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 so 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.)
When I was about 12, I got into a discussion about the environment with another kid at school. She told me that it didn't matter if we ruined the environment of the countries we all live in now, because we could all just move to the Arctic or Antarctica.
I was so surprised by the absurdity of that statement that it stuck with me vividly. To her credit, some years later she asked if I remembered her saying that and then admitted that it was a dumb thing to say. I occasionally remember this as an amusing childhood experience.
Besides the credit part, I remembered it again today for a different reason, this time in a conversation about model collapse.
This is my fault for letting myself get into a discussion about model collapse on the fediverse.
I'm not sure why model collapse isn't a big topic anymore, but maybe that's just because the environmental catastrophes are a more pressing concern. To be clear, I'm not concerned about the models themselves, just our increasing inability to verify the authenticity or accuracy of any information we encounter, including search engines just not turning up any useful results.
On a slightly different topic, if anyone has suggestions for how a person could acquire money to live, which can't involve physical labor, is probably remote-only, and possibly allows part-time flexibility, while unable to move from an expensive location for at least the next couple of years: I'm open to ideas. Because scamming people on Polymarket with a hairdryer sounded far more appealing than it ought.
this is the level the median hackernews poster thinks on