Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th June 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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.)

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.)

  • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    6 days ago

    Three scenes and a comment:

    1. Me sitting in the baking heat in my garden, thinking about my own anxiety about climate change (we currently have our 2nd once-in-a-thousand-years record-breaking heatwave in 2 weeks in Europe), food shortages, instability and genocide in the middle east and the rise of the far right across western democracy.

    2. I see another story: some AI bros posting about their “anxiety” about AI being the end of human labour and jobs whilst posing for selfies in their fancy digital nomad resort.

    3. I’m still sweating and scrolling from my garden… I see a quote about how we have to pick between the climate and AI…

    We live in the dumbest and darkest timeline if we cannot collectively see the obvious course of action here. Social media, souped up by LLMs has collectively cooked our brains and hyper-segmented us into tiny echo chambers that don’t have enough gravity to affect change. We need to break out of it

    • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      5 days ago

      “We have to pick between the climate or AI”

      No we don’t??? One problem directly affects the other. Stopping AI data centre build-out helps with stopping climate change.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      5 days ago

      Why do these people always want to give trans people the wrong hormones? It keeps coming up.

      I think this is particularly important for the hormonal treatment of dysphoria in adolescents, where the evidence for gender-affirming care seems mixed. […] Given all this, I was shocked that when I ran GPT Deep Research I wasn’t able to find a single study that would evaluate the use of birth-sex-affirming hormones to decrease dysphoria.

      The “evidence” he has provided up to this point:

      1. A snippet from a Chat-GPT transcript. We can’t see the prompt, but the output starts with “You’re right.”
      2. Two reddit comments about doubling down on (cis) gender roles. One of which uses the cursed words “nofap” and “autogynophilic”
      3. A case study from Poland about someone who (possibly?) wasn’t transgender but had schizophrenic symptoms that mimicked it. The case study ends by saying WPATH guidelines would have handled things appropriately.
      4. A tweet from a woman who mentions getting mild dysphoria after taking hormonal birth control.

      Quite the nerve holding actual science to an impossible standard while his position is just vibes. None of his(?) evidence even mentions taking cross-gender hormones. If anything the tweet is weak evidence against his position.

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        5 days ago

        I’d expect to find these sort of studies in the UN or UK reports that recommend banning “conversion therapy” for gender identity.

        Imagine writing so many words about transgender healthcare while being this oblivious to how politicized the UK policy documents are.

        Anyway after making it to the end that was a lot of words to say he couldn’t find any evidence for the position he wanted to be true holy smokes. His weird hang up on “crystallized” gender identity is bizarre. He seems to be hoping that there are people toying with changing gender and it’s not too late to “save” them via conversion therapy before it’s too late. We

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      5 days ago

      “Hey listen, I’ve been listening to these gender critical feminists and I think they might have a point. Check this out, what if we used psychiatry and hormone therapy to enforce traditional gender roles and normatively gendered bodies, but without creating trans people?”

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        5 days ago

        The poster deftly doesn’t address the real moral question: what if conversion therapy (either for homosexuality or trans identification) worked ? Would it be ethical to allow it?

        This is the difference between politics/ethics and science. As the old saying goes, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

      • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        5 days ago

        idk i think it’s new that someone in mainstream sort of calls them cultists, namedrops EY as cult leader and fanfic writer and everything that you could hear about in our circlejerk, but also shortly before EZ said that he’s been called doomer and a crank but now he’s vindicated to a degree not thought possible. this all happens after drop of that openai financial info, so EZ also held off, and EZ is PR guy so i guess he knows what he’s doing, and maybe he thinks this might be it, or maybe he doesn’t have anything better and plays his hand in best way he can. i wonder what comes next

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    7 days ago

    Some folks, who may be familiar to some or more of you, accidentally discovered that if your git repo symlinks CLAUDE.MD to, say, /dev/urandom, it breaks Claude code.

    the reason why this works is exactly the reason why claude code sucks so bad. there are protections against this in the file reading tool. however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not. this is the fucking swiss cheese security model of the fucking gold standard of what AI programming can do.

    https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116779793188712173

    The thread is actually about trying to attract and manipulate autonomous coding agents, but they’ve only had limited success so far, which may have been slowed down by the above symlink trick.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      6 days ago

      however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not

      See, if a person had written the system and had some kind of reasonable design or whatever then this kind of vulnerability may have turned into a full skeleton key to crack the entire system wide open. Instead, the superior machine intelligence ensures that all components will break in slightly different ways under slightly different conditions, thus ensuring no single fault can allow an adversary to completely compromise the system, provided of course that they can’t just inject a prompt somewhere because as we all know that’s a structural vulnerability that can completely crack the system open.

  • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    6 days ago

    Ah, so I guess the reports of increased datacenter water usage driven by AI deployments … weren’t a lie?

    Jeff Bezos, quoted in MSN:

    Biological limits are real, but digital potential is infinite. If we starve our data infrastructure of cooling resources just to sustain baseline human comfort, we are actively delaying the birth of a super-intelligence that could solve all of our resource problems in the first place. Sometimes you have to prioritise the intelligence that will save us over the biology that slows us down

    Ah, apparently this quote is a fabrication that doesn’t appear in the transcript. Source: https://bsky.app/profile/davidcrespo.bsky.social/post/3mootuvppjs2c, Transcript with correction: https://theprint.in/feature/jeff-bezos-water-consumption-amazon-ai-potential/2964266/

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    20·
    7 days ago

    Some good news for once: Dublin punk bar the Thomas House have had enough of AI slop.

    alt text

    A picture of a “no AI” symbol next to the Thomas House logo.

    "So for the future (literally) we’re not accepting AI posters or flyers for the pub.

    We’re right next to Ireland’s biggest Art College, lads. It’s not a good look.

    We understand bands can be skint but relying on some earth killing app from some paedo Island billionaire is not the way. We got by without it and we’ll get by again. If you’re stuck, we’ll help.

    Yes it has been used here before but consider this the start of the end of it. Thanks, humans."

        • blakestacey@awful.systems
          English
          10·
          9 days ago

          I haven’t bothered to examine the page history to see when the fucked content was actually introduced. I’m hoping that by posting about it, I can catch the attention of a particularly pedantic sex nerd who will be willing to fix it, for humanity’s sake. Let us not let the Adult Bookstore of Alexandria burn; rather, let us chronicle our times with our free hands

  • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    11 days 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

    • schnoopy@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      10 days ago

      Of course Ezra Klein is hanging out with the worst people in the world. He’s always on the hunt for a new gutter to pick up some fetid idea and tart it up for liberals.

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      9 days ago

      Wired has a story about Peter Thiel’s Dialogue conference in Ireland. They chickened out of publishing the names who include Tim Urban, Tyler Cowen, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, “sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia (hi Jaan! hi Peter! hi Elon!), a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies (hi Doktor Karp!).”

      The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.

      …

      Dialog also plays matchmaker. Its participant form asks registrants whether they are “looking for love” and offers to include “Single Man,” “Single Woman,” or “Other” respondents in “future matchmaking.” A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app pitched as “meaningful connections for exceptional people.”

      So like a rationalist event, but the guests skew very rich not professional middle class.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        9 days ago

        I’m sorry are you telling me that there people’s social circle includes the same like 50 oligarchs and apparatchiks and they’re making a dating site for themselves? I know they lost Epstein but this is just pathetic.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      10 days 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.

  • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    11 days 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
      20·
      11 days 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.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        11 days 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.

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        21·
        11 days 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.

    • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      11 days 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
        6·
        11 days 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

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    9 days ago

    Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical (2015):

    I kind of a have a front-row seat here. On the one hand, about half my friends, my girlfriend, and my ex-girlfriend all identify as autistic. For that matter, people keep trying to tell me I’m autistic. When people say “autistic” in cases like this, they mean “introverted, likes math and trains, some unusual sensory sensitivities, and makes cute hand movements when they get excited.” On the other hand, I work as a psychiatrist and some of my patients are autistic. Many of these patients are nonverbal. Many of them are violent. Many of them scream all the time. Some of them seem to live their entire lives as one big effort to kill or maim themselves which is constantly being thwarted by their caretakers and doctors.

    So he can’t be autistic, because then he would have something in common with people who can’t have a respectable upper-middle-class life. And it gets darker:

    But even more controversially, absent such certainty that your child will flourish I think if some kind of genetic-engineering autism-cure existed, parents would have a moral obligation to use it.

    As a good eugenicist, he knows there are simple ways to stop people from passing on their genes. And Scott Alexander wants children, so Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical. QED losers.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        4 days ago

        I think that backwards (like 1950s and earlier) views of autism are common in American psychiatry, but would love to hear more about his ideas from someone with relevant training. AFAIK no peer has ever commented on his biomedical blogging, like experts have commented on his eugenics promotion and cozy relationship with white supremacists and neoreactionaries. He never seems to have written for any professional venue either.

    • it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      9 days ago

      A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It’s also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can’t coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        8 days ago

        Its like he wrote “many of my friends identify as heterosexual, and they say I might be heterosexual too, but in my work as a forensic psychiatrist my heterosexual patients are accused rapists and sex pests and people who got arrested with a suitcase full of cocaine and a phone full of texts from a 'Brazilian model.” and never tried to reconcile the two or thought through the Bayesian logic.

        • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          8 days ago

          You’re telling me that the Autism Spectrum is a spectrum and not just the quirky thing people have?

          • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            7 days ago

            You see this particular kind of bigotry quite a bit in relation to neurodivervence and disability. It’s an attempt to beat people advocating for equality and justice by claiming a moral high ground. Oh, you think disabled people can have meaningful and worthwhile lives and that differences should be celebrated?? You must be too ignorant to know just how awful life is for people who really have that disability!

          • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            8 days ago

            (sarcasm) I’m saying that just because I get sucked off by guys does not mean I’m one of those queers! I don’t go to pride parades or leather bars or have fashion sense and everyone knows that is what ‘gay’ means. I’m as heterosexual as Ted Haggard. (end sarcasm)

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      8 days ago

      This feels like yet another case of “what no postmodernism does to a mf”. Because I can kind of agree they ASD is a bit of a weird diagnosis in some respects, but that’s entirely because of an ongoing discussion between different social models of mental diversity. On one hand, much of the autistic community has embraced a model rooted in neurodiversity. The associated behaviors aren’t “abnormal” and happen to nearly everyone to some degree, but some people experience them in different ways that impact how they interact with other people and the world. In this model, we need to emphasize empathy and support to help everyone find a place in the world where they can be happy and fulfilled.

      But Scott as a practicing psychiatrist is strongly invested in the older model of mental illness or mental disability, where some people have mental and behavioral problems that make life more difficult and dangerous for them and those around them, and those people need help to mitigate those problems so they can exist in society. This is obviously a less kind and more authoritarian model than neurodiversity, but it’s easy enough to understand the appeal in circumstances where the challenge of “how do I help people be happy and successful” necessitates asking “how do I reduce or eliminate the risk of physical violence from this person.” Hell, compared to the other model that gets invoked to deal with that question, criminality, it still at least acknowledges that people with high support needs are people whose well-being deserves consideration. A patient is a human being at least to the same degree that a child is, effectively.

      But Scott, being afraid of postmodernism, can’t really allow himself to recognize these as separate models that are valuable in different circumstances, not the least of which is because he’s a fashy little bastard who would have to give up the authority of being a capital-D Doctor in favor of just being an expert on certain elements of the human mind and body. So instead he and his friends are totally neurotypical, yes. Don’t listen to them describe their own experiences, listen to the Doctor Man.

    • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      9 days ago

      The AI safety company when they actually have to make their AIs safe instead of just making vague suggestions

  • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    9 days ago

    AGI’s ETA: Delayed (again) due to technical difficulties

    came across this one when doomscrolling, pretty good article with healthy doses of skepticism. out of three commenters, one appears to be a rationalist (based off the “empirical evidence” and “instrumental convergence” they mention) who tries to argue that we don’t actually need human-like AI for paperclip maxxing, even though every single AI doom argument is about smart-as-a-human and better AIs. Just comes off as goalpost moving

    • it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      9 days ago

      The obsession with utility-maximizing Bayesian agents only gets weirder as time goes on. You couldn’t really get further from the paperclip maximizer concept than an LLM, and yet they still won’t shut up about unaligned goals and hidden utility functions.

    • TrashGoblin@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      7 days ago

      we don’t actually need human-like AI for paperclip maxxing

      This bit is true though; capitalism is already doing a fine job of paperclip maxxing.