the default just for local stuff, without making things janky for folks reading federated content
amazingly, lemmy doesn’t even seem to persist the last sort you’ve selected correctly. which is like easy 10 lines of code to do even in React with Typescript
I’ve been kind of following development of Sublinks, which hopes to reach parity with Lemmy with more typical web tech so development can go faster/with more contributors, and also so they can pivot to better moderation tools. Maybe it works out, maybe we learn to love the jank.
I’ve been following it too, and hoping it yields a fork with better development priorities (and, frankly, developers) than lemmy, though I’m not at all looking forward to dealing with deploying Java and Go to production
Re: Lemmy, some dude (ofc) is trying to start a new “decentralized” Wikipedia, and he touts as a merit that he created Lemmy:
I have worked on Lemmy for the past four years, bringing it from a prototype to a fully functional Reddit alternative.
Some would say this is damning with faint praise, others would see it as a warning.
(https://ibis.wiki/article/Announcing_Ibis,_the_federated_Wikipedia_Alternative@ibis.wiki)
These are only a few examples, journalist Helen Buyniski has collected much more information about the the rot in Wikipedia.
(quickly web-searches for that name)
Oh, she writes for Russia Today.
Authors and public figures in fields as diverse as Complementary and Alternative Medicine and progressive politics (including Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, Gary Null, John Pilger, and George Galloway) have complained of persistent negative coverage on Wikipedia despite the site’s vaunted neutrality and the promise that “Biographies of Living Persons” are held to the highest standard.
(snerk) Oh, no, Deepak Chopra and Rupert Sheldrake are upset. I can feel the quantum disruption in the morphogenetic field.
now, you may have heard unfortunate rumours that the lemmy devs are a pair of tankies
this is of course shitlib lies spread by revisionists,
@blakestacey Oh dear, George Galloway complaining about negative coverage, how sad, much hardship. (Galloway is an utter shit.) John Pilger had credibility for a critique of US/western foreign policy, but the rest of the listed folks are just cranks.
extremely high context ancient-lore buttcoin lol:
anyone remember Ryan X. Charles, the man who spent nine months working at Reddit to reimplement bitcoind in javascript, 'cos it took that long for them to notice they were paying him and to stop doing that?
he became an extremely ardent Bitcoin-SV (Satoshi’s Vision) advocate who thought Prof Dr Dr Wright was a genius
anyway, he’s decided it’s time to flip to the non-losing side
https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770024760677687735
https://twitter.com/ryan_x_charles/status/1770039633490985430
(stefan matthews was the guy who brought craig to calvin)
not quite the sharpest tinnie in the six-pack
And, like every other crypto guy, Ryan has pivoted to AI now. His github profile says “Building AI with AI. Founder @artintellica.”
https://artintellica.com/ Truly, a website.
jesus goatfucking christ
Strange man posts strange thing.
The Lawnmower Man (1992), dir. Brett Leonard
he could have just admitted he couldn’t get the ai to draw a dick. Instead, a future without dicks is his idea of a surprising future
Those image generators are surprisingly bad at drawing nether regions, it turns into real horror shows quickly. A thing the ‘it is so over for real women’ incel weirdos don’t seem to talk about. (I checked it a while back no idea if it has improved since, but the conclusion was that sex workers can breathe easily (apart from them being fucked by mastercard/visa being run by cryptoprudes, governments going after them, and the general economic downturn driving the demand for sex work down but that is a different issue)).
Anthropic’s Claude confidently and incorrectly diagnoses brain cancer based on an MRI.
“Oh, some patient data. Let me quickly casually scan this into the sv datacorp. What’s that…privacy concerns? Naaaaah I changed the filename”
A friend that wants you to have an aggressive brain tumour to make an AI look good is no friend at all
There are far too many people in this world who learned both wrong things from the “Pray tell, Mr Babbage” anecdote
“But look how convincing [it] sounds!”
… how did we get to the point where the ai bros are un-ironically telling us, as a selling point, that their shiny toy literally gives false yet convincing-sounding medical diagnoses ?!?!?!
If I were working on Claude and wanted to hype it up, I would not talk about this experiment online or in public. If I were working on Claude and wanted to be responsible towards “the public”, I would use this example as a cautionary warning, not to further hype up the tool.
This feels like the slight period at the beginning of the NFT craze when I wasn’t yet comfortable dismissing out of hand anyone excited about them, because surely there was a least some useful application that wasn’t for scamming people, and surely this many people couldn’t all be so deluded about the same idea.