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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 21 April 2024 (awful.systems)
submitted 2 years ago by [M] to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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.

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[–] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (9 children)

About a year ago I ran across something (a ZA startup, by the looks of it) that essentially pitched casting reels as an interview screener, and one of the highlights of the pitch was “they just send in a video clip introducing themselves, and you can tell whether they’re a cultural fit”.

No need for all that messy scheduling! No misunderstandings[0]! Totally fair[1]! Totally not abusable[2]!

Noped out of that so hard, on account of all the obvious reasons, but also because it immediately felt like it had ulterior motives/uses, such as dataset for ML training.

Imagine we’ll see some more of that.

[0] - that you get to do anything about

[1] - y’know, if you ignore the complete power imbalance and complete susceptibility to allowing hidden profiling

[2] - except for all the extremely obvious ways

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Oof.

    That being said, that’s not unheard of. I remember back when I was looking at scholarships and such that some places wanted video submissions, and I have friends in other industries that had to do the same. That in no way diminishes the shittiness of it all.

    The ML angle seems novel though. Ostensibly you’d have a resume/cover letter that is effectively a set of tags for the video component, which I guess you could do sentiment analysis over? I guess the end game is to build a robot that can tell if you are a team player or not, and if you’d lie about it out of necessity for a job vs. eagerly for kool aid.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    That strikes me as probably illegal, at least in the US (although I can't find a better source, if someone can find where the EEOC says that it'd be appreciated.)

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    yes thanks for reminding me that the US is the center of the known universe and that all morality and allowances of anything ever should be modelled on events there. I almost forgot!

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    Using it for ML training would also be illegal in the EU under GDPR.

    But this already exists. My colleague had to submit a video self-interview when applying to Goldman Sachs, the pillar of morality and ethics in the corporate world.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (4 children)

    I didn't intend to make any comment on morality. US law seems relevant given that it's near-impossible to find one of these nonsense AI startups that isn't either in the US or targeting US customers. Indeed, this one looks to be based in Los Angeles.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I literally stated that the thing I was referencing in my comment (that you replied to) was from ZA. but I appreciate your doubled-down US-centrism in your second reply. nice job! glad you can remind me again! I must've forgotten about it in the handful of hours since you last did it!

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    @froztbyte @Eiim "ZA" is not a country abbreviation that many united statians know, at least from my anecdotal experience.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I'm familiar enough with country codes that I do know what ZA means, but in the context I didn't realize that it was referring to a country, I thought it was just an abbreviation I wasn't familiar with. In retrospect that probably should have stood out to me more.

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