dgerard

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.

Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of WordPress. He recently had a bout of extreme shitheadry and massively transphobic behaviour on his product fucking Tumblr of all the fucking places to be a transphobe. Nobody there is delighted with him at present. His own staff are publicly posting what a shithead he is on the official Tumblr staff account!

So it turns out Mullenweg’s been like this for more than a few years now, it’s just the maggots are finally bursting through the skin.

The linked post is the tale of how wordpress.com was completely fucked around in 2019 for a signup increase of 0.1 percent!!!

This change also increase free account churn by 20 percent. But that officially didn’t matter, free users weren’t worth a lot.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the ‘free plan’ button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

The dude asked to move from wordpress.com to Tumblr. Guess what?

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be “the last bastion of the free internet”, cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren’t we, etc etc.

that CEO was of course Matt Mullenweg.

All platforms are grass. Tomorrow we die. Shitpost the day.

But remember the enshittifiers responsible. They really fucking hate being named.

includes considerable nonspecific shit-talking of assigned EA enemies, including - horrors! - Timnit Gebru talking about the social issues of the actually-existing AI-industrial complex. also it's not a CASTLE it's a MANOR HOUSE, you fools, you rubes,

courtesy @self

• preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.02926
• blackhat abstract: https://www.blackhat.com/asia-24/briefings/schedule/index.html#llmshell-discovering-and-exploiting-rce-vulnerabilities-in-real-world-llm-integrated-frameworks-and-apps-37215
• Tong Liu's related research: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=egWPi_IAAAAJ

can't wait for the crypto spammers to hit every web page with a ChatGPT prompt. AI vs Crypto: whoever loses, we win

Koanic Soul was a website on the virtues of craniomentry that was popular in early-2010s neoreactionary discourse. It told of how modern humanity is a mix of Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal and Melonhead. Each has different intellects and personality types. And you can tell by just looking at them.

We lost so much (that was well worth losing) when Koanic Soul closed in 2015-ish. Amazing new slurs for unworthy skull shapes ("snake-melon") that you just don’t hear any more.

Anyway, it turns out there are traces still remaining in rssing.com. This is just page 7 of several.

The main site was rambling delusional blog posts - the above link is just some of the RSS feed for the blogs - and a forum filled with our very good friends.

Here's a contemporary review from r/badscience.

(There is a current substack and a current youtube of the same name which are unrelated.)