Want to wade into the sandy, spooky surf of the abyss? 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. The spooks are well underway.)

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    9·
    21 hours ago

    This idea that the LLM is analogous to a camera is such an insipid, thought-terminating cliché.

    Its completely wrong, too - the camera’s invention didn’t render painting obsolete like he implies. The only way you’d come to that conclusion is if you’re utterly devoid of creativity and artistic insight.

    Iris suggested “prevent[ing] people from studying software development and only software development” in her article. I fully endorse that idea - at the bare minimum, it’d hopefully reduce the number of dipshits like this guy.

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        2·
        11 hours ago

        I vaguely recall once arguing that an arts education should be mandatory for all students. Honestly, that would probably solve a lot of problems in society.

        Maybe if we banned teaching MBAs altogether alongside it…

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      20 hours ago

      I think the advent of photography decimated a particular genre of painting - portraits, but it was still a tail-off. The middle classes could get photo portraits done but they were only B&W and small (a Daguerreotype is basically twice as big as a standard photo print) and still quite expensive. So if you wanted a big color portrait of a loved one, you still had to commission a painting. Same for landscapes.