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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Ah, late stage capitalism at its finest.
From an article about a boutique brand that sells books to rich people:
Assouline has made its name publishing tomes that sell for $1,000 or more.
Oh, so they publish textbooks.
“They represent stealth wealth, intended to tell you what your hosts are about and to provide visual evidence: that the owners are people of wealth, education and taste.”
🎶 Please allow me to introduce myself 🎶
now where did I leave my hammer and sickle
“…37%… That means nearly one in four…”
Eh, no it doesn’t, it means nearly two in five. Which is worse.
So you’re saying that they’ve got books worth at least a grand which their owners are literally using to flaunt their wealth?
I’m legally obligated to say stealing is legally and morally wrong buuuuuuuut
@BlueMonday1984 Betcha the authors aren’t getting paid industry-normal royalties (10-15% of net receipts) on those Veblen goods …
(A few of my novels have been sold as limited-run signed first editions. Typically for 50%-100% more than the normal hardcover price, so maybe 3-5% as much as this nonsense. Cost of goods for a leatherbound, gilt-trimmed luxury edition is maybe $5-10, plus 10% of the cover price for the author. So someone in the middle is making serious bank.)
Of course the books are just vapid art books or travel books.
I just learned about this “wonderful” little item too
@froztbyte Your term of art in economics to describe this shitbaggery is “Veblen goods”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
“a type of luxury good… for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.”
handy to know, ty
“Complimentary Carbon Efficient Delivery”
Carbon Efficient even…
That means that DHL driver has to take bike instead of car for this one
If there is an elevator in the apartment, the driver has to take the stairs, contractually. Of course people who order that don’t live in high rise apartments where the driver can reach the door, so everybody wins.
Assouline! The gasoline of ass!
just heard a podcast ad for amazon prime saying it causes “involuntary deal squeals” followed by a categorization of different kinds of customer grunts and squeals according to product. not making this up
god that’s just really icky
I swear I keep seeing Amazon ads in this same icky dehumanizing “cute” style, like some of the annoyance-based ads I vaguely remember from when I still had cable TV. is this just what ads become every time a corporation decides you have no other choice? (yes, almost every time)
one of OpenAI’s cofounders wrote some thoroughly unhinged shit about the company’s recent departures
Thank you, guys, for being my team and my co-workers. With each of you, I have collected cool memories — with Barret, when we had a fierce conflict about compute for what later became o1; with Bob, when he reprimanded me for doing a jacuzzi with a coworker; and with Mira, who witnessed my engagement.
I am in awe of the sheer number of GPUs… whose lives ChatGPT has changed.
If it was just this one line, this would be in the top 10 funniest things ever written around genAI. Too bad the rest of the rambling insanity ruins it.
I can’t be the only one reading that super passive aggressively right? “Thank you Barret, whom I hated. Bob, for ruining my hot Jacuzzi date. And Mira, for existing.”
right with you on team passive aggressive.
Fun fact: All of these incidents happened at the same jacuzzi party.
I heard it was the same 50 parties, over and over
(or, well, the same party, x50…)
lmao this is weird as fuck, reminds me of the bullshit Lex Fridman comes up with, I can totally imagine him saying things like this
love a good second paragraph jumpscare
I am sure this is totally not sketchy in the slightest and the people behind it have no nefarious agenda whatsoever.
fuck that’s gross
where’d you find/run across that? can’t tell if it’s a normal ad or some gig-site thing or what
Saw it posted on Reddit. It’s apparently from clickworker.com which is a weird-ass website by itself at first glance, with great pitches like this:
People are happier if they are more financially independent. We can help you achieve this.
ah, doman name sounds like it’s one of the microwork farms
Ah yes the advertisement which causes T&S people (who have seen some things) to go on long rants on why you should never put pictures of your kids online publically.
Found a good one in the wild
Didn’t you know LLM stood for Limited Liability Machine
A lobsters states the following in regard to LLMs being used in medical diagnoses:
If you have very unusual symptoms, for example, there’s a higher chance that the LLM will determine that they are outside of the probability space allowed and replace them with something more common.
Another one opines:
Don’t humans and in particular doctors do precisely that? This may be anecdotal, but I know countless stories of people being misdiagnosed because doctors just assumed the cause to be the most common thing they diagnose. It is not obvious to me that LLMs exhibit this particular misjudgement more than humans. In fact, it is likely that LLMs know rare diseases and symptoms much better than human doctors. LLMs also have way more time to listen and think.
<Babbage about UK parlaimentarians.gif>
nothing hits worse than an able-bodied techbro imagining what medical care must be like for someone who needs it. here, let me save you from the possibility of misdiagnosis by building and mandating the use of the misdiagnosis machine
Also please fill in the obligatory rant about how LLMs don’t actually know any diseases or symptoms. Like, if your training data was collected before 2020 you wouldn’t have a single COVID case, but if you started collecting in 2020 you’d have a system that spat out COVID to a disproportionately large fraction of respiratory symptoms (and probably several tummy aches and broken arms too, just for good measure).
Turns out trump really does understand cryptocurrency perfectly. Who’d have thought? Some folk seems surprisingly unhappy about this, though.
Maybe we’ll pay off the $35 trillion US debt in Crypto. I’ll write on a little piece of paper ‘$35T crypto we have no debt.’ That’s what I like.
The question (which doesn’t matter) now is, does he really understand crypto? Or did he get at the right conclusion because he thinks that everybody else, like him, is just scamming all the time?
Given the kinds of crowds he hangs out with (i.e. mostly other rich people and political elite) is that not an understandable conclusion?
anything that makes yglesias have a bad day is generally a good thing
but it sounds like the orange man understands the crypto market perfectly: the numbers are all made up and everyone’s lying
(at least I think it’s that one? one of them’s quite the bootlicker. I’m bad at names tho)
I mean there are definitely some brain rotted crypto bros who would buy shares at face value because it’s totally gonna go to the moon guys
Not a sneer, but some truly beautiful karma:
Judge to approve auctions liquidating Alex Jones’ Infowars to help pay Sandy Hook families
Somehow I managed to mention the wordpress lawsuit on last week’s thread instead of this one, so let’s try again.
Matt Mullenweg, the wordpress(.)com guy and current owner of tumblr, tried to shakedown competing blog product WP engine (which builds on the same open source software that his company does) for 8% of their revenue (https://goblin.band/notes/9yjrc2logimd1tr3 h/t to froztbyte who was also on the old thread for some mysterious reason) or he’d say mean things about them at a conference where they were one of the sponsors. And they didn’t pay up, so he compared them to cancer.
And now they’re suing him.
https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2024/matt-mullenweg-wp-engine-debacle/
Mullenweg’s the same guy who publicly harassed a random transwoman on Tumblr and had a general meltdown to the point where Tumblr staff had to distance himself from him, so I’m not shocked.
(That its Tumblr is the only thing that shocks me - you’d think he’d have realised its queer-friendly rep was one of the main things going for it)
wait are there non-queer people on Tumblr even??
I mean, it’s the same company that didn’t realize that half its traffic was porn, so it’s on brand
I mean, it’s the same company that didn’t realize that half its traffic was porn, so it’s on brand
Granted, Apple’s banhammer forced Tumblr’s hand on that front (though Tumblr’s complete failure on moderation did give Apple that golden opportunity).
(The whole debacle did lead to Newgrounds getting hit by two separate waves of new users - a minor wave in November after the NSFW purges kicked in, then a major wave in December after the porn ban was officially announced. I have nothing more to add, I think it was pretty funny Tumblr shat the bed that hard)
Haha I saw it from new comments view, didn’t check the thread title
lol holy shit, he was barely getting started
shortly after the first posts, he (most likely personally, although remains to be seen) had the trademark usage page updated specifically to take aim at wpengine
and started making his employees do an astroturfing campaign on their private socials
and blocked wpengine from interacting with wordpress.org at all, by both blocking accounts and IPs
dude’s lost it. coming up soon, mass migrations off wordpress?
Sounds like someone under a lot of pressure to raise revenue and not having much success.
Hello Matt this is your lawer speaking
a twitter thread by sv ceo where comment section wants to do some recreational union busting, political assassinations and automating away longshoremen (lmao) over checks notes black friday bringing slightly less profit to mass retailers. to which i say, fuck your black friday then
and he says that it’ll affect elections? specifically in “don’t do anything visible in interest of unions or trump will win” kinda way? what kinda madhouse is this americans explain https://xcancel.com/typesfast/status/1836498432510562788#m
fuck your black friday then
the institutionalisation of it is/was also just fucking nuts
and then in recent years it’s slowly been creeping out into other countries too, with other vendors in other places aping “black friday deals”
I have no mouth and I must scream
Is this the Flexport(?) guy? They’re YC funded I believe.
yeah so it seems
was/is he unusually shitty or notorious for something
dunno really, he’s got a lot of threads on HN where hackernews incorrect each other about logistics
I think the dude is just a wonk who happens to have gotten funding
I might not be a huge fan of his work, but I’ll take it any day over AI slop. At least it’s a creative vision.
You don’t have to agree with someone to recognize that they care.
Do you think they still say all that bullshit even when they’re not screenshooting it for twitter? Probably, right
hundo p
This was the woman who took over during Sam Altman’s temporary removal as CEO, which we’re pretty sure happened because the AI doom cultists weren’t satisfied that Altman was enough of an AI doom cultist.
Yudkowsky was solidly in favor of her ascension. I take no joy in saying this as someone who wants this AI nonsense to stop soon, but OpenAI is probably better off financially with fewer AI doom cultists in high positions.
Do you think when the Trumps get paperclipped it will look something like this?
