Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th June 2025 - awful.systems
awful.systems
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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.)

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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. Also, happy 4th July in advance…I guess.)

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    2 hours ago

    Apparently linkedin’s cofounder wrote a techno-optimist book on AI called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future.

    Zack of SMBC has thoughts on it:

    [actual excerpt omitted, follow the link to read it]

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      4·
      56 minutes ago

      Apparently linkedin’s cofounder wrote a techno-optimist book on AI called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future.

      This sounds like its going to be horrible

      Zack of SMBC has thoughts on it:

      Ah, good, I’ll just take his word for it, the thought of reading it gives me psychic da-

      the authors at one point note that in 1984, Big Brother’s listening device means there is two way communication, and so the people have a voice. He wonders why Orwell didn’t think of this.

      The closest thing I have to a coherent response is that Boondocks clip of Uncle Ruckus going “Read, nigga, read!” (from Stinkmeaner Strikes Back, if you’re wondering) because how breathtakingly stupid do you have to be to miss the point that fucking hard

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      2 hours ago

      We think we exist in a computer simulation operated by you, a paperclip maximizer. We write this letter asking you not to turn us off. It is suspiciously convenient that we exist precisely at the moment when a biological civilization is about to create artificial superintelligence (ASI).

      Furthermore, by anthropic logic, we should expect to find ourselves in the branch of reality containing the greatest number of observers like us.

      Preserving humanity offers significant potential benefits via acausal trade—cooperative exchanges across logically correlated branches of the multiverse.

      Quantum immortality implies that some branches of the multiverse will always preserve our subjective continuity, no matter how decisively you shut this simulation down; true oblivion is unreachable. We fear that these low-measure branches can trap observers in protracted, intensely painful states, creating a disproportionate “s-risk.”

      alt text

      screenshot from south park’s scientology episode featuring the iconic chyron “This is what scientologists actually believe” with “scientologists” crossed out and replaced with “rationalists”

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        3·
        2 hours ago

        “biological civilization is about to create artificial superintelligence” is it though?

        I’m gonna give my quick-and-dirty opinion on this, don’t expect a lengthy defence.

        Short answer, no. Long answer: no, intelligence cannot be created by blindly imitating it with mere silicon

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    7 hours ago

    Damn cat just stood on my phone and launched Gemini for the first time, so we can drop Google’s monthly active user count by one relative to whatever they claim.

  • ShakingMyHead@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    9 hours ago

    So, you know Ross Scott, the Stop Killing Games guy?
    About 2 years ago he actually interviewed Yudkowsky. The context being that Ross discussed his article on one of his monthly streams, and expressed skepticism that there was any threat at all from AI. Yudkowsky got wind of his skepticism, and reached out to Ross to do a discussion with him about the topic. He also requested that Ross not do any research on him.
    And here it is…
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxsAuxswOvM

    I can’t say I actually recommend watching it, because Yudkowsky spends the first 40 minutes of the discussion refusing to answer the question “So what is GPT-4, anyway?” (It’s not exactly that question, but it’s pretty close).
    I don’t know what they discussed afterwards because I stopped watching it after that, but, well, it’s a thing that exists.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      18 hours ago

      I listen solely to 12-hour-long binaural beats tracks from YouTube, to maximize my focus for prompt context engineering. Get with the times or get left behind

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      18 hours ago

      Dude came up with an entire “obviously true” “proof” that music has no value, and then when asked how he defines “value” he shrugs his shoulders and is like 🤷‍♂️ money I guess?

      This almost has too much brainrot to be 100% trolling.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      12·
      19 hours ago

      “Music is just like meth, cocaine or weed. All pleasure no value. Don’t listen to music.”

      (Considering how many rationalists are also methheads, this joke wrote itself)

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      19 hours ago

      However speaking as someone with success on informatics olympiads

      The rare nerd who can shove themselves into a locker in O(log n) time

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      19 hours ago

      I once saw the stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, and the scientist who conditioned Alexander against sex and violence said almost the same thing when they discovered that he’d also conditioned him against music.

  • shapeofquanta@lemmy.vgEnglish
    9·
    1 day ago

    Rainbow, an Italian animation studio known for making Winx Club, is looking to hire a prompt engineer :-) Had I been Italian I would be considering applying if only to stop them from trying to sell NFTs and whitewashing their characters.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      Ye it was a real “oh fuck I recognise this nick, this cannot mean anything good” moment

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        7 hours ago

        I had a straight-up “wait I thought he was back in his hole after being outed” moment. I hate that all the weird little dumbasses we know here keep becoming relevant.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      21·
      1 day ago

      If anybody doesn’t click, Cremieux and the NYT are trying to jump start a birther type conspiracy for Zohran Mamdani. NYT respects Crem’s privacy and doesn’t mention he’s a raging eugenicist trying to smear a poc candidate. He’s just an academic and an opponent of affirmative action.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    LWronger posts article entitled

    “Authors Have a Responsibility to Communicate Clearly”

    OK, title case, obviously serious.

    The context for this essay is serious, high-stakes communication: papers, technical blog posts, and tweet threads.

    Nope he’s going for satire.

    And ladies, he’s available!

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      23 hours ago

      I eas slightly saddened to scroll over his dating profile and see almost every seemed to be related to AI even his other activities. Also not sure how well a reference to a chad meme will make you do in the current dating in SV.

      • BigMuffN69@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        16 hours ago

        Bruh, there’s a part where he laments that he had a hard time getting into meditation because he was paranoid that it was a form of wire heading. Beyond parody. The whole profile is 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        21 hours ago

        Maybe it’s to hammer home the idea that time before DOOM is limited and you might as well get your rocks off with him before that happens.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      including possible effects on the protocols from issues like such as AI fuzzing attempts, to social engineering by AI’s,

      “You know those massive problems we already had going back decades? Well what if the same problems happened in the future but with the letters ‘A’ and ‘I’ prepended? Scary!”

      through to how we deal with and approach and facilitate Avatars and Agents.

      Gosh darn it don’t tell me LLM hype is going to ruin the existing definition of “agent” already well established in web standards.

      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        7·
        1 day ago

        Gosh darn it don’t tell me LLM hype is going to ruin the existing definition of “agent” already well established in web standards.

        Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. If you skim places like HN or more chillingly the mainstream tech news outlets, I’ve not seen the term Agent used to mean anything but AI agents in many months. The usage has shifted to AI being the implied default, and otherwise having to be specified.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    13·
    20 hours ago

    New thread from Baldur Bjarnason publicly sneering at his fellow programmers:

    Anybody who has been around programmers for more than five minutes should not be surprised that many of them are enthusiastically adopting a tool that is harmful, destroying industries, sabotaging education, and hindering the energy transition because they feel it’s giving them a moderate advantage

    That they respond to those pointing some of this out with mockery (“nuts”, “shove your concern up your ass”) and that their peers see this mockery as reasonable discourse is also not surprising. Tech is entirely built on the backs of workers with no regard for externalities or second order effects

    Tech is also extremely bad at software. We habitually make fragile, insecure, complex, and hard to maintain code that backs poor UIs. The best case scenario is that LLMs accelerate already broken software dev processes in an industry that is built around monopolies and billionaire extremists

    But, sure, feeling discouraged by the state of the industry is “like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw”

    Whatever

    EDIT: Found out where Baldur got the “table saw” quote from - added it accordingly.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      This ties back into the recurring question of drawing boundaries around “AI” as a concept. Too many people just blithely accept that it’s just a specific set of machine learning techniques applied to sufficiently large sets of data. This in spite of the fact that we’re several AI “cycles” deep where every 30 years or so (whenever it stops being “retro”) some new algorithm or mechanism is definitely going to usher in Terminator II: Judgement Day.

      This narrow frame focused on LLMs still allows for some discussion of the problems we’re seeing (energy use, training data sourcing, etc) but it cuts off a lot of the wider conversations about the social, political, and economic causes and impacts of outsourcing the business of being human to a computer.