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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 12 May 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This incredibly managed to mangle all non-English alphabet names:

hmm. I can guess at a few reasons this could be happening: model coders "normalizing" everything to flat-ascii in training, or similar happening at training stage (because of the previously-referenced RLHF datamills employing only people with specific localized dialects, instead of wider context-local languages), etc.

wonder if this particular thing is a confluence of those, or just one specific set

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

have you ever met an English-native dev who didn't need to be trained out of the world being 7-bit ascii

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I got lucky and largely missed out on having to deal with those, at a guess largely because of location and age. the type I got to deal with instead were the php-/perl-brained "everything is just a string" types

hell, (circa 2010) I had beers with someone once who was really into Tcl and Second Life, and wanted to be uploaded as a digital consciousness. way before I knew about the other nutjobs, but in retrospect I now have a couple other questions I might've wanted to ask at the time...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

@dgerard

7 bits were good enough for Jesus.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

First efforts at bible digitization seems incredibly poorly documented online, and from a casual inspection in google scholar, not very well referenced. It's a pity it sounds like a fascinating topic, though 7 bits is likely for the first english versions yes (And according to this there are horrid 7-bits encodings for the ancient greek)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

My Jesus wanted characters for drawing borders and playing card suits, which is why He handed down to us Code Page 437. Using the upper 128 characters for things like vowels with funny marks on them is catholic heresy (nuts to Latin 1, down with Unicode).