Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th December 2024 - eviltoast

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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

  • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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    9 days ago

    Saw something about “sentiment analysis” in text. While writers have discussed “death of the author” and philosophers and linguists have discussed what it even means to derive meaning from text, these fucking AI dorks are looking at text in a vacuum and concluding “this text expresses anger”.

    print("I'm angry!")
    

    the above python script is angry, look at my baby skynet

    • self@awful.systems
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      9 days ago

      sentiment analysis is such a good example of a pre-LLM AI grift. every time I’ve seen it used for anything, it’s been unreliable to the point of being detrimental to the project’s goals. marketers treat it like a magic salve and smear it all over everything of course, and that’s a large part of why targeted advertising is notoriously ineffective

      • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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        8 days ago

        It’s built upon such a nonsensical ontology. The sentiment expressed in a piece of language is at least partially a social function, which is why I can add the following

        I AM BEYOND FUCKING LIVID AT EVERYONE IN THIS FUCKING INSTANCE

        to this response and no one will actually assume I’m really angry (I am though, send memes).

        Edit: not one meme. Not. One.

        Edit2: thank you for the memes, @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de. This one is my favorite. It feels Dark Souls-y.

        Image description

        Live crawfish with arms spread in front of bowl of cooked crawfish with caption “Stand amongst the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts if honor matters”.