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.

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

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    6 hours ago

    (After sleeping on it it’s possible the book I was thinking of was written in the earliest 21st century).

    There was an announcement on their mailing list here: https://lists.pglaf.org/archives/list/gmonthly@lists.pglaf.org/thread/MTHHI3TD7YXD3EHLKVBBA57KRBBWRI72/

    We then worked with the same programmers [as AI generated categories] to provide automated summaries of nearly every book in the collection. You can find those summaries on book landing pages. These summaries are intended to be helpful for people trying to decide what book to read, or to get an idea of what a book is about.

    For example, here is the automated summary from book #1, the US Declaration of Independence (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1): […]

    If you spot errors in summaries, let us know. Summaries of most books are based only on the first 12,000 characters, because the costs would have been too high for if we included all of every book.

    We have also been corresponding with another programmer seeking to instruct AI technologies to “read” books from Project Gutenberg, summarize them, and answer questions about them. We hope this might be described further in a future newsletter.

    Based off Wayback Machine poking around it looks like they were added sometime between September 20th to October 1st.