Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th October 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
(The spooks shall soon be upon us.) 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 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.)

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.)

    • rhamph@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      10 hours ago

      we’ll read and debate many of the conceptual and mathematical works that have been most influential in the AI alignment field, from both before and during the current LLM revolution.

      Can’t wait until an ‘after’ sneaks in there 🤞

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      14 hours ago

      Its kind of notorious that scientists are bad at dealing with con artists and sales funnels because they assume good faith and that nobody has serious material interests in convincing you of something false. That was James Randi’s whole thesis. A good professor would contextualize ‘AI alignment’ and The Singularity in '80s and '90s pop culture, apocalyptic religion, and a rape-enabling SoCal subculture and not just have his students read the papers straight.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      20·
      23 hours ago

      I vividly remember encountering Eliezer Yudkowsky and his Sequences 20 years ago. I remember thinking: even if these people talk and act like crazy cultists, still, let me bend over backwards to be epistemically virtuous, and entertain their ideas on their merits, as very few academics would.

      Scott Aaronson is an experiment to discover how many timeshares one man can afford on a professor’s salary. He has never in his life not bought the extended warranty.