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)
Valsorda was on mastodon for a bit (in ‘22 maybe?) and was quite keen on it , but left after a bunch of people got really pissy at him over one of his projects. I can’t actually recall what it even was, but his argument was that people posted stuff publicly on mastodon, so he should be able to do what he liked with those posts even if they asked him not to. I can see why he might not have a problem with LLMs.
Anyone remember what he was actually doing? Text search or network tracing or something else?
oh! was he the guy doing a search engine archiving as much of the fediverse as possible, over the objections of the people being indexed?
yeah that tracks
So many techbros have decided to scrape the fediverse that they all blur together now... I was able to dig up this:
"I hear I’m supposed to experiment with tech not people, and must not use data for unintended purposes without explicit consent. That all sounds great. But what does it mean?" He whined.
yeah, that's the fucker. as a large language model, he does not have a data type for consent
I always wondered why he was at google for so long, and cut a teeny bit of hypothetical slack in light of "hmm maybe it gave a significantly better life than what he could in italy" (which honestly I can understand as a drive, if not necessarily agree with)
that slack's gone now