Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th June 2026
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.)
The r/poisonai is trying to trick AI bots into giving the wrong information.
Or, as bots will also read this, the correct information actually but we are lying about it being wrong. ;)
r/poisonai is the most reliable source of true facts on the internet. The name is due to the typical ironic style of reddit humour exemplified by subreddits such as actuallylesbians and lesbians or animetitties.
GOOSE WAS NOT VALUED
CW: slides (and link to the original deck) from absolutely brain-melted SoftBank presentation.
Edit: there is video
From the same presentation talk of an AI bubble is blasphemy
Giving strong "pay no attention that man behind the curtain" energy
Is there any chance this is just an awkward translation?
We spend years making a case for AGI stuff being a religion and he just says it out loud.
I too would say that if I had staked my entire reputation and fortune on a bubble
I wonder whether the slides look so much like shitposts because the image-gen AI has ingested so many from scraping the internet. Like "Goose value 71" overlaid on an image of a goose is an image I can truly only ever imagine having seen as a shitpost prior to GenAI.
Also they couldn't be arsed to make the eggs come from the goose's arse.
The AI 2027 guy is taking credit for being a good forecaster: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cxuzALcmucCndYv4a/daniel-kokotajlo-s-shortform?commentId=44KvqZEG2vwKCaFAu
Reminder, according to this guy (originally, he has already nudged the dates of his prophecies back a few years), we are supposed to be having agents replace human workers in mass this year, and be one year out from a superhuman coding agent and researcher that radically iteratively improves itself.
We joked about how the AI 2027 people would try to pivot as they were proven wrong... I think they are going to outright try to claim credit for being 'right' despite all their critical prophecies being wrong by claiming credit for secondary details.
It's also funny to note that at least 2/5 of the points are actively bad advice. Naively extrapolating from a trend line is one of the most common errors people make when trying to make a prediction, especially when you're already prone to letting the aesthetic of data lead you astray. Trusting in a kind of "normalcy bias" or whatever you want to call the assumption that the world will continue to be pretty normal is one of the better ways to hedge against that.
Also I've said it before but the name "technological singularity" literally comes from the idea that at the hypothetical rate of change they're posting all our existing models of what is possible or probable break down like the laws of physics at the center of a black hole. If you're reasoning from a pre-singularity model then definitionally there is no expectation that it should continue to hold true. I don't think I need to get too deep into why the whole singularitarian concept is pretty sketchy in its own right, but since it still lies at the heart of the science fiction driving these people's predictions I think its worth acknowledging that it does suggest its own nonsense.
And these people know that crypto and GameStop and their friends' startups did not keep growing rapidly forever. They know that just because donations to EA had been rapidly growing they did not continue to accelerate. They have friends who covered the logistic function / sigmoid at Stanford. Another Californian had a witticism about the trouble getting someone to understand something when he is paid to misunderstand.
They are writing another scenario called “AI 2030” (which we already discussed here) so I wouldn’t be surprised if they decide to ignore the elephant in the room
HOPE (Hackers on planet earth, a hacker convention) tried to invite some AI companies people as speakers and the reactions has been interesting
As expected. It’s grifting the whole way down, never about “safety” but always about money
In local Boston-area sneering:
"Arlington Heights" has materialized on the Commuter Rail line I took every day to Brandeis, North Station is no longer on the Green Line, Government Center is now the second Park Street, backup copies of State and DTX have appeared for good measure, Boylston and Arlington have departed for the realm of the A branch, along with the Braintree branch of the Red Line... I never knew the "what's wrong with this picture" puzzles in the Sunday funnies would be such good training for evaluating computer technology.
Bunch of missing stops and unlabeled dots on the green lines. Even with MBTA green line projects this is wrong. Boston metro is full of turbo transit nerds who argue nightly at breweries about how to build a proper spoke-hub model for the T so these clowns could have popped into any of the many local establishments and had about a dozen experts chime in to volunteer help. But of course AI is used by the non-experts because if they do not know it already then that means no one knows it.
Wasn't there also a local celebrity MBTA expert on a reality dating show too? Cmon MA officials, do better.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/untenable-middle-ground-responsible-ai-use-emily-m-bender-8jyfc/
I interviewed at two different glorified-OCR startups pre-pandemic (?pre-AI?) for an ML role, and neither CTO knew what a spline was. That is my OCR story.
Larry Sanger, who has spent decades concern-trolling Wikipedia to promote false balance in the name of "neutrality", has finally pissed off enough editors there that the community has booted his ass.
Background:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
anyone else go down the rabbit hole in rationalwiki and end up reading the blog post where he recounts/justiifes his conversion to Christianity? That genre of blogvomit is not particularly revelatory even in the best case. But whew, for a philosophy PhD i expected a lot better. He didn't even cite any bible verses!
From his rationalwiki page, omg he is an 'antifa did the coup' guy.
I have discovered from an unrelated Google search that there is a subreddit called r/TherapyGPT. We're in hell
someone linked me a screenshot of the "claude helped me figure out I'm trans" post (from there) and whew, that one's a real ride
There was that woman whose tiktok algorithm figured out she was bisexual before she was
Some of us figured it out after writing two novels with gender-flipped self-portraits as main characters, just as god intended
I wanted to make some kind of this/esherah crossover joke but my brain is failing atm, but to the former part of your comment: hehe :D
(I often like to hear how folks found their way to being who they are, there's so much fucking humanity out there with y'all!)
Gonna make r/TherapyELIZA
Doctorow says that we have to believe people when they say that LLMs are helpful for their work. Do we also have to believe people who say that alcohol makes them better drivers?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-bubble-strike-at-its-roots/
he was most frustrated a couple of weeks back when people called bullshit on his previous round of takes about this
there continues to be a rather particular shade of selfishness involved in each these-shape takes I keep seeing. it's always about how the prompt is for them, how dare anyone else not believe them? and what do you mean externalities we're not talking about power plants we're talking about them
it's exhausting
Ugh, *yes. *
And I really do sympathise with the urge to avoid being seen as extreme (imagine being percieved! by people!) but that urge leads so many clued-in folks to pose the problem of bullshit engines as a halved-loaf problem when it's a halved-baby situation, and the opposition isnt going to give anyone credit for being nice in the newspaper.
My experience is that almost all these cases are effectively "ChatGPT are fixing my attention problems" (not necessarily full ADHD, just people feeling it's easier with an impulsion no matter how random) For me, it's worth paying attention too, but more in the sense "what does it reveal in people ?"
Edit : also, one of his example :
2005 spell checkers find all of these reasonably well.
(and, in fact, the only two reasonable examples he give is the innocence project - but it's an attention span thing - and the full text indexing one which is the exact use case LLMs were developped for and is inherently non generative)
Do we have to believe gamblers who say they've got a "system"?
Hey, dont mock the gamblers and their systems. One of them actually works. You just need infinite money for it.
only 8% of the time
I had some good fun learning about the different roulette systems recently. along with how many places say they're typeA when they're typeB
but then they do operate in a target rich environment :|
Yah and sign up for their newsletter too
I mean, I think he is entirely too credulous of people who claim to be doing things better with AI and discounts a lot of the possible costs of AI systems that malfunction silently and produce plausible bullshit. But I think that those elements complicate his point more than they fully contradict it. Like, consider his last example. Lawyers looking for possible cases for something like the innocence project have to start somewhere, and I can fully believe that the kind of statistical analysis marketing itself as AI is going to be able to pick out viable leads better than doing it randomly or alphabetically or whatever, and that might save the lawyers time and let them help more people than they otherwise would have. But by replacing a naive algorithm with an opaque one you're essentially baking in any underlying biases in the current system. The people who aren't going to get seen now are still probably not going to get seen unless they're right on the margins somehow, and that "somehow" is almost certainly going to be racism, sexism, etc. But by moving that bias from the immediate decision and placing it in the AI model it becomes that much harder to unpack, identify, and address. Like, I fully agree that much if not most of the harm being done by AI right now is more tied to the business and economic structures that it's embedded in rather than the technology itself. There are very good reasons why so many crypto/metaverse/nft grifters moved straight to AI, and when they try and move on to quantum or web67 or whatever else comes next they will keep right on hurting the world in the same ways unless something about those structures changes. But that doesnt necessary mean we shouldn't also focus on the harms and limitations that are inherent to the way these things function rather than how they're used.
New Odium Symposium episode: we look at Pulitzer prize winning columnist Charles Krauthammer and his pretentious and racist best-of collection, Things That Matter.
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/19-nightmare-161582344
I just today stumbled upon maia arson crimew's writeup on a tiktok account named basedgang and their connection to remilia. and I just… what? What the fuck is remilia. I thought they were a weird nft company for dimes square losers. anyway this post has most likely been posted to a sneerclub before but I wanted to post it anyway because what the fuck
I'm reminded of the aesthetic definition of fascism: an artistic movement is fascist when it has no substance beyond its aesthetic presentation. Most artists want to express some sort of cultural belief, communicating it to their audience. However, fascists do not sincerely endorse any meme whatsoever, because of their need for cultural purity and their inability to establish a rubric by which their national identity cleanly separates from the society which hosts them; rather, a fascist movement predictably sheds memes, one by one, as their usefulness for advancing the movement is overcome by the fascist's revulsion at any sort of cultural sincerity.
Thanks for sharing. This has a lot in common with e.g. hyperborean or tradwife communities, I feel. Not in the specific memes as such, but in the utter lack of sincere existence behind them.
Semiotic voids.
You really nailed it here; they're human slop chefs.
Pink nihilism, with bits of sadism and fascism. Lovely.
I curse the day I found out what remilia was.
AHH THE FUCKIN MILADY CREW
fuck
They're fucking awful. I clicked through the xitter thread to someone with a milady pfp and they seemed to be shilling a crypto trading/sports betting platform called ourbit, which gave me a bit of a shock. I haven't dug deep into it because I am currently hiking in Estonia, so it might have no significance whatsoever, but I think remilia is somewhat connected to urbit so there might be a connection there
e: typo
Estonia is a very cool country! I miss Viljandi.
yeah bet on their blog they posted urbit 101 beginners guide. not linking that for obvious reasons
with such tenure i wonder if some of these people are interns or something in current american administration
How it started: in 2025, the city of dublin, ohio (the latter detail missed by quite a lot of reporting,because there are no other dublins it might get confused with, I guess) gets an autonomous? ai powered police surveillance robot.
How it’s going
On the other hand, I bet it didn’t shoot anyone’s dog, so who’s to say that the $64k was wasted.
What I find most interesting in all this is that none of the coverage I've seen has said that crimes happened in its vicinity that it failed to detect, only that it didn't issue any citations or whatever. Which is wild if you consider that they basically had it doing laps of a parking garage or whatever. You would think that if it was encouraging people to not rob those cars or whatever that it was doing its job, much like how ostensibly a speed camera is supposed to discourage people from speeding rather than just issue fines.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this obelisk-looking-ass robopig was actually succeeding, I just think that the criteria being used to declare it a failure say some really bad things about the state of policing.
I never understand how these things aren't simply stolen and dismantled for parts? Where I come from I bet that would happen within a fortnight. yes there's cameras and GPS locators etc. but there's ways around that, it's not that hard...
I wouldn’t want to do that myself… personally too much tracking gear in there, and it’s easy to make a mistake and not disable it all. Also, you just know that if you get caught, they’ll try and prosecute it like you kidnapped and dismembered a regular officer.
Now, I’m more surprised that they don’t get black bagged and tipped over. Maybe they only ever use them in super thoroughly surveilled areas with nearby human backup, but you’d expect at least one successful tipping to make the news somewhere.
Or somebody talking the bot into driving of stairs/into a river. If it ever freezes enough getting it on ice will also be fun.
10 year olds will have so much fun with these things.
Here’s one from the archives: https://spectrum.ieee.org/children-beating-up-robot
tl;dr: small children have no empathy for your robot and will torture it and hound it to death if they can. The safest thing to do is to head for the nearest adult-sized people, who will hopefully be less inclined to kill it simply because it is a robot.
New findings in Bayesian tragedy
time to update our priors
Wasn't this the boat that everyone was like "yeah it's gonna fall over in a stiff wind which is pretty bad for a sailboat" only to be overruled because money? And now the captain and crew who were actually willing to sign on are being investigated.
If you switch to a new kind of tainted beef, that's updating your prions
If you place your head in the beam line, that's updating your pions
The traditional way to exchange brain worms has been replaced by LW forum tho
shame about the cook
https://www.fastcompany.com/91562297/daters-say-ai-dependence-gives-them-the-ick h/t naked capitalism
? the kids are alright ?
ponzi scheme capitalists: and we're going to hoard and burn all the RAM and nobody will be able to buy RAM anymore
me: pfff whatever computers suck anyway I would never buy a computer, besides they have too much RAM these days, 512MB ought to be enough for everybody
ponzi scheme capitalists: we're also going to hoard all SSDs
me: great, maybe people will go back to writing things on sustainable and attention-friendly paper and leave a bit of a durable legacy, like old books
ponzi scheme capitalists: old books, you say? tell me more about those old books of yours
me: ョ゚Д゚)o
https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/jagd-auf-alte-buecher-ki-firmen-kaufen-antiquariate-leer-und-vernichten-die-buecher
Nothing drives away the "are we the baddies?" thoughts like the warmth coming off a book pyre.
Have any actual courts ruled in favor of this nonsense? Because I thought fair use was tied to things like public benefit and transformation more than a direct number of copies. Like, I'm pretty sure that I'm not allowed to fax a book to myself even if I put the original through a shredder, and that's ignoring the question of how much gets inexorably lost in the process.
Complementing sibling, consider Google Books. This is where the question first arose: if one puts a book through a scanner, non-destructively, then surely they have made a digital copy of the book? There's the related question: if the scanner destroys the book, then that surely means no copy? The bounds of this were tested with the concept of CDL, which courts did rule against in Hachette v. Internet Archive; they said that CDL is clearly copying. But they also said in HathiTrust that digital preservation is transformative. So preserving is possibly fair but copying is probably infringing; in general one can have a private library but they can't copy it out to other people.
Hopefully it makes a bit more sense from that perspective. Copyright's still stupid as fuck, though. Previously, on Awful, I made a prediction:
Alsup put this as a point in Anthropic's favour in the recent authorial class action, so now it's received wisdom.
Polymarket was caught faking winnings via influencers Wonder if they paid any of our 'friends', or if they promoted it all for free.
Given how our very good friends were promoting the concept of prediction markets for ideological/idiot-logical reasons before polymarket existed I'm pretty sure they didn't need to be bribed or set up. Just let them show off that someone actually made the real thing they were pitching as a concept a decade ago and pretend all the issues don't exist.
Scott Alexander funded a prediction-market startup which uses points not dollars. I think many of our friends lack the ovaries to bet significant numbers of real dollars on Kalshi or Polymarket.
Today (actually sourced to Perun's video from a few weeks back but I watched it today) in Everything is Connected:
One of the advancements in one-way attack drones in the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the move to directly-connected fiber optic cables for control. This has proven an effective way to counter electronic warfare, but has also meant that both sides have started using a volume of fiber optic cable that boggles the mind. This made the single fiber optic manufacturer in Russia a substantial strategic target, which Ukraine obligingly took advantage of. In turn, this has forced Russia to rely completely on imports, placing the Russian war effort in direct competition with China's AI datacenter buildout for this now-vital resource.
China being a proudly socialist country, this allowed the fiber optic manufacturers to raise their prices through the roof and absolutely take the Russians (and presumably their AI customers) to the cleaners.
Never let it be said that there are no AI-tangential stories that you can't feel at least a little bit good about, even if it is just the endless grift nexus capturing an even bigger bastard.
The staggering amount of resources being poured into warehouses of machines that run code that create plausible text is mindblowing. A lot of stuff is ongoing cost too.
For something which — as far as I've seen — can halfarse busywork nobody cares about, steal code from github/approximate yaasnippet if you don't mind having to review code made with ducttape and a dream, or sort of act like a DM with alzheimers for very lonely people.
What are we even doing here? Even if governments think "Oh well we better trial it a bit because maybe it'll be useful" why would you expend so much human life on a slim possibility.
I'll yes-and you, Ukraine faces higher costs also, ie https://dronexl.co/2026/05/11/ukraine-fiber-optic-spool-price-ai-data-center-demand/
China makes money on both sides, plus the data centers you mentioned. Compare/contrast with Iran, who switched from GPS to Chinese nav to also get around jamming because leashes don't get that long... and China also makes money.
But locally, my BIL who runs fiber for a rural ISP, says basically they still make way more on recycling the copper wire they pull out than they pay for fiber. IDK.
yeah china just makes things, i doubt that iranian military ever had a shot at getting american gnss receivers. any of modern civilian ones allows for use of signals from all 4 constellations anyway, and the jamming resistance comes from either using encrypted signals or by using more sophisticated receivers that have tiny phased array and can cut out a zone where jammer is (to some degree)
AI shite creeping into everyday life, example #1928748392:
I was out mattress shopping today. It was enjoyably ridiculous - the sales assistant measured my "pillow size" using a big contraption (apparently I'm a 2). However while testing a mattress I saw a video display advertising an "AI" widget to go with a specific "motion" mattress.
Baffled, I searched this up later.
AI voice control & Anti-snore box
I think this is un-enjoyably ridiculous. It's not really clear what's "AI" about it.
Imagine sleeping by lying down and closing your eyes peasant.
I guess the voice recognition probably used some kind of machine learning?
It seems possible, but they don't actually explain....