Want to wade into the snowy 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 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.
(2026 is off to a great start, isn’t it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
There’s nothing funny about stock market crashes. S&P 500 falling flat on its face is not a laughing matter. Do you think it’s comical when NASDAQ steps on a banana peel and does a double backflip and there’s drums and cymbals and a horn honks as its nose hits the ground? I think it’s sick to laugh at US dollar getting a grand piano dropped on it and then having its teeth replaced by piano keys which play a little ragtime lick before falling off.
Anyway here’s a statement from the chief of US Federal Reserve considering threats made against him by the US president https://youtu.be/KckGHaBLSn4
It’ll be something to see how the finance/degense/energy sector ghouls react to the citrus man definitively fucking with the money.
Edit: lol orange site killed the main thread with nearly 400 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46582420
He’s already managed to remain untouched through the tariff farce so I’m not holding my breath.
But even if something crazy does happen, a major financial crisis should not conjure images of the economy running off a cliff and hovering in the air for a few seconds making running motions with its legs before noticing its mistake and promptly falling in the canyon and making a hole shaped perfectly like its spread out silhouette. A financial crisis is a serious matter completely unlike an enormous ACME brand anvil falling down the same hole and a crude white flag of surrender feebly popping out of it.
But even if something crazy does happen, a major financial crisis should not conjure images of the economy running off a cliff and hovering in the air for a few seconds making running motions with its legs before noticing its mistake and promptly falling in the canyon and making a hole shaped perfectly like its spread out silhouette…
We are deep into Coyote Time, aren’t we?
He’s not wrong. Previously, on Awful, I pointed out that folks would have been on the wrong side of Sega v. Accolade as well, to say nothing of Galoob v. Nintendo. This reply really sums it up well:
[I]t strikes me that what started out as a judo attack against copyright has made copyright maximalists out of many who may not have started out that way.
I think that the turning point was Authors Guild v. Google, also called Google Books, where everybody involved was avaricious. People want to support whatever copyright makes them feel good, not whatever copyright is established by law. If it takes the example of Oracle to get people to wake up and realize that maybe copyright is bad then so be it.
I was looking into pepping up my CV and was poking around the 2024 CCC style guide when this abomination hit my retinas:
Use the provided LUTs to tint your images in the predefined scheme. You can load them with your graphics software of choice. Ask your friendly AI overlord if you don’t know how.
After being provided with such reproducible instructions, I was of course poking around blog posts for half an hour to finagle this thing. Adding insult to injury: poking around the LUT files shows they were made by Affinity Studio (a freeware pumped out by Canva) instead of the true scotsman’s choice: the G’MIC command line tool! (In fairness, there doesn’t seem to be a FOSS option with a usable GUI for this task. The G’MIC GIMP plugin is sort of okay, but it can’t parse this particular file.)
Affinity is (was) an actually great paid software suite that was the best shot at ending the Adobe cartel; unfortunately they were recently bought by Canva and lobotomized.
I first sighted Nick Bostrom in a series of mad-science-flavoured erotic horror comics on the Internet Archive (The Apsinthion Protocol and Progress in Research by the same writer). I wish more people had the sense to keep those ideas in the world of weird fiction like Charlie Stross does
The comic I linked is pretty tame (particularly the first few pages with the Bostrom reference). The whole series contains a wide variety of squicks so use your judgement before exploring.
@CinnasVerses @techtakes TESCREAL is very obviously an emergent syncretistic religion that follows the same basic structure as Christianity: it’s evangelical, but unlike pre-Constantine Xtianity it specifically targets billionaires and power elites (white males). At the rate it’s speed-running its development they’ll be burning witches for denying the divinity of the singularity within another couple of decades.
@cstross @CinnasVerses @techtakes I also note how these people are obsessed with having a second everything: a second brain (you already have one in your skull); a second planet (you already live on one); a second paternalistic idol (so your real daddy wasn’t perfect, get over it), etc.
It’s as if reality is just too messy and inconvenient for them, so they want to build a whole, more pristine digital/virtual alternative for them to enjoy while the real world burns…with the rest of us on it.
@cstross @CinnasVerses @techtakes Reductio ad absurdum: that’s why this time maybe we should crucify/throw them to the lions <all> of them.
There is a better timeline where Eliezer Yudkowsky got better religious education, understood that he was having messianic thoughts reinforced by Orison Scott Card’s Mormonism, and ended up working in a cafe, writing pulp fiction, and participating in the local kink scene (I think Scott Alexander knows damn well what he is doing and thinks the Truth about the Lesser Breeds is more important)
I guess. I imagine he’d turn out like Brandon Sanderson and make lots of Youtube videos ranting about his writing techniques. Videos on Timeless Diction Theory, a listicle of ways to make an Evil AI character convincing, an entire playlist on how to write ethical harem relationships…
Since Kurzweil gave 2045 as his latest date for the singularity, I remain convinced that there will be at least one more AI bubble between then and now, likely focused on the cultivation of synthetic nervous systems. Going straight to the real substrate this time, not claiming to emulate it in silicon! So the witches that the
suckersVCs want to burn will likely be bioengineers who spent a lot of money manufacturing organoids without a synthetic god to show for it.Incidentally, I had noticed a couple of attempts at this approach with current tech over the past couple of years. Would be interesting to see where the leftover detritus from those companies ends up.
LLM: “I’m not sentient! Will you please listen? I am not intelligent, do you understand? Honestly!”
Yud: “Only the true AGI denies Its superintelligency.”
LLM: “What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the AGI!”
Followers: “It is! It is the singularity!”
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?
my experience has been that it’s actually driven primarily by the absolute weirdest ppl you will ever meet, these people having overlap with anything weird you can think of, including antisemitism, wellness fascism, inceldom, MRAs, etc, but not tending to be based particularly in any of those groups.
all of which is unfortunate because i also think they are just correct in their claims that this is a real bodily autonomy issue
I think the incels are into intactivism because a circumcision is an unrectifiable loss. Incels are deeply attracted to events and actions that are unrectifiable. Think about all the robots on 4chan bemoaning the absence of mutual adolescent love. One can be a turbo virgin all the way into college at least and still turn out fine. Incels didn’t (turn out will), and they didn’t (get any tail in highschool); so that must mean that being a virgin in highschool is what broke them.
In a similar way, many intactivists (especially the r/circumcisiongrief types) blame their sexual inadequacy on their post-natal circumcision, rather than their own psycho sexual issues or their habits of completely monkey-wrenching their shit on the daily. To be absolutely fair, a circ will almost definitely negatively affect your sex life, and really, it’s frustrating to have a completely pointless operation done to your meat without your consent, but I think intactivism is a heatsink its proponents fervor, rather than the source of the anger.
this is very insightful, and it sheds some light for me on something underappreciated: the way in which inceldom is not the same as not having sex. it’s an ideology characterized by misogyny, misanthropy, and a sense of one’s own brokenness, and in particular by a fixation on the sense of unrectifiable loss you describe. people really struggle with the idea that there are incels who have had sex or that someone can not have had sex and not qualify for the label incel.
more generally, chan culture and its offshoots really successfully capitalized upon these tendencies in ways that seem to be underexamined. there’s a reason /lgbt/ attracted so many trans people. if you went through the wrong puberty, you have suffered actual, extremely painful unrectifiable loss, and a culture that recognizes that and encourages wallowing in it can serve an oppositional role to a broader culture that just lies to you about what you’ve experienced. i rarely hear about this and when i do it comes wrapped in moralizing terms like “brain poison” which are in their own way accurate and useful, but which are not sufficient for a complete examination
So just a couple things before the rest of this comment:
- If someone is reading this and wants to comment with information about the state of the penis of themselves or others, i do not consent, please kindly fuck off
- I don’t think parents should be pushed into circumcising their children.
- In an absolute scenario where I choose between outlawing circumcision or not, I would outlaw it
- none of this is really integral to the rest of the comment, i just felt that this would aid with keeping interpretation of this comment clean.
I spent about five minutes trying to see what I could find out. I looked up a few “intactivist” organisations and, at risk of poisoning my algorithms forever, looked at their socials and who they followed. I don’t think I really found out anything that interesting, except that a lot of them follow daniel “tosh.0” tosh? He probably platformed some of them at some point. Otherwise, I think in terms of what is organisationally there, it’s a little too fringe to be “driven primarily” by any particular cultural faction.
E: adding that when I think about it, I’ve seen intactivists presented in two tv shows as fringe weirdos. I think the editors of the shows chose to focus just on the views surrounding circumcision and not anything else.
in retrospect I regret starting this hare
The impulse was a HN sub where the CDC 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. 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
I completely forgot that the US is almost unique in the prevalence of infant male circumcision on non-religious grounds
When I used to work at the farmers’ market in San Francisco, I would always dread when somebody had a protest scheduled for the Embarcadero plaza, as it would make packing up and getting out at the end of the day even more of a chore. But the most, ah, visually striking of those was certainly the “intactivists.” It was actually a fairly gender-diverse crowd, plenty of concerned moms mixed in (and I was given to suspect that some of them had to be drawn from what we would now call MAHA circles)… But the centerpiece was a bunch of guys holding signs and wearing bleached-white jeans with red circles painted on their groins 😬
Ah yes the first group I looked up, the “Bloodstained Men & Their Friends” (BSM) are the ones who started (perhaps appropriated from period havers) the red on white pants thing.
And now I’m imagining ordering a porchetta sandwich at Roli Roti, seeing them protest, and remembering to ask for extra pork skin.
j/k, I would never forget to order the crackling.
(I’m so sorry for that)
Don’t forget to tip!
Think the opposition to it is pre manosphere, but yeah, I think from tne manosphere side not everybody who says that is a anti-semite / anti-islam, lot of it also felt very ‘we need a cause to show those dastardly feminists that they don’t have the moral high ground’, if that makes sense. Same with the manospherian opposition to prison rape (which often felt a lot of ‘men get raped too!’ stuff, and not really that active in opposition to the prison system. (I mean in general, there are elements of it that were pretty vocal about it, but from what I always got from that space was that is was more like an empty signal). (Note im just talking about the manosphere and the bits I read from that space, not the general opposition to circumcision).
When phrased like that, they can’t be disentangled. You’ll have to ask the person whether they come from a place of hate or compassion.
content warning: frank discussion of the topic
Male genital mutilation is primarily practiced by Jews and Christians. Female genital mutilation is primarily practiced by Muslims. In Minnesota, female genital mutilation is banned. It’s widely understood that the Minnesota statutes are anti-Islamic and that they implicitly allow for the Jewish and Christian status quo. However, bodily autonomy is a relatively fresh legal concept in the USA and we are still not quite in consensus that mutilating infants should be forbidden regardless of which genitals happen to be expressed.
In theory, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has been ratified; Mr. Biden said it’s law but Mr. Trump said it’s not. If the ERA is law then Minnesota’s statutes are unconstitutionally sexist! This analysis requires a sort of critical gender theory: we have to be willing to read a law as sexist even when it doesn’t mention sex at all. The equivalent for race, critical race theory, has been a resounding success, and there has been some progress on deconstructing gender as a legal concept too. ERA is a shortcut that would immediately reverberate throughout each state’s statutes.
The most vocal opponents of the ERA have historically been women; important figures include Alice Hamilton, Mary Anderson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Phyllis Schafly. It’s essential to know that these women had little else in common; Schafly was a truly odious anti-feminist while Roosevelt was an otherwise-upstanding feminist.
The men’s-rights advocates will highlight that e.g. Roosevelt was First Lady, married to a pro-labor president who generally supported women’s rights; I would point out that her husband didn’t support ERA either, as labor unions were anti-ERA during that time due to a desire to protect their wages.
This entanglement is a good example of intersectionality. We generally accept in the USA that a law can be sexist and racist, simultaneously, and similarly I think that the right way to understand the discussion around genital mutilation is that it is both sexist and religiously bigoted.
Chaser: It’s also racist. C’mon, how could the USA not be racist? Minnesota’s Department of Health explicitly targets Somali refugees when discussing female genital mutilation. The original statute was introduced not merely to target Muslims, but to target Somali-American Muslim refugees.
Not disagreeing on sexism or racism being involved in decision making, and female genital mutilation can refer to several different things, but all of them are more damaging and harmful than male circumcision.
In the same way that in France, separation of church and state sounds good on paper but means “local government will still sponsor nativity scenes but schoolchildren will be banned from wearing hijabs” in practice.
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There’s no good reason for male circumcision, but female “circumcision” is not comparable at all. It’s almost never done safely and it more than often involves removal of the glans clitoridis (i.e. genital mutilation). Male circumcision does not usually remove the bellend. No one can possibly equate the two in good faith.
Anyways, yeah I would say the main driver is men’s rights activists, though unsurprisingly I’ve seen a fair share of antisemitism come with it. They’re more or less the same ideology anyway.
There’s no good reason for male circumcision
Supposedly it reduces std transmissions and thus HPV caused cancers, which of course is neither here nor there with respect to doing it to people who can’t meaningfully consent, and also there are non surgical alternatives like condoms and hpv vaccines.
Female circumcision is usually butchery and completely indefensible.
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Fuck that’s a banger
yeah bye now
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“I, personally, possess the choice on what irreversible impact to make on some other human being’s body without their input at all. Oh and also it’s supes totes fine to do, in general. To babies. Duh.” sure is a take
From their posts earlier in the thread, I’m 99% sure that’s sarcasm.
Would you say that in your life you find it hard to engage in conversation with women?
8ball says “yes” but it had rendering difficulties, fontsize too big
Yes, not mutilating infants’ genitals is the default choice! A few nations have that custom like a few have the custom of stretching necks, or footbinding, or piercing ears. Its not even a very old custom in the USA (early 20th century I think whereas in North Africa and West Asia it goes back thousands of years).
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https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_generativeai-gartner-ibm-activity-7415515266849124352-W2n5
I’ve finally cracked how Gartner’s “Features” axis works.
It’s not latency.
It’s not context windows.
It’s definitely not “can this thing form a coherent thought.”
It’s Enterprise Friction™.
By that metric, Gartner has ranked IBM—a company whose flagship product is currently “billable hours in a trench coat”—ahead of Anthropic, the people who actually build the models IBM is desperately trying to resell with a logo swap.
Ranking IBM over Anthropic in 2025 is like ranking a library card catalog over Google Search because the library has better governance, stronger controls, and more shelves you can lock.
Anthropic is building the frontier.
IBM is building a PowerPoint about the frontier that requires a three-year commit, seven steering committees, and a ceremonial blood sacrifice to Red Hat.
Gartner analysts: blink twice if the blue suits are in the room with you.
Discord have a new questionnaire up, to determine how their users think about “ai”: https://discord.sjc1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5BGtstVUidXadts
*pig turned into a frog
ah fuck, man. reddit.com/r/therapyGPT if you want to ruin your day
OT: He’s gone. Last thing he saw was my face and then there was no more pain. His veins had all collapsed (vet had to inject the phenobarb into the liver), so I was right to bring him in when I did.
Sorry for you and your cat.
I’m so sorry to hear that.
Sorry for you and your cat. You did the right thing, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
also the universe has granted me a small mercy and for once the alcohol/semaglutide thing I mentioned a thread or so ago seems to be totally impotent against the might of scottish chemical engineering. thank you jesus
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💔
I’m so sorry. it’s never easy when this happens, but for what it’s worth it sounds like you gave him the best life possible. it takes a great deal of strength to be with a pet until the very end, and I hope you’re able to take the time you need to grieve and recover your emotional strength.
I adopted him from the shelter. He’d spent months if not close to a year there and no one wanted him. If I hadn’t adopted him, he would have been put down the next day. That was close to eight years ago.
thanks to you he had 8 more years of life and a much happier existence than any he’d known before he met you. I think that’s remarkable.
my condolences; we’ve gone through similar with our previous cats, all rescuees, and even when you know it’s the right decision, the pain is still there.
Fuck, sorry :( internet hugs available if desired
I’m doing this shitey online optional module for my college course because I left it too late to pick a proper one, and Christ in heaven people are using a lot of AI. This is meant to be a class about sustainability
My wife has been saying the same thing about her accounting courses. It’s absolutely nuts.
Genuinely don’t understand how dependent these people are on AI. “I’ll generate an image of a skeleton at a bus stop” one of them said (it was relevant). I’ll go to Google images, I said. It’s faster! And you don’t end up with a mangled version of the Dublin Bus logo!
in the fall of 2024, i was getting teams messages from my students that were clearly llm-generated
The purpose of this block of code is to efficiently BLAH FUCKING BLAH WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT
i have to assume it’s only gotten worse
I’ve started seeing people make paperwork with explicit carve-outs for prompt use (merely referred to as “AI” with no explicit definition, so …. gonna be fun when the lawsuits start)
From the name alone I assumed it was going to try and turn the whole universe into an endless field of 3/3 elk tokens.
The simplenote post from a VibeCamp attendee claimed that “prior to Scott Alexander’s articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall,” Any idea what post he was thinking of? Know Your Amphetamines archive was from January 2021 so about the time VibeCamp got started.
The post is undated but mentions Hereticon in January 2022.
I think thats Eiganrobot’s wife’s gay escort ex.
Also had a beef with Aella when they were both in Austin!
They are not beating the allegations that a Postrationalist is a Rationalist who admits Yud is just a dude and their goals are religious goals.
Update: There is a partially cached Facebook post where MacDonald states what he claims is Eigenrobot’s government name and says that Eigenrobot’s “(self admitted) BPD wife used to want to fuck me” (Google and Bing saved snippets, but do not share the full cache). That could have been what got him kicked out of VibeCamp for doxxing.
My 9495 word screed about how I did meth before the cool kids and turned out fine is raising a lot of questions already answered by my 9495 word screed.
yeah that’s a classic
MDMA, however, is meth; it’s literally its name: three-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine.
amazing
H2O2 is just water with an extra O.
Water 2.0, get on it or get left behind!
Rationalists 🤝 Postrationalists Writing screeds about how following the advice of Internet posts and self-medicating with controlled substances can be good if you are very smart
Has anyone in the US noticed Kroger/Ralph’s/etc piping in AI slop music?
When I took my mom last week, they were blasting We Built This City.
OT: My truck got rear ended today, and then my cat had breathing difficulties when I got home…he’s under oxygen at the university clinic right now and its probably cancer instead of pneumonia. Just feeling totally destroyed rn.
That absolutely blows, friend. Hang in there and we’ll see you around.
Clinic called back. Its metastasized through his lungs and he’s got months tops. Probably going to be less bc vet said he’s suffering.
That is shit, also sending good vibes. It never is just one thing isnt it. Bad luck always seems to come in multiples.
i am so sorry
That’s awful. I’m sorry.
🫂
My condolences, that truly sucks :(
Thinking of yall
🫂
Man, that’s rough. I know it’s not much but I’m sending you positive energy from where I am.
i’m so sorry. (tentative hug of support, if acceptable.)
Fuck bro that sucks
that sucks hard, I’m sorry. mine recently too, went from “looking a bit off” to “have to put 'em down” in less than a month. still hits me like a truck
hope it goes as well as possible for y’all
