this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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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.

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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.)

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I should add that I have a book published with Springer. So, yeah, my work is being directly devalued here. Fun fun fun.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Can we make "low-background media" a thing?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

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.

EDIT: On an unrelated note, I suspect hand-writing your original manuscript (or using a typewriter) will also help increase the value, simply through strongly suggesting ChatGPT was not involved with making it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

hand-writing your original manuscript

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

There aren't really many other options besides Springer and self-publishing for a book like that, right? I've gotten some field-specific article compilations from CRC Press, but I guess that's just an imprint of Routledge.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 23 hours ago

What happened was that I had a handful of articles that I couldn't find an "official" home for because they were heavy on the kind of pedagogical writing that journals don't like. Then an acqusitions editor at Springer e-mailed me to ask if I'd do a monograph for them about my research area. (I think they have a big list of who won grants for what and just ask everybody.) I suggested turning my existing articles into textbook chapters, and they agreed. The book is revised versions of the items I already had put on the arXiv, plus some new material I wrote because it was lockdown season and I had nothing else to do. Springer was, I think, the most likely publisher for a niche monograph like that. One of the smaller university presses might also have gone for it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

i have coauthorship on a book released by Wiley - they definitely feed all of their articles to llms, and it's a matter of time until llm output gets there too