Want to wade into the sandy 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 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I keep wondering: is this really a need which many people fundamentally have, or is AI usage doing something to their brains?
Most likely the latter - Gerardās already done a couple Pivot to AI posts about AIās ability to lobotomise its users (Exhibit A, Exhibit B). Someone else has noted their coworker admitting to the lying machine ruining their Google-fu, too (source):
Recently my research lead recounted a meeting among the senior people, where they hammered out a bunch of project pitches. Some of the wording was still a little rough, but they were going to pass it all through DeepL anyway, to make it read good. Also everyoneās bad at spellling these days, since you got a thing that autocompletes for you, right? They were proud they remembered how to spell ācontinuousā.
Sure, everyone has days they canāt word good, but this starts sounding like worrying de-skilling. These people spend a good portion of their paid time working on and arguing over wording.
To be fair though itās not just their brains turning to mush, google has genuinely been getting worse too.
i donāt remember who said it, but they described genai as in some way reverse bayesian spam filter - so if spam filter can adapt to variety of spams, now thereās automated tool to flood the zone with spam that does pass the filter. this was used for seo with predictable results
feel like Iāve seen variations on that in a few places myself. would be interested in seeing a source, if anyone has. could be an interesting piece by itself
Found the original source
Thatās a one-two punch of Prabhakar Raghavan publicly executing it for profit and the slop-nami drowning out human-made work via SEO-optimised garbage (indirectly assisting Googleās enshittification efforts in the process).
Publishers have been reportedly readjusting their businesses to account for this shit - combined with Googleās enshittifcation and the slop-nami, we may see Google (if not search engines in general) lose a lot of relevance due to AI.