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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.)

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[-] jaschop@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago

I just watched the whole thing. She makes a consistent case.

I felt a little called out by the being tolerant bit. I for sure haven't had great success in talking to close people about their AI use. And I was maybe a little too cold to colleagues, who tried to get ahead of the AI literacy circus with good intentions, although I grudgingly agreed that they are right.

Maybe I don't meet enough randos to get feeling on the level of pervasiveness of chatbots. Maybe it's a personality thing; I worked myself out of depression mostly by disciplining myself and stopping to buy my own excuses, and that's kind of how I approach every problem now. That sure isn't a vibe that most people respond to.

There was one part of my AI beliefs that wasn't adressed. Besides the "front-end" and "back-end" harms, that can be mitigated, the tech as a whole still seems trash to me. That may be boomerism setting in, but chatbots just feel counter to and displacing my positive vision for a social fabric, be it for responsible professional communities or for interpersonal connections.

(I do buy into the use-case for a context-sensitive search engine, e.g. for walls of legalese. But the current framing of the tools is just so harmful, even that use is hazardous as seen in the anecdote.)

[-] zogwarg@awful.systems 2 points 9 hours ago

I don't meet that many people either, but I get the general vibe that people understand that it's somewhat shitty, but it still fills a social need (compare/contrast horoscopes).

Completely anecdotally, I recently saw a short video of a french woman, saying to an impressive know-it-all-tv-quizz-champion [intended as a compliment I think]: "Wow you sound like Chat GPT!"

Too me that was very illustrative of the perception of Chat GPT from a less tech-literate perspective.

this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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