Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)

  • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    18 hours ago

    my current favorite trick for reducing “cognitive debt” (h/t @simonw ) is to ask the LLM to write two versions of the plan:

    1. The version for it (highly technical and detailed)
    2. The version for me (an entertaining essay designed to build my intuition)

    I don’t know about them, but I would be offended if I was planning something with a collaborator, and they decide to give me a dumbed down, entertaining, children’s storybook version of their plan while keeping all the technical details to themselves.

    Also, this is absolutely not what “cognitive debt” means. I’ve heard technical debt refers to bad design decisions in software where one does something cheap and easy now but has to constantly deal with the maintenance headaches afterwards. But the very concept of working through technical details? That’s what we call “thinking”. These people want to avoid the burden of thinking.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      18 hours ago

      Eh, one might say that going by the broad strokes version while letting the expert do their thing is basically what management is all about, especially if they ignore the part where he wants his version to be light and entertaining.

      This isn’t about managing subordinates though, this is about devising ways to be complacent about not double checking what the LLM generates in your name.