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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

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

  • corbin@awful.systems
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    14 days ago

    Itā€™s almost completely ineffective, sorry. Itā€™s certainly not as effective as exfiltrating weights via neighborly means.

    On Glaze and Nightshade, my prior rant hasnā€™t yet been invalidated and thereā€™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 ā€œforce-feedingā€ is probably not the right metaphor. At scale, more effort goes into cleaning and tagging than into scraping; most of that ā€œforcedā€ input is destined to be discarded or retagged.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsOP
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      14 days ago

      yeah this is the thing Iā€™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 canā€™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 ā€œai bot filterā€ services. feels extremely monopolistic, but ianal and Iā€™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 thatā€™s extremely fucking dire because thatā€™s yet another nail in the coffin of the increasingly less open internet

      • bitofhope@awful.systems
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        14 days ago

        The whole Cloudflare bot detection is so weird and eerie. Iā€™ve had issues where I canā€™t get past it presumably just because Iā€™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@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          13 days ago

          it just lets fucking curl through no questions asked

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