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.

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    I had a simple question: how to rescue a Windows hard disk to a new SSD?

    The answer is ddrescue from a Linux USB stick, but the Windows user wasn’t comfortable at the command line.

    But if you Google it, you get:

    • insanely detailed geek pages. These contain the right answer! But not the specific right answer.
    • AI slop.

    Eventually I just did it myself with ddrescue. But I got a first-hand experience of how fucking unusable search is now.

    Oh, and Google is now showing AI slop answers at the top of searches in the UK.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      insanely detailed geek pages. These contain the right answer! But not the specific right answer.

      I had a windows problem once, so was looking through all that looking for an answer and saw somebody go ‘I need to save my data, which is very important, so how do I fix this problem’ and then they got a reply with ‘follow these steps with step X making sure they would delete their data’. And this was before the whole era of AI slop so I fear how much worse it has gotten now.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      For people from the future:

      I’m a fan of Clonezilla, which is a debian-derived live distro designed specifically to clone partitions as well as whole disks. If you’re comfortable with how Linux represents devices, it’s as close as you can get to training-wheels-included imaging for free.

      BIG WARNING: Be sure to write down the BitLocker key before you begin, or else it’ll be a bad time!