Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 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, and happy 4th July in advance.)

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, and happy 4th July in advance.)

  • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    Oh damn, they originally said it was gonna be called AI 2030, so they pushed it back a bit

    It’s not a rehash of AI 2027 with moved-back timelines like I thought it would be, instead its what they believe should happen in regards to AI development

    Plan A is our positive vision for what should happen instead. In this scenario, humanity delays the development of superintelligence until 2040, makes all AI research public, allows dozens of companies globally to catch up to the frontier, and intentionally enters a regime of mutually assured compute destruction.

    And in the first footnote:

    So far reality is tracking closer to AI 2027 than even we expected. (2027 was our modal year at time of publication, not our median.)

    According to them, preliminary analysis of the data as of July 2026 says that rate of progress is 75% of AI 2027. This says Daniel K only believes in a 25% chance of AGI by the end of 2027, their model also hasn’t changed so their medians are still shown as beyond 2027. Footnote 11 also flat-out says they have no idea how much things will keep progressing

    I’m not gonna be able to go through the whole thing because busy today, but those are my observations based off a quick glance

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      So far reality is tracking closer to AI 2027 than even we expected. (2027 was our modal year at time of publication, not our median.)

      They aren’t even trying to hide the fact that their predictions have already failed but instead claiming victory.

      • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        23 hours ago

        Should’ve left in the full footnote:

        ”The AI 2027 scenario is still roughly what we expect the future to look like: a mad scramble to superintelligence leading to either AI takeover or extreme concentration of power. So far reality is tracking closer to AI 2027 than even we expected. (2027 was our modal year at time of publication, not our median.) You can read more about our views on timelines here and here.”

        So yeah you’re bang on the money. Funny how they went on a press tour hyping up Kokotajlo as a forecaster and claiming that dismissing AI 2027 as hype was a “grave mistake” to “yeah we did not expect for it to follow our predictions” and still being slower than what they predicted

    • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      20 hours ago

      Piggybacking off myself to say that the way they wrote the update on their 2025 review is weird. I’m assuming that they mean 2025 was 65% pace but 2026 crept up to 75%, but the way they wrote it makes me think that they actually meant to say “we originally thought 2025 was 65%, but new data shows it was actually 75%” which would be odd, I’m still assuming the former since it makes more sense to me (they also drop it with zero elaboration like, what metric increased with this new data since this was an overall % of pace? not to mention the real percentage was 58-66% based off their means and medians so it would actually look like 58-76% pace)

      I mean no matter which way you spin it we’re still going slower than AI 2027, so hooray

      (turned this into a second comment so they first one wouldn’t be a wall of text)