Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    4 months ago

    The smug presumption that any brand of spicy autocomplete is a viable tool “to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge” is so fucking galling.

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      4 months ago

      It’s also insane to believe it should be a first class feature, when those who god forbid want to “opt-in” could simply install a plugin.

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        4 months ago

        according to Mozilla’s track record, they’re making it a core feature so it’s impossible to remove without a custom fork, and they’ll relentlessly goad the user into enabling it via ads pushed with every update. implementing it as a core feature also means they can easily infect the search bar and other core functionality with this horseshit

        we’ve also only got mozilla’s word that this shit can be disabled once it’s in production Firefox at all, and we’ve seen, repeatedly, how Mozilla’s AI team does with consent — they use LLMs and marketing tactics to fabricate it

        • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
          12·
          4 months ago

          In the end they had 18481 words of notes to go through. Which is not nothing but also not that much. […] Mozilla also seems to know. And they had an innovative solution: THEY HAD AN LLM SUMMARIZE THE NOTES TO REDUCE BIAS.

          It feels like the AI contingent lost the attention span to actually read stuff somewhere along the line. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this garbage approach. Of course here at awful.systems we’ve been innoculated against declining attention spans due to regularly having to read lesswrong dissertations.

          • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
            10·
            4 months ago

            To avoid confirmation bias and subjective interpretation, we decided to leverage language models for a more objective analysis of the data. By providing the models with the complete set of notes, we aimed to uncover patterns and trends without our pre-existing notions and biases.

            … the Hell?

            • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
              10·
              4 months ago

              Yeah it’s wild. Even most AI grifters don’t outright try to claim that LLMs reduce bias (they know we’d laugh at them even harder than usual) so mozilla.ai is in deep.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
          9·
          4 months ago

          ah yes, flashbacks to when they bought pocket and instantly forced it on everyone

          where you had to remove the ui icon, untick shit in settings, and then STILL go into about:config to kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share, but then found that apparently at some point my old settings got nuked? or decommissioned or something? and others reinstated/introduced? because none of my changes for that are there anymore

          sigh

          also, their push to telemetry, to labs, to getting people to cohort into running things, them pushing selective bans on plugins because of legal pressure in countries, their absolutely fucking awful track record in spending their cashflow on utter and complete bullshit instead of actually improving the browser, …

          • earthquake@lemm.eeEnglish
            6·
            4 months ago

            go into about:config to kill even more things there. which I just wanted to share

            Well, looks like my custom pocket settings are preserved, if they’re useful to anyone:

            browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket				false	
extensions.pocket.api										0.0.0.0	
extensions.pocket.enabled									false	
extensions.pocket.onSaveRecs									false	
extensions.pocket.settings.test.panelSignUp							v1	
extensions.pocket.showHome									false	
extensions.pocket.site										0.0.0.0	
services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.section.highlights.includePocket	false