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gerikson

@ gerikson @awful.systems

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3 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026

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  • It's darkly funny that the AI2027 authors so obviously didn't predict that Trump 2.0 was gonna be so much more stupid and evil than Biden or even Trump 1.0. Can you imagine that the administration that's sueing the current Fed chair (due for replacement in May this year) is gonna be able to constructively deal with the complex robot god they're conjuring up? "Agent-4" will just have to deepfake Steve Miller and be able to convince Trump do do anything it wants.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th January 2026

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  • in retrospect I regret starting this hare

    The impulse was a HN sub where the CDCCPS was gonna mark infant male circumcision as bad

    becase the CDC is now basically RFK JR/MAHA aligned, my thought went instantly to neo-nazis. [See above, this was CPS, not CDC, so I doubly misread. Further association follows] In part because a couple of election cycles ago here in Sweden, the local nationalist party tried to resurrect the old Swedish ban on kashrut slaughter as an anti-islamist trope, showing that these bad Nazi ideas keep showing up

    HN submission (flagged): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46567696

    Previous discussion on HN from 9 years ago, no-one mentions Fremskrittspartiet are heirs to Nazis, nor that the linked submission explicitely calls out the legislation as anti-semitic.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291906

    I completely forgot that the US is almost unique in the prevalence of infant male circumcision on non-religious grounds

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th January 2026

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  • People more plugged in than me in US culture war issues: is the opposition to infant male circumcision driven primarily by anti-semitism / anti-islamism or by more general manosphere vibes?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th January 2026

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  • I found out about the rightwing / misogynist strain of FOSS mostly via the furore over RMS defending Minsky from Epstein allegations.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th January 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th January 2026

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  • Sorry for you and your cat.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th January 2026

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  • cue this lobste.rs shitshow where someone states "88 is a known Nazi dogwhistle", and multiple people come out of the woodwork saying even if it is, it's not so bad actually, get over it

    https://lobste.rs/s/rvgvgj/best_line_length_is_88

    Submitted blog post could without loss of generality be titled "Black's default of 88 for line length is not necessarily the best", yet author decided to go with the title they have now... edit author seems to be a good egg generally https://mastodon.social/@glyph

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th January 2026

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  • Man, that's rough. I know it's not much but I'm sending you positive energy from where I am.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th January 2026

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  • I'd wager an ounce of gold that the general attitude towards sustainability and the environment is 100% aligned among the rulers of both states.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th January 2026

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  • Dubai famously doesn't have a sewage pipe system, human waste is loaded onto tanker trucks that spend hours waiting to offload it in the only sewage treatment plant available.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th January 2026

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  • A rival gang of "AI" "researchers" dare to make fun of Big Yud's latest book and the LW crowd are Not Happy

    Link to takedown: https://www.mechanize.work/blog/unfalsifiable-stories-of-doom/ (hearbreaking : the worst people you know made some good points)

    When we say Y&S’s arguments are theological, we don’t just mean they sound religious. Nor are we using “theological” to simply mean “wrong”. For example, we would not call belief in a flat Earth theological. That’s because, although this belief is clearly false, it still stems from empirical observations (however misinterpreted).

    What we mean is that Y&S’s methods resemble theology in both structure and approach. Their work is fundamentally untestable. They develop extensive theories about nonexistent, idealized, ultrapowerful beings. They support these theories with long chains of abstract reasoning rather than empirical observation. They rarely define their concepts precisely, opting to explain them through allegorical stories and metaphors whose meaning is ambiguous.

    Their arguments, moreover, are employed in service of an eschatological conclusion. They present a stark binary choice: either we achieve alignment or face total extinction. In their view, there’s no room for partial solutions, or muddling through. The ordinary methods of dealing with technological safety, like continuous iteration and testing, are utterly unable to solve this challenge. There is a sharp line separating the “before” and “after”: once superintelligent AI is created, our doom will be decided.

    LW announcement, check out the karma scores! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Bu3dhPxw6E8enRGMC/stephen-mcaleese-s-shortform?commentId=BkNBuHoLw5JXjftCP

    Update an LessWrong attempts to debunk the piece with inline comments here

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i6sBAT4SPCJnBPKPJ/mechanize-work-s-essay-on-unfalsifiable-doom

    Leading to such hilarious howlers as

    Then solving alignment could be no easier than preventing the Germans from endorsing the Nazi ideology and commiting genocide.

    Ummm pretty sure engaging in a new world war and getting their country bombed to pieces was not on most German's agenda. A small group of ideologues managed to sieze complete control of the state, and did their very best to prevent widespread knowledge of the Holocaust from getting out. At the same time they used the power of the state to ruthlessly supress any opposition.

    rejecting Yudkowsky-Soares' arguments would require that ultrapowerful beings are either theoretically impossible (which is highly unlikely)

    ohai begging the question

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th January 2026

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  • LOL @ promptfondlers in comments

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th December 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th December 2025

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  • this made my day, thx

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th December 2025

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  • whole country is swole, good mirror of the maga mind

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025

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  • yeah, I dunno how large the union of retro game handheld enthusiasts and techfash lickspittles is.

  • Amazon discovers AI sucks at automated TV recaps

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  • Did you hear about the vegetarian cannibal?

    He can only eat swedes.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025

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  • So I gather but SB is the only book I’ve read

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025

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  • More on datacenters in space

    https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters

    N.B. got this via HN, entire site gives off "wouldn't it be cool" vibes (author "lives and breathes space" IRONIC IT'S A VACUUM

    Also this is the only thermal mention

    Thermal: only solar array area used as radiator; no dedicated radiator mass assumed

    riiiiight....