Want to wade into the snowy 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 so 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.)

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call h/t metafilter

    It’s a good read overall, makes some good points about global south.

    The hostility to AI tools within parts of our community is understandable. But it’s also strategic malpractice. We’ve seen this movie before, with Wikipedia itself. Institutions that tried to ban or resist Wikipedia lost years they could have spent learning to work with it. By the time they adapted, the world had moved on.

    AI isn’t going away. The question isn’t whether to engage. It’s whether we’ll shape how our content is used or be shaped by others’ decisions.

    Short of wikipedia shipping it’s own chatbot that proactively pulls in edits and funnels traffic back I think the ship has sailed. But it’s not unique, same thing is happening to basically everything with a CC license including SO and FOSS writ large. Maybe the right thing to is put new articles are AGPL or something, a new license that taints an entire LLM at train time.