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)

  • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    18 hours ago

    So, uh, remember that call for stories set in a world where we ‘somehow’ don’t get AGI and instead get modern-style LLMs providing such incredible value to the world that it is transformed? That tells people not to use LLMs to write it because its writing is low quality? https://www.gpuworld.org/

    Premise Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board. So the Singularity never happens—but GPUs keep getting made. By 2040, there may be the equivalent of 8 billion GPUs globally and everyone has access to a frontier LLM. What happens in this ‘business as usual’ future?

    (Incidentally, this reminds me strongly of ‘Project Heiroglyph: Stories and Vision for a Better Future’, also by Neal Stephenson, somewhat desperately trying to pretend that there is a bright future ahead of us rather than slow grinding decline)

    Somehow we got… this. I can’t even. I really just can’t even.

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6hFByFwDLxtnbvje/a-normal-friday-in-2042

    I thought I had lost my ability to be surprised by these people. In here we get:

    • anthropomorphization of current LLMs as conscious beings
    • Graverobbing
    • Trump magically doing everything these people want
    • Married couples paying each other for chores
    • Prediction market language
    • Weird sex stuff
    • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      13 hours ago

      I wonder if that ‘frontier progress stoops as of 1 steptember 2026’ is part of this apparently coordinated push to try to freak people out and get the government involved. Maybe the AI labs are angling to make that the cutoff and stop shoveling money into the furnace of training. This is all too conveniently timed.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 hours ago

      As always with LW, we can adapt the vector definition of “normal”, i.e. what is being said is completely orthogonal to reality

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 hours ago

      Ugh. I got to the point with the cutesy redefinition of “CPU” and rode the nopetopus out of there.

      Edit to add: Welp, I went back, and it got a whole lot worse.

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          9 hours ago

          It’s the regurgitation of an insular community’s bizarre beliefs, up to and including sexual fixations, back to that community for unquestioning consumption… a vore-ouboros, if you will.