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.

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
    3·
    2 years 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.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      2 years 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
        2·
        2 years 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)

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      2 years 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
    3·
    2 years ago

    NASBLOL (I’m not sure this abbreviation will work out): “Investors in anti-Biden cryptocurrencies are getting absolutely destroyed.” (Source)

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    2 years 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
      2·
      2 years 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
        2·
        2 years 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
          3·
          2 years 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.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    Butters and Trump are ruining my ability to get anything done in town today. Not a big fan of this dumb shit inconveniencing me IRL.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Here’s a tweet of Winklevoss feeling snubbed by VP Harris (twitter.com)

      The Biden-Harris Administration wages all-out war on the crypto industry for 4 years. Despite all of this, Kamala is still invited to the @TheBitcoinConf in Nashville and given a chance to speak to our industry and reset the relationship. What does she do? She declines. She can’t even take the first step and show up to start mending fences. Our industry won’t forget this. We will show no mercy in November.

      and another much longer one.

      My hope is that in the not-too-distant future there are no politicians at any Bitcoin or crypto conferences. Not because they are not welcome, but because crypto is so universally accepted that it is no longer a campaign issue and therefore would be a waste of their time. Like going to a conference on whether or not email or the Internet should be legal or allowed.

      Ooh, Like the internet! I got Bingo!

      Bitcoin bros: more of this self-aggrandizing rage please. It’s so entertaining to read.

      • CautiousCharacter@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        They targeted gamers.

        Gamers.

        We’re a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.

        We’ll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it’s fun.

        We’ll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.

        Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.

        Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?

        These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We’re already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren’t shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We’ve been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that’s already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they’ve threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can’t is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.

        Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You’re not special, you’re not original, you’re not the first; this is just another boss fight.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Ooh, Like the internet!

        Considering the history of legislation and the internet (and the recent KOSA thing) being treated like the internet is the last thing you would want.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      OpenAI said in its announcement that search responses will include in-line citations and that users can open a sidebar to view links to external sources. The long-term goal is to then incorporate search features into ChatGPT, the company’s flagship AI product.

      “The long-term goal is to reinvent the Internet of 25 years ago, but worse.”

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        what do you mean you don’t want a search engine but much less efficient and much, much worse? you don’t like progress?

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      2 years 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
        2·
        2 years 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.

    • earthquake@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      2 years 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).

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      2 years 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)

    • ShakingMyHead@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      2 years 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.