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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    18·
    2 months ago

    Don’t know how much this fits the community, as you use a lot of terms I’m not inherently familiar with (is there a “welcome guide” of some sort somewhere I missed).

    Anyway, Wikipedia moderators are now realizing that LLMs are causing problems for them, but they are very careful to not smack the beehive:

    The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.

    I just… don’t have words for how bad this is going to go. How much work this will inevitably be. At least we’ll get a real world example of just how many guardrails are actually needed to make LLM text “work” for this sort of use case, where neutrality, truth, and cited sources are important (at least on paper).

    I hope some people watch this closely, I’m sure there’s going to be some gold in this mess.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      15·
      2 months ago

      The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.

      Wikipedia’s mod team definitely haven’t realised it yet, but this part is pretty much a de facto ban on using AI. AI is incapable of producing output that would be acceptable for a Wikipedia article - in basically every instance, its getting nuked.

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
            13·
            2 months ago

            it is impossible for a Wikipedia editor to write a sentence on Wikipedia procedure without completely tracing the fractal space of caveats.

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 months ago

        I’d like to believe some of them have, but it’s easier or more productive to keep giving the benefit of the doubt (or at at least pretend to) than argue the point.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      2 months ago

      Welcome to the club. They say a shared suffering is only half the suffering.

      This was discussed in last week’s Stubsack, but I don’t think we mind talking about talking the same thing twice. I, for one, do not look forward to browsing Wikipedia exclusively through pre-2024 archived versions, so I hope (with some pessimism) their disapponintingly milquetoast stance works out.

      Reading a bit of the old Reddit sneerclub can help understand some of the Awful vernacular, but otherwise it’s as much of a lurkmoar as any other online circlejerk. The old guard keep referencing cringe techbros and TESCREALs I’ve never heard of while I still can’t remember which Scott A we’re talking about in which thread.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      2 months ago

      Don’t know how much this fits the community, as you use a lot of terms I’m not inherently familiar with (is there a “welcome guide” of some sort somewhere I missed)

      first impression: your post is entirely on topic, welcome to the stubsack

      techtakes is a sister sub to sneerclub (also on this instance, previously on reddit) and that one has a bit of an explanation. generally any (classy) sneerful critique of bullshit and wankery goes, modulo making space for chuds/nazis/debatelords/etc (those get shown the exit)

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      you use a lot of terms I’m not inherently familiar with (is there a “welcome guide” of some sort somewhere I missed).

      we’re pretty receptive to requests for explanations of terms here, just fyi! I imagine if it begins to overwhelm commenting, a guide will be created. Unfortunately there is something of an arms race between industry buzzword generation and good sense, and we are on the side of good sense.