this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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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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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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The post Xitter web has spawned so 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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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 11 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Google is seemingly experimenting with replacing their help articles with LLM text.

I was searching for how to use multiple profiles on Chrome and found https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop in the search results, which used to look like a normal useful help article, however it's now been replaced by an LLM that takes upwards of 30 seconds to load, will randomly just refuse to answer the question, and produces significantly worse output than the existing (now inaccessible to me) technical writer written article.

This may be being A/B tested, so if you can't reproduce it here is one of the worse results I got:

slopAsk Google Help Built with Gemini. Would you like to know how to sign in to Chrome with your Google Account, or perhaps how to browse Chrome as a guest?

Here the "source" it gave me was the same URL it was hosted on. When I clicked through to it it just gave me different slop.

I've seen some bad decisions in the AI mania, but "let's take our entire corpus of professionally written technical writing and replace it with slop" managed to surprise me.