Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025

https://awful.systems/post/3841082

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025 - awful.systems

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. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

AI slop in Springer books:

Our library has access to a book published by Springer, Advanced Nanovaccines for Cancer Immunotherapy: Harnessing Nanotechnology for Anti-Cancer Immunity.  Credited to Nanasaheb Thorat, it sells for $160 in hardcover: link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-86185-7

From page 25: “It is important to note that as an AI language model, I can provide a general perspective, but you should consult with medical professionals for personalized advice…”

None of this book can be considered trustworthy.

mastodon.social/…/114217609254949527

Originally noted here: hci.social/@peterpur/114216631051719911

Advanced Nanovaccines for Cancer Immunotherapy

This book discusses how nanomedicine can be used for better drug delivery, to overcome resistance and to boost anti-cancer immunity.

SpringerLink
I should add that I have a book published with Springer. So, yeah, my work is being directly devalued here. Fun fun fun.
New Textbook | Science After Sunclipse

On the other hand, your book gains value by being published in 2021, i.e. before ChatGPT. Is there already a nice term for “this was published before the slop flood gates opened”? There should be.

(I was recently looking for a cookbook, and intentionally avoided books published in the last few years because of this. I figured that the genre is a too easy target for AI slop. But that not even Springer is safe anymore is indeed very disappointing.)

Is there already a nice term for “this was published before the slop flood gates opened”? There should be.

“Pre-slopnami” works well enough, I feel.

Can’t wait until someone tries to Samizdat their AI slop to get around this kind of test.

AI bros are exceedingly lazy fucks by nature, so this kind of shit should be pretty rare. Combined with their near-complete lack of taste, and the risk that such an attempt succeeds drops pretty low.

(Sidenote: Didn’t know about Samizdat until now, thanks for the new rabbit hole to go down)

I find absolutely consistently that gen-AI advocates are literally unable to tell good output from bad output. They think people who say their output is garbage are just lying to have a go at them. - awful.systems

xcancel: https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115 [https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115]

hand-writing your original manuscript

The revenge of That One Teacher who always rode you for having terrible handwriting.