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 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Most likely the latter - Gerard's already done a couple Pivot to AI posts about AI's ability to lobotomise its users (Exhibit A, Exhibit B). Someone else has noted their coworker admitting to the lying machine ruining their Google-fu, too (source):
To be fair though it's not just their brains turning to mush, google has genuinely been getting worse too.
i don't remember who said it, but they described genai as in some way reverse bayesian spam filter - so if spam filter can adapt to variety of spams, now there's automated tool to flood the zone with spam that does pass the filter. this was used for seo with predictable results
feel like I've seen variations on that in a few places myself. would be interested in seeing a source, if anyone has. could be an interesting piece by itself
That's a one-two punch of Prabhakar Raghavan publicly executing it for profit and the slop-nami drowning out human-made work via SEO-optimised garbage (indirectly assisting Google's enshittification efforts in the process).
Publishers have been reportedly readjusting their businesses to account for this shit - combined with Google's enshittifcation and the slop-nami, we may see Google (if not search engines in general) lose a lot of relevance due to AI.