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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.

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.

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

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[-] sc_griffith@awful.systems 22 points 2 months ago

lol fandom could have been even worse

hackernews: post by languagehacker: Former Wikia engineer, here. I left right around when they changed their name to Fandom and kind of saw the writing on the wall. Despite the tremendous amount of information they have at their disposal, they never really saw themselves (or positioned themselves) as more than a low market cap media company. I spent a lot of time in the mid-teens trying to encourage them to be early on AI/NLP kind of stuff and use that to drive new product development. Needless to say, it didn't work out. Imagine the data moat they could have built and monetized, and all without needing to degrade the customer experience.

[-] istewart@awful.systems 24 points 2 months ago
[-] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 16 points 2 months ago

That's just the kind of innovation we need to get over this primitive and outdated impulse to cooperate with one another.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago

ok my first thought was to make a joke about castle warfare, despite my knowledge set being ephemera from a childhood appreciating tech trees in video games. So I did some research:

  • The etymology of “moat” is that it comes from the word “motte”. I will not elaborate.
  • Moats were effective against early forms of siege warfare, like battering rams, siege towers, and mining out the foundations of a castle’s defences, or anything that required approaching the castle directly
  • Moats were made somewhat obsolete by siege artillery, which did not need to be in the direct vicinity of the castle

Err so yeah. Make your own jokes, ig.

Anyway, this has been MoatFacts™️. Paging @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de for better commentary*

[-] istewart@awful.systems 14 points 2 months ago

In this context, "moat" is a cargo-cult invocation of Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham. Just another square on the hackernews bingo

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

idk what to exactly put there, moat is still an obstacle even in modern context, but assault on a castle with a moat using modern weaponry would be hilariously one-sided. you can suppress defenders with something, use a bridge layer to get inside the moat, then let combat engineers do their shenanigans to "open" castle one way or another. or you can use helis to do the same, or you can just level it all with artillery or airstrike or maybe even loads of ATGMs

that said it's not completely useless. moats but dry were used as a part of fixed fortifications in ww1 quite successfully. freshly invented electrified barbed wire fence and machine guns made them quite hard to pass, especially if you are, say, a peasant from tula oblast born in 1898 that has never seen powerline before. i think the last proper moat use in large-scale warfare happened during iran-iraq war, in battle of the marshes, when iraqis flooded previously dry area known as fish lake and put underwater coils of barbed wire and high-voltage cables. defensive tactic used there was to shoot at assaulting iranians to make them abandon or fall out of their boats or amphibious vehicles, then when they were in the water high voltage lines were energized. iranians eventually crossed the marshes entirely using speedboats. maybe it's not that outdated considering that last recored bayonet charge happened in 2004 (by brits in iraq). ymmv

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago

I will internalise this for the next time data moats come up!

[-] sc_griffith@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago

imagine how they could have monetized it

[-] istewart@awful.systems 16 points 2 months ago

Surely Wikia could have catapulted to the upper echelons of the Fortune 500 if they had just moved faster to gatekeep the facts about gender-swapped Lady Vegeta being a rare card in set 27 of the Dragonball gacha game

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago

iirc they had tools to import data from other wikis into theirs, but not tools to export.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

they have the MediaWiki database dumps, which are XML so you can do anything with them!! *

* the actual page text is a single field

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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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