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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)

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[–] 9 points 1 day ago (17 children)

How do you all cope with the great ensloppification of the net when searching.

I usually limit to before 2022 but that's increasingly out of date, fiddly, and not always accurate anyway. I just fucking hate getting a couple of paragraphs into something and realising it's all fake.

And human work is buried in tides of garbage. It's not like it was great the last few years BS (before slop) but it's awful now

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  • [–] 2 points 8 hours ago (1 child)

    At this point, when I’m looking up something that hits me with pagefuls of links to barely relevant vibecoded scam websites, I’d rather ask a fucking chatbot. At least it’s usually (?) able to give me links to real websites. Very much a choose your flavour of infuriating slop situation.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 hours ago

    The irony being that the chatbot does seem to have access to a list of relevant, non-slop websites, or at least some sort of way to rank searches by reliability, which of course they would never implement in the human-usable search engines.

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  • [–] 3 points 13 hours ago

    I wonder if there's a market for RevivingYahoo^TM^, which in some ways was more link curation than search engine.

    When searching for examples of commands, I've sometimes been resorting to telling google to restrict itself to pdf files of specific websites (example redhat, with sometimes useful commands for server maintenance broadly)

    It's a bit sad that it's not just search that has gone downhill, but new documentation too (I swear Microsoft Azure documentation is getting worse).

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago (6 children)

    Really bumping up against this taking a math class. It's not just the ick feeling of getting slapped with a Google AI rendition that may or may not be accurate. There's at least 4 or 5 other vendors, Chegg and the like, doing the same thing but keeping their explanations behind a login wall. That's the entire first page of Google search results now. Of course, simply copying and pasting questions from a textbook is a terrible search strategy. But I still wish I could find a durable math Q&A community that wasn't slop-adjacent.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)
  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    limiting to .edu or ye olde mathematics stack exchange might get you part of the way, in addition to the previous suggestions. Lots of good stuff on old university websites!

    Edit: and hyperphysics, as suggested by schnoopy

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  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago (6 children)

    My non-helpful answer is to resign myself to accepting that whatever I was searching for isn’t that important.

    More practically, finding human-written work is the thing that https://marginalia-search.com/ excels at, although you might have to scroll a bit to find a relevant result.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago* (2 children)

    the marginalia dude is a bit of both-sideist, though it could've been worse (his second reply in the thread clarifies things a bit). and frankly, most of the alternative search engines developers are worse.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    This is nice! I'm curious how it's building its index.

    Probably not great fot general research, but for finding wholesome authentic stuff like cooking recipes it seems great.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago

    Yeah, pretty much. I think Marginalia is explicitly not trying to be the search engine, but rather to surface some of the more-neglected corners of the internet. So it won’t function as a complete substitute for another.

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