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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • rook@awful.systems
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    29 days ago

    And on the subject of AI: strava is adding ai analytics. The press release is pretty waffly, as it would appear that theyā€™d decided to add ai before actually working out what theyā€™d do with it so, uh, itā€™ll help analyse the reams of fairly useless statistics that strava computes about you and, um, help celebrate your milestones?

    https://press.strava.com/articles/stravas-athlete-intelligence-translates-workout-data-into-simple-and

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      28 days ago

      Definitely saw an ad today for an AI-powered workout machine. It looks like if Bowflex was made by Tesla and promises to ā€œoptimize your workout with every repā€ or some such nonsense.

      I tried to remember the name of it by googling ā€œAI exercise equipmentā€ and despite the slick branding (itā€™s called Tonal btw) it was like 5th on the list. Do you think itā€™s awkward having all these overlapping grifts? In the pre-internet days Iā€™m imagining like 10 unique traveling snake oil salesmen trying very hard to sell their bullshit over everyone elseā€™s in the same tiny frontier town without inviting anyone to look too closely at any of them.

      • gerikson@awful.systems
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        28 days ago

        (itā€™s called Tonal btw)

        Oh no this will make Luke-Jr so mad.

        Context, Luke-Jr is an early Bitcoin adopter, literal Florida man, and all-around kook. His wikipedia user page used to be a work of art with an ordered list of his obsessions[1], starting with sedevacantism and including Tonal, an early attempt to promote hexadecimal. Hereā€™s a long page on the old Bitcoin wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tonal_Bitcoin. Sadly it never caught on, people donā€™t want to say ā€œbong bitcoinā€ apparently.

        [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Luke-Jr&oldid=593942679

        • self@awful.systems
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          28 days ago

          Iā€™m vaguely remembering this and not sure where to look for confirmation, but wasnā€™t Luke-Jr the bitcoin maintainer who put his foot down and blocked a design change that wouldā€™ve made bitcoin much more efficient because it would have made it inconvenient for him to run a full node on a slow Florida residential cable internet connection?

          people donā€™t want to say ā€œbong bitcoinā€ apparently.

          thatā€™s weird, Iā€™ve known so many guys whose whole personality is bong bitcoin

          • gerikson@awful.systems
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            28 days ago

            Yes he led the charge against the ā€œbitcoin maxisā€ who wanted to increase the actual block size to contain more info. (this later became Bitcoin Cash). We had to endure stuff like ā€œUASFā€ (user activated soft fork) for complicated reasons no-one can explain now.

        • V0ldek@awful.systems
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          28 days ago

          including Tonal, an early attempt to promote hexadecimal

          I am so happy Iā€™ve seen this, itā€™s so bad.

          I will now forever pronounce $2^{16}$ as bong.