Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 25 August 2024
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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.
Google is no longer asking — feed the AI or you’re not in search results
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/08/19/google-is-no-longer-asking-feed-the-ai-or-youre-not-in-search-results/
Kids today might not realize that, for about twenty years there, you could go to Google Search and find things you were looking for! Google now features a hilariously unreliable AI summary as the f…
ChatGPT makes a terrible doctor. But it’s very convincing!
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/08/18/chatgpt-makes-a-terrible-doctor-but-its-very-convincing/
In shocking news, popular plausible BS machine ChatGPT gets medical diagnoses wrong more than half the time. But don’t worry — it’s very confident in them! A team at the University of Western Ontar…
How to fix AI’s ghastly power consumption? Fake the numbers!
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/08/17/how-to-fix-ais-ghastly-power-consumption-fake-the-numbers/
Big tech uses a stupendous amount of power, so it generates a stupendous amount of CO2. The numbers are not looking so great, especially with the ever-increasing power use of AI. So the large techs…
Elon Musk releases Grok-2 AI image generator for edgelords
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/08/15/elon-musk-releases-grok-2-ai-image-generator-for-edgelords/
Grok-2 is the latest edition of Elon Musk’s Twitter chatbot, featuring a preview of xAI’s forthcoming image generator. This lets paying blue-check users “have some fun.” [Twitter, archive] Mo…
San Francisco sues sites over nude AI deepfakes — including children
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/08/16/san-francisco-sues-sites-over-nude-ai-deepfakes-including-children/
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu is suing a pile of sites that generate and sell AI deepfakes of real women — and children. [Complaint, PDF; press conference, video] You upload a photo of a w…
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1etko9h/family_poisoned_after_using_aigenerated_mushroom/
5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people
5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people
https://privacy.thenexus.today/start-making-the-fediverse-less-toxic/
Anti-Blackness is a long-term problem in the fediverse. Now's a good time to start changing that.
Wyoming reporter finds one weird trick to fabricate quotes and stories!
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/08/14/wyoming-reporter-finds-one-weird-trick-to-fabricate-quotes-and-stories/
In the old days, bad journalists had to work at fabrication. Jayson Blair would copy from small local papers for the New York Times. Johann Hari would copy articles in other languages and steal sub…
Kroger unveils AI-powered automatic price gouger
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/08/13/kroger-unveils-ai-powered-automatic-price-gouger/
Kroger, the US’s largest supermarket chain, has been rolling out AI-powered “dynamic pricing” — hooked to cameras on its display shelves. Since 2018, the chain has been using digital price labels t…