Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th September 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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.)

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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    23·
    2 days ago

    Unsurprisingly, the Coxon dipshit who is getting all the press for quitting his cushy AI-industry job is a MIRI fanboy:

    I’ve been associating with rationalists for almost a decade. Their ideas were compelling and you can’t deny their foresight. The founders of every superintelligence effort are all bound up in the rationality sphere. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman used to frequent the MIRI offices.

    If MIRI was Sam Altman’s old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can’t work in it, isn’t this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?

    The way I relate to rationalists is it’s like the bizarre hypertrophied physiques on specialized athletes. In my opinion they have weirdly specialized minds that make them uniquely correct about topics removed from daily experience. These “specialized minds” can also make them off-putting to many people.

    I don’t know if I’d consider myself a rationalist. I am intuitively opposed to polyamory, veganism, and consequentialist intuitions. But I certainly trust them to be correct about factual questions.

    “I’m intuitively opposed to culinary traditions that people have been developing for hundreds of years, but gosh dang it, when they talk about the Machine God torturing a billion simulated copies of me unless I tithe my income to a Harry Potter fanfiction writer, I’m sold!”

    Every time this dorkus is in the news, remember, he’s an absolute wanker.

    • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      If MIRI was Sam Altman’s old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can’t work in it, isn’t this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?

      It is very funny how the rhetoric from the rationalist doomers has been one of the main forces propping up the AI industry. If they’re saying AI will be powerful enough to kill us all, they’re still saying that AI is powerful! They are so high on their own supply (and the fame and wealth from finally being in the spotlight) that they have not realized just how much they have undermined their own cause.

      Then again, perhaps one could say that a doomsday prophet, deep down, actually wants doom to happen.

      (Also, the paltry amount of technical work done by MIRI has zero relevance whatsoever to modern day AI.)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      2 days ago

      Their ideas were compelling and you can’t deny their foresight

      Ah yes, the AI did almost kill everyone with custom bacteria.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          20 hours ago

          10 seconds in and I’m already thinking about how many ideas for new chemical weapons I could come up with, and I haven’t studied chemistry since high school.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          23 hours ago

          I recall a long time ago when the first ‘we are going to hack virusses and the terrorists will kill everybody’ stories came up that actual viroligists already explained that this is not how it works, and this isn’t a risk people should really fear. But science fiction > experts.

          E: also terrorists don’t just want to kill everybody, and guns and fertilizer are cheap and easy to use.

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        1 day ago

        and if that didn’t get everyone, the food-safety AI plus MAHA will pick up the stragglers with natural bacteria cultivated in abundance

      • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        2 days ago

        And was a Bayesian calculating agent that enumerates every possible explanation for the information it takes in and ranks them according to evidence, along with every trajectory through the world that could fulfill its utility function, rather than approximating the high dimensional shape of text

    • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      2 days ago

      Least surprising news of the week

      If MIRI was Sam Altman’s old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can’t work in it, isn’t this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?

      Plus Anthropic-the company he quit for being irresponsible-being heavily tied to EA/rationalism. Not exactly the best endorsement

      These “specialized minds” can also make them off-putting to many people.

      The eugenics endorsing also does a pretty good job with that

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        1 day ago

        There might be some way of bypassing the ATproto sign-in wall, but I don’t know and don’t care enough to figure it out. The content of the locked post is only this screenshot. Ed Zitron asks, “What is your relationship to the rationalists and effective altruists?” and Coxon replies as quoted above.