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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt 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 ā22 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 canāt 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?
deleted by creator
(e: apologies, this turned into more of a wall-of-text sneer than I meant to, but Iāll leave it for flavour and detail)
as someone from (and living in) the global south (fairly familiar with but not myself at worse end of the resources spectrum), I cannot tell you how fucking ridiculous it sounds each time I see some North American Fuckwit post shit like that. whether it was the coiners going ābanking the unbanked!!!ā or the llm trash ācan help you write professional!!!ā, itās always some Extremely Resourced thinking that just does. not. apply. this side of the world
I probably should make this a long detailed post sometime somewhere, demonstrating just how utterly fucking wrong some of these presumptions are, because oh god theyāre many:
the amount of data it takes to communicate with this trash (in a number of markets, you get people buying data bundles in 10/50/100MB increments in day or hour units because thatās what they can afford at that point (there is another rant here to be had about exploitative behaviour on the part of telcos but separate rant))
just reaching the servers for this shit requires a good network connection, nevermind the interaction latency (higher base latencies = much longer cumulative = much slower āexperienceāā¦ and this shit was already slow from US networks)
hell, just having the hardware thatās capable is sometimes a big blocker - so-called āfeature phonesā are somewhat common (how much depends on where you are). sideline mention: locally in some areas theyāre called ātrililisā, after the way they ring, which I fucking love. and even when you have users with smartphones, the devices are not necessarily good. sometimes itās low resourced (because cost), sometimes itās buggy as fuck (vendors, cost), sometimes itās just plain fucked (because hard knocks life)
and donāt even get me goddamn started on the language. the phenomenon of nigerian english being Too Florid For USA has already featured here previously, but it goes so much beyond that. show me one of these fucking prompts working even half-well in Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsongo, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, Zulu, or Afrikaans. and those are just the other national (spoken/textual) languages here (in ZA). one single border away thereās 25+ more that I know of
and thatās to just look at the resource/technical/implementation side of it, and saying nothing about the Northern Saviour dynamic - so many of these fucking people advertise working for a non-profit, wearing it like a badge. wandering around DC a few years back, running into many of these, with so-called focuses on places in africa Iāve been to and worked inā¦ it was surreal how wide the gap was between reality and what they had in their heads
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 nowā¦ I was able to dig up this:
āI hear Iām 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?ā He whined.
yeah, thatās 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 āhmm maybe it gave a significantly better life than what he could in italyā (which honestly I can understand as a drive, if not necessarily agree with)
that slackās gone now