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.

Last week’s thread

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

      • corbin@awful.systems
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        1 month ago

        It’s almost completely ineffective, sorry. It’s certainly not as effective as exfiltrating weights via neighborly means.

        On Glaze and Nightshade, my prior rant hasn’t yet been invalidated and there’s no upcoming mathematics which tilt the scales in favor of anti-training techniques. In general, scrapers for training sets are now augmented with alignment models, which test inputs to see how well the tags line up; your example might be rejected as insufficiently normal-cat-like.

        I think that “force-feeding” is probably not the right metaphor. At scale, more effort goes into cleaning and tagging than into scraping; most of that “forced” input is destined to be discarded or retagged.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsOP
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          1 month ago

          yeah this is the thing I’ve been thinking a lot about

          fucking reCaptcha is literally mass-weaponising users for data filtration, and there is no good counter besides just not using reCaptcha (which is something one can’t easily pull off without things like regulatory action, massive reputational problems that make people gtfo, etc)

          I have similar worries about cloudflare being such a massive chokepoint and using that position to enable “ai bot filter” services. feels extremely monopolistic, but ianal and I’m not entirely sure what the case grounds/structure on that would be (if any)

          the only other viable strategy at the moment is fully breaking contact with any potential bad traffic systems, and that’s extremely fucking dire because that’s yet another nail in the coffin of the increasingly less open internet

          • bitofhope@awful.systems
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            1 month ago

            The whole Cloudflare bot detection is so weird and eerie. I’ve had issues where I can’t get past it presumably just because I’m using some in-application browser just to get a login cookie, but other times it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked.

            • flavia
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              1 month ago

              it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked

              Fucking what. I’ve heard of sites blocking curl and I’ve been able to get around it by copying user agent and sometimes cookies from the browser. Now I’m cursed with the knowledge that I could probably just scrape stuff from everywhere

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        1 month ago

        I saw people say they would add 10% opaque layers of the musk with Epstein’s accomplice (whos name i forgot for a second and too lazy to look her up) photo. Would be nice if there was a tool to do so automatically. (Not that i post on twitter anymore).

        • swlabr@awful.systems
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          1 month ago

          tbh that sounds like a pretty easy script to write! Too bad I am not near a computer rn

          • ShakingMyHead@awful.systems
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            1 month ago

            Wouldn’t really need a script, though. Just open up photoshop or GIMP and add a layer after everything is finished.

            • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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              1 month ago

              But that doesn’t scale properly, you want ideally some sort of browser extension that just automatically does it for you before the data gets send to twitter.

          • bitofhope@awful.systems
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            1 month ago

            I got nerd sniped into trying to resize felons_musk_and_maxwell.webp to the same size as some base image before compositing it on top with a 10% dissolve in the same magick invocation but I need to sleep so I’m giving up for now.

    • antifuchs@awful.systems
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      1 month ago

      They added sleeps to training jobs? Sounds like they deserve a raise for improving energy efficiency instead…

    • luciole (he/him)@beehaw.org
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      1 month ago

      I thought they were gonna do that themselves by feeding on their own outputs littered all over the www. Maybe they can use some help.