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.)

    • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      24 days ago

      Spotted this the day it came out. It’s largely reporting Dwarkesh Patel’s blog post about the different “civilisations” of agents as if it were fact.

      Very disappointed in Kurzgesagt who previously seemed pretty “with it”. But then, as someone with a formal background in compsci, stats, NLP and machine learning, perhaps this is Gell-Mann Amnesia/Knoll’s Law of Media literacy at work…

      • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        Late response but I looked at the sources page, and the first paragraph is about how they anthropomorphise AI to ‘make a better narrative’

        Disclaimer: We use anthropomorphism as a narrative tool in the script to make the story more understandable. Otherwise, we do not attribute human traits to AI agents or claim that AI agents have motivations, wants, or desires similar to humans. We use the words “unethical”, “awareness”, “civilization”, or “die” as metaphors to communicate the events, rather than referring to the true meanings of the concepts or in the same ways that they are applied to humans. Also, no part of the script is to be interpreted as assigning legal responsibility to any party.

          • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
            2·
            20 hours ago

            That last bit is also some pussy shit

            Also, no part of the script is to be interpreted as assigning legal responsibility to any party.

            ‘We don’t want people to think OpenAI-the people actually making these AI agents-should be held legally responsible for the things their products do’