Want to wade into the sandy, spooky surf of the abyss? 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. The spooks are well underway.)
LW is freaking out over the Russian plague leak/quarantine, but no-one else seems to be fazed. Sweden’s health authority are chill https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/uppgifter-laboratorieanstalld-dod-efter-pestsmitta and to be honest, Russia has a functioning health system unlike the US badum-tish
Over on her Substack, Ivy Astrix says correctly that many of our friends are children playing at adult responsibilities. Dealing with misbehavior around money, substances, and sex is annoying but if you organize an event with those things flowing you have a duty to take precautions and deal when things go wrong.
I’m starting to believe that Sam Altman’s reputation as a genius salesman is a bit overrated
Accept ‘bad things’ in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman
Starting off with a double bill:
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First, a new post from Iris Meredith about enshittification, featuring a cameo from the rats.
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Second, a truly godawful take on art history coming from a DHH defender (h/t Daphne Preston-Kendal)
With the agents pouring concrete, we can now focus on the thing as a whole.
This is such a dumb take because it’s wrong in both directions.
Either LLMs are really bad and shouldn’t be trusted to write code and by trusting them you’re going to utterly fail. Or LLMs are actually good enough to write code, but then they’ll also be good enough to design/architect anything you could and reduce your labor’s value to zero (e.g. someone will create a harness that lets the business guys TRULY prompt whatever they want into existence). The only situation where this works out for labor is if LLMs end up frozen in some middle ground where they don’t get any more capable.
This idea that the LLM is analogous to a camera is such an insipid, thought-terminating cliché.
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I saw several people mention it last week, but have not really used it much myself, anybody know how dead stack overflow is atm due to the AI backlash?
Pretty dead, checking one of their own graphs - the number of questions on the site has been in freefall for the past few years:
I don’t entirely agree; 200000 questions asked per day is arguably a worse situation than 100 asked per day, and the latter rounds to 0 in that chart.
But yeah it feels pretty dead.
More disucssion about AI safety over at LGM
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/10/ai-safety
comments are a mix, some smart generalists incorrecting each other. I have not bothered to comment because I’m not an active part of the community, but I’ll share here that Rofer’s recommendations about safety we can apply now would presumably help us contain Robot Satan should it deign to be created. Lots of commenters don’t really draw that conclusion. This is pointing out the yawning void between the intense interest among Rats to devise the perfect alignment and their disinterest at mitigating harms ocurring right now.
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