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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Wikipedia also just upped their standards in another area - they've updated their speedy deletion policy, enabling the admins to bypass standard Wikipedia bureaucracy and swiftly nuke AI slop articles which meet one of two conditions:
"Communication intended for the user”, referring to sentences directly aimed at the promptfondler using the LLM (e.g. "Here is your Wikipedia article on…,” “Up to my last training update …,” and "as a large language model.”)
Blatantly incorrect citations (examples given are external links to papers/books which don't exist, and links which lead to something completely unrelated)
Ilyas Lebleu, who contributed to the update in policy, has described this as a "band-aid" that leaves Wikipedia in a better position than before, but not a perfect one. Personally, I expect this solution will be sufficent to permanently stop the influx of AI slop articles. Between promptfondlers' utter inability to recognise low-quality/incorrect citations, and their severe laziness and lack of care for their """work""", the risk of an AI slop article being sufficiently subtle to avoid speedy deletion is virtually zero.