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.
(Taking over for Gerard this time. Special thanks to him for starting this.)
This came across my desk today. Anything to be skeptical about?
https://www.platformer.news/roost-open-source-trust-safety/?ref=platformer-newsletter
rahaeli on bluesky says this is fine, it's the same ML that any T&S dept already has to apply to triage the firehose of shit, and doesn't involve LLMs
Well now, this is intriguing. Let me check out their website and see if they have the source code for this open source offering available there. Oh dear, looks like they have forgotten to include a link to the source code (though they did make sure to prominently include the referrer of platformer.news in the URL so that's good for them). Not to worry, surely they have a GitHub or something. Oh, still nothing. Maybe there's a link in this Mozilla blog post about it? Still no, but they seem to accidentally imply this is some kind of an AI thing? Is this finally the open source AI we have all been so excitedly waiting for?
To be a little more serious, there's barely anything here to even be gullible about. Just a Vaporware idol for corpos to have a circlejerk around and congratulate themselves for pretending to do something about the bad vibes. If there's a real ambition beyond corporate peacockery here, the motivation is merely to take care of the pesky content moderation without having to pay people to do it.
dammit it's barely days since my open source veneer side comment and then this happens. I'm dubious of even giving a tiny bit of goodwill because with this set of orgs on task and the resources they can muster, surely piddly little things like setting up some infra for publishing and management is in the hours to maybe days spectrum...
casey's words:
that roblox post that casey links to:
I have no mouth and I must scream
merely from seeing the domain and author, probably all of it - casey newton’s got a real bad case of access syndrome, and keeps writing fluff/puff pieces uncritically amplifying tons of bayfucker nonsense
(it’s even beyond the usual levels of what one may refer to as useful idiot)
(I’ll read the rest of it later as my brain boots and the day’s bullshit allows on time)
Ed Zitron behind a tree rubbing his hands together