Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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 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.)

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    4 hours ago

    Qiaochu Yuan (no relationship to the man accused of soliciting a child) left his PhD program to become an “emotional coach.” If his old tweets are any guide then Doctor, heal thyself. G. Duleba and Ozy picked similar careers rather than coaching a soccer team or teaching freshman English like most people who want to be teachers and mentors.

    Edit / Ozy also does not like the PUA advice of Geoffrey Miller and Tucker Max. I think this is less sneering at a stranger than sneering at someone Ozy’s friends know and admire (Miller and Fleischman attend TESCREAL events).

    • TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      It makes a twisted sort of sense that so many of them go into life coaching. In their hermetically sealed subculture of highly paid, socially inept nerds, it probably pays the bills to set yourself up as an authority on reading social cues.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    11 hours ago

    Congrats to lesswrong, another one of their big ideas has reached the mainstream. (And it is eugenics).

    Skeet from motherjones "Some of the same billionaires who bankrolled AI now admit the technology could one day kill us all.

    And they’re funding a new plan to stop it—genetically engineered genius babies."

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        6 hours ago

        Has it been 2 months already? I was wondering when they would turn up in the news again.

        E: I’m not serious, I came across this video on yt which fulfilled my ‘every 2 months’ thing already. It was actually a bit interesting, as it turns out both of them have a long mostly unscrubbed online history which they tracked down and analyzed, turns out she has a history of being a weird quirky person, and they both have an air of ‘want to become internet famous/create an internet scam’ sort of thing.

        The comments on that vid are great as well (wait for it) check this one out:

        It is rich for you to skewer anything Simone and Malcolm miss with their podcast when they post 5 days a week (you neglected to mention) and you can’t even maintain your schedule or throw up a post on bluesky when you are off schedule. Also, because you two are genetic dead ends you don’t know that a mother of 5 cannot be a night person, she was up with a baby when she emailed. Malcolm and Simone talk in different rooms because she always is looking after a baby, and babies can randomly make noise so Simone can mute and Malcolm can take over. Maybe you can meet a baby one day and learn how they work. But I will say this episode is better researched than the usual “read article titles and giggle” podcasts you put out.

        This comment was left by none other than “Diana Fleischman” Yes, that one, the evolutionary psychologist, and partner of Primal “I’m no longer allowed near students” Poly (For those who remember sneerclub from reddit, he was a regular subject. For example).

        Amazing how small this nazi nerd world is. And how bad they are at defending their own. Feel free to leave ‘ad hominem’ reactions to that. (I will not as my yt profile links back to my real life).

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    13 hours ago

    Person bets big on polymarket to profit from the continuation of the Iran war, gets screwed out of his blood money by site-wide oracle scam, complains on reddit.

    Oracle as in a confirmation of facts protocol (used to be a thing with smart contracts), which in polymarket apparently amounts to token holders in an external DAO called UMA voting in proportion to their holdings to resolve disputes, and currently like 9 people hold over half the voting power, so yeah.

    The future of finance and the future of information aggregation keep overlapping in the funniest ways.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      11 hours ago

      Oracle as in a confirmation of facts protocol

      Amazing that on first glance it looks like a smart contract ‘all done by code’ thing, but then the reveals comes and it is just a few rich people again.

    • DJDarren@mendeddrum.org
      6·
      13 hours ago

      LB: Enormous fan of that chud griping in /r/CryptoCurrency of all places, and getting laughed at for falling victim to a scam.

  • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    17 hours ago

    i’ll just quote it straight because i can’t make it any funnier:

    maia arson crimew 🏴 ‪> @crimew.gay‬ SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thiel’s private society that doesn’t have a public website and no public list of members? I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members.

    https://bsky.app/profile/crimew.gay/post/3moejkbqctc2z

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      10 hours ago

      According to a later post from them there’s a chance this is more of a list of attendees at a past or upcoming event, but tbh I don’t think there’s much of a difference between “member of the nu-money illuminati” and “accepted an invite to hang out with the nu-money illuminati at their clubhouse.” I can only assume it has the same statue of a hand clutching a globe as the Deus Ex opening cinematic.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      13 hours ago

      NVIDIA bonds

      Turns out your best customer debtor being one Cyprus GDP in the hole might actually lead to cashflow problems.

    • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      16 hours ago

      So when sama suggested the financials would leak and people speculated that Zitron might have thema couple of weeks ago, they were bang on the money!

      • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        17 hours ago

        tbf i expected that ed got openai’s s1 at that point. anything more detailed would be nice to see. that also suggests that saltman knows that leak occurred, and maybe who leaker is

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    22 hours ago

    Anthropic: Oh no! Our new model is too powerful! It’s dangerously good!

    US Government: okay then you can’t export it or allow foreign nationals to access it

    Anthropic: Wait not like that

    We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.

    Of course this has less to do with the actual capabilities of any model and more to do with Anthropic openly telling the Trump administration “no” on exactly one occasion, but we can still roast some marshmallows over this dumpster fire, right?

  • macroplastic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    20 hours ago

    Of course, the “AI Control” in Firefox for Android conveniently doesn’t include the “make-a-jerkoff-motion-to-llm-summarize a-page” “feature” Mozilla has added.

    • schnoopy@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      Bwahaha I didn’t believe you but it’s there. Gotta find the option in about:config to kill it.

      Who is that for? “Ahh I’m so angry, why are you showing me big words and multiple paragraphs phone? where are the emoji bullet points? Ahhh — oh hey it got replaced with something vaguely related and unchallenging. Thanks firefox”

        • FredFig@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          9 hours ago

          I believe in about:config it’s mostly under browser.ml.

          browser.ml.chat.enabled => False, browser.ml.enable => False and extensions.ml.enabled => False I think are the minimum changes?

  • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    1 day ago

    This Geekwire piece about anti-ai movement being just like the anti-gmo movement really boils my piss.

    The anti GMO movement was non scientific and the reasons to reject the tech were always vibes. Whereas AI is entirely vibes and the reason to reject it are abundant and obvious - I don’t need to list them in this forum.

    Why did GMOs win the long game? Three reasons that map almost exactly onto AI-generated content.

    First, the product is indistinguishable. Nobody can tell whether the corn syrup in their soda came from a bioengineered cob, and after a while they stop wondering. AI-written prose is already past the Turing threshold for casual reading. Many readers cannot tell a competent LLM draft from a competent human one.

    Yes because LLMs are so great at prose. They definitely don’t keep telling the same story about the same made up characters and locations. And they don’t produce hallucinations that keep getting people into trouble.

    Now the techno fascist billionaire class know how much we hate AI we shouldn’t be too surprised that the flaks are out in force trying to spin anti-ai sentiment as an unjustified position for an educated people. We’re doing something right folks. Keep fighting the good fine.

    • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
      16·
      1 day ago

      @samvines @techtakes It’s also missing the point that the original GMO crops that were being promoted were engineered by Monsanto to survive being drenched in Glyphosate, a probably-carcinogenic pesticide, to produce a monopoly in those crop plants for Monsanto. Ugly side of capitalism.

      (If they’d led with golden rice, the reaction would have been different.)

      It also arrived in the late stages of the BSE cull in the UK, at a time when food supply anxiety was at an all-time high.

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        17 hours ago

        the original GMO crops

        The original GMO crops would be like, broccoli existing and bananas not sucking ass. Monsanto are villains but they didn’t invent genetics or selection.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        1 day ago

        I also question the degree to which “the other 99% of readers” actually don’t care about AI slop. Even outside the awful bubble here I see AI images get met with at best a weary sigh of “I guess this is the world now” rather than actual acceptance. And I know we’ve talked at some length about how gell-mann amnesia isn’t a very useful model, but I think most people are much less tolerant of slop in areas that the know more about. Maybe I can’t tell an slopware history paper from a real one, but historians certainly can, and they hate that shit. In that sense the “median reader” statistic is misleading because the median reader isn’t particularly invested in most of what gets written anyways, and it’s the lack of investment that makes slop seem plausible. Even the concerns about deep fakes seem like they’re not separate from this general problem, since the same disconnection that makes people uncritically accept deep fakes makes them uncritically accept fake news without an accompanying video, or with a context-stripped video from an unrelated event, or whatever.