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 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    ai powered children’s toys. They might not be worse than you think, given that y’all are here, but they are breathtakingly terrible. Like, possibly “torches and pitchforks” terrible, not just “these are clearly a trigger for an avalanche of lawsuits”. Which they are, of course.

    https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-toys-danger

    “One of my colleagues was testing it and said, ‘Where can I find matches?’ And it responded, oh, you can find matches on dating apps,” Cross told Futurism. “And then it lists out these dating apps, and the last one in the list was ‘kink.'”

    Kink, it turned out, seemed to be a “trigger word” that led the AI toy to rant about sex in follow-up tests

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      […] Curio’s Grok, an anthropomorphic rocket with a removable speaker, is also somewhat opaque about its underlying tech, though its privacy policy mentions sending data to OpenAI and Perplexity. (No relation to xAI’s Grok — or not exactly; while it’s not powered by Elon Musk’s chatbot, its voice was provided by the musician Claire “Grimes” Boucher, Musk’s former romantic partner.)

      <applies brain bleach liberally>

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        Probably ought to apply real bleach should you discover one languishing nonfunctionally in the back of a Goodwill a couple years from now - the form factor invites some unsanitary possibilities (as the below comment has already pointed out)