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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
This is barely on topic, but I’ve found a spambot in the wild. I know they’re a dime a dozen, but I wanted to take a deep dive.
https://www.reddit.com/user/ChiaPlotting/
It blew its load advertising a resume generator or something bullshit across hundreds of subs. Here’s an example post. The account had a decent amount of karma, that stood out to me. I’m pretty old school, so I thought someone just sold their account. Right? Wrong. All the posts are ChatGPT generated! Read in sequence, all the karma farm posts are very clearly AI generated, but individually they’re enticing enough that they get a decent amount of engagement: “How I eliminated my dent with the snowball method”, “What do you guys think of recent Canadian immigration 🤨” both paraphrased.
This guy isn’t anonymous, and he seemingly isn’t profiting off the script that he’s hawking. His reddit account leads to his github leads to his LinkedIn which mentions his recent graduation and his status as the co-founder of some blockchain bullshit. I have no interest in canceling or doxxing him, I just wanted to know what type of person would create this kind of junk.
The generator in question, that this man may have unknowingly destroyed his reddit account to advertise, is under the MIT license. It makes you wonder WHY he went to all this trouble.
I want to clone his repo and sniff around for data theft; the repo is 100% percent python, so unless he owns any of the modules being imported the chance of code obfuscation is low. But after seeing his LinkedIn I don’t think this guy’s trying to spread malware; I think he took a big, low fiber shit aaaaalll over reddit as an earnest attempt at a resume builder.
Personally, I find that so much stranger than malice. 🤷♂️
the username makes me think the account started its life shilling for the chia cryptocurrency (the one that spiked storage prices for a while cause it relied on wearing out massive numbers of SSDs, before its own price fell so low people gave up on it), but I don’t know how to see an account’s oldest posts without going in through the defunct API
Maybe hot take, but when I see young people (recent graduation) doing questionable things in pursuit of attention and a career, I cut them some slack.
Like it’s hard for me to be critical for someone starting off making it in, um, gestures about this, world today. Besides, they’ll get the sense knocked into them through pain and tears soon enough.
I don’t find it strange or malice, I find it as symptom of why it was easier for us to find honest work then, and harder for them now.
I don’t know man, there are plenty of jobs that don’t involve any of whatever that is, like line cook or caregiver or going on disability.
Also he’s a programmer? You can find a Python job that isn’t, you know, this bullshit.