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 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.
(Decemberās finally arrived, and the run-up to Christmas has begun. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
something i was thinking about yesterday: so many people i
respectused to respect have admitted to using llms as a search engine. even after i explain the seven problems with using a chatbot this way:they continue to do it. the ease of use, together with the valid syntax output by the llm, seems to short-circuit something in the end-userās brain.
anyway, in the same way that some vibe-coded bullshit will end up exploding down the line, i wonder whether the use of llms as a search engine is going to have some similar unintended consequences ā āoh, yeah, sorry boss, the ai told me that mr. robot was pretty accurate, idk why all of our secrets got leaked. i watched the entire series.ā
additionally, i wonder about the timing. will we see sporadic incidents of shit exploding, or will there be a cascade of chickens coming home to roost?
they call this ātrainingā but i try to avoid anthropomorphising chatbots ā©ļø
At work, i watched my boss google something, see the āai overviewā and then say āwho knows if this is rightā, and then read it and then close the tab.
It made me think about how this is how like a rumor or something happens. Even in a good case, they read the text with some scepticism but then 2 days later they forgot where they heard it and so they say they think whatever it was is right.
Sadly web search, and the web in general, have enshittified so much that asking ChatGPT can be a much more reliable and quicker way to find information. I donāt excuse it for anything that you could easily find on wikipedia, but itās useful for queries such as āwhatās the name of that free indie game from the 00s that was just a boss rush no you fucking idiot not any of this shit it was a game maker thing with retro pixel style or whatever ughā where web search is utterly useless. Itās a frustrating situation, because of course in an ideal world chatbots donāt exist and information on the web is not drowned in a sea of predatory bullshit, reliable web indexes and directories exist and you can easily ask other people on non-predatory platforms. In the meanwhile I donāt want to blame the average (non-tech-evangelist, non-responsibility-having) user for being funnelled into this crap. At worst theyāre victims like all of us.
Oh yeah and the gameās Banana Nababa by the way.
Yes i know the kid in the omelas hole gets tortured each time i use the woe engine to generate an email. Is that bad?
āthey call this ātrainingā but i try to avoid anthropomorphising chatbotsā
You can train animals, you can train a plant, you can train your hair. So itās not really anthropomorphising.
Is there any search engine that isnāt pushing an āAI modeā of sorts? Some are more sneaky or give option to āopt outā like duckduckgo, but this all feels temporary until it is the only option.
I have found it strange how many people will say āI asked chatgptā with the same normalcy as āgooglingā was.
@yellowcake @Seminar2250
https://mastodon.me.uk/@pikesley/115514168501256644