Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th February 2025

2 years ago by David Gerard to c/techtakes

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.

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NextElephant9 6 points 2 years ago

I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but a friend from the field is wondering if there are any examples of good AI companies out there? With AI not meaning LLM companies. Thanks!

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froztbyte 12 points 2 years ago

sounds a bit of a xy question imo, and a good answer of examples would depend on the y part of the question, the whatever it is that (if my guess is right) your friend is actually looking to know/find

“AI” is branding, a marketing thing that a cadaverous swarm of ghouls got behind in the upswing of the slop wave (you can trace this by checking popularity of the term in the months after deepdream), a banner with which to claim to be doing something new, a “new handle” to use to try anchor anew in the imaginations of many people who were (by normal and natural humanity) not yet aware of all the theft and exploitation. this was not by accident

there are a fair of good machine learning systems and companies out there (and by dint of hype and market forces, some end up sticking the “AI” label on their products, because that’s just how this deeply fucked capitalist market incentivises). as other posters have said, medical technology has seen some good uses, there’s things like recommender[0] and mass-analysis system improvements, and I’ve seen the same in process environments[1]. there’s even a lot of “quiet and useful” forms of this that have been getting added to many daily use systems and products all around us: reasonably good text extractors as a baseline feature in pdf and image viewers, subject matchers to find pets and friends in photos, that sort of thing. but those don’t get headlines and silly valuation insanity as much of the industry is in the midst of

[0] - not always blanket good, there’s lots of critique possible here

[1] - things like production lines that can use correlative prediction for checking on likely faults

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NextElephant9 3 points 2 years ago

Thanks for the replies, I guess the "good" was vague on purpose, to see how people interpret it...

This popped up on one of my feeds today and I saved it, can't remember from where, it's relevant to the above so sharing here: https://oneproject.org/ai-commons/ (AI Commons: nourishing alternatives to Big Tech monoculture).

They talk about AI for good, at some point they mention how the term is sometimes used just for marketing.

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FredFig 7 points 2 years ago

There are companies doing "cool-sounding" things with AI like Waymo. "Good" would require more definition.

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mii 6 points 2 years ago

The only thing that comes to mind is medical applications, drug research, etc. But that might just be a skewed perspective on my end because I know literally nothing about that industry or how AI technology is deployed there. I've just read research has been assisted by those tools and that seems, at least on the surface level, like a good thing.

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