Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems - 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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    6Ā·
    19 hours ago

    Itā€™s term time again and Iā€™m back in college. One professor has laid out his AI policy: you should not use an AI (presumably Chat GPT) to write your assignment, but you can use an AI to proofread your assignment. This must be mentioned in the acknowledgements. He said in class that in his experience AI does not produce good results and that when asked to write about his particular field it produces work with a lot of mistakes.

    Me, Iā€™m just wondering how you can tell the difference between material generated by AI then edited by a human, and material written by a human then edited by an AI.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      14Ā·
      11 hours ago

      Here is what I wrote in the instructions for the term-paper project that I will be assigning my quantum-physics students this coming semester:

      I canā€™t very well stop you from using a text-barfing tool. I can, however, point out that the ā€œAIā€ industry is a disaster for the environment, which is the place that we all have to live in; and that it depends upon datasets made by exploiting and indeed psychologically torturing workers. The point of this project is for you to learn a physics topic and how to write physics, not for you to abase yourself before a blurry average of all the things the Internet says about quantum physics ā€” which, spoiler alert, includes a lot of wrong things. If you are going to spend your time at university not learning physics, there are better ways to do that than making yourself dependent upon a product that is a tech bubble waiting to pop.

      • gramie@lemmy.caEnglish
        1Ā·
        8 hours ago

        I was talking to someone recently and he mentioned that he has used AI for programming. It worked out fine, but the one thing he mentioned that really stuck with me was that when it was all done, he still didnā€™t know how to do the task.

        You can get things done, but you donā€™t learn how to do them.