Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Want to wade into the sandy 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.)

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[-] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago

There's a... robust debate about LLM slop submissions on everyone's favorite boiled crustacean site.

First shot fired: a promptfondler suggest suppressing all comments pointing out that a submission reeks of slop by flagging them as "off-topic" [1]

"This is written by an LLM" comments should be flagged as off-topic (80 net upvotes, 139 comments)

Riposte: a suggestion that posing LLM generated content should be a bannable offence:

LLM generated submissions should be disallowed (274 net upvotes, 108 comments)

So far it looks as if the anti-slop forces have opinion on their side.

[1] short explanation of how flagging of comments work on lobste.rs - it's sort of a downvote, but the flagger has to chose from a list of reasons. If a commenter accrues enough flags they'll get a red warning banner, and might possibly be banned as disruptive.

[-] corbin@awful.systems 2 points 4 days ago

A prominent cloud engineer had a sizeable subthread where they were skeptical about the entire idea of Quality as something that humans can discern and rank. Through what I presume was a nat 20, I threw a philosophy book at them and they appear to have responded by deleting the worst of their comments, particularly the ones where he admits to quoting chatbots, and deactivating their account. This may be the first time that quoting Pirsig has won an argument, TBH.

This was after a week's vacation caused by a thread that is still too hot to deeplink, where I had multiple comments removed by mods and still won the argument. I am currently once again the second-most-flagged user with like 25 flags in the last month. "The things I do for love."

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago

OK here's a followup, which I'm putting out here as there's probably a higher proportion of neurodivergent people here than in other fora I frequent

A commenter on lobste.rs states that being anti-LLM is effectively being against neurodivergent individuals, because many such individuals express themselves in prose in a way that's indistinguishable from LLM output.

Is this a widespread viewpoint?

https://lobste.rs/s/wee21u/this_is_written_by_llm_comments_should_be#c_nadrad

[-] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 6 points 5 days ago

I was trying to reply by way of linking a piece by Robert Kingett that had been shared here some time ago that, in excruciating detail and with righteous fury distilled to cold analysis, explained why AI is absolute shit for accessibility aids. His experience is in the realm of physical disability rather than neurodivergance, but that only makes the problems more starkly illustrated rather than unique.

Unfortunately I couldn't find that piece, but I found this one and needed to explain to the kid why I randomly laughed out loud.

[-] mawhrin@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago

this is obvious bullshit: theoretically, my writing is affected by two factors that might skew the assessment towards it having been generated by an llm: i'm neurodivergent (adhd) and english is not my native language – and i was never accused of using synthetic text generators…

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 5 days ago

I recall seeing someone elsewhere on the fedi trying to drum up a point like that a few weeks ago, their complaint was something like “I’ve been chased out of neurodivergent spaces for not being enough into LLMs”

No idea if their claim was true; I can definitely see the possibility of some ND neurotypes slanting more favourable, but nfi on the values

Not sure I buy the ground for that argument anyway tho. Lotta people used to smoke and society slapped all manner of regulation on that

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago

I called it out as lies and bullshit, the poster asserted it was totally true and I asked for numbers to support this statistical claim.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago

And instead of providing numbers, they came back with an anecdote about university administrators being incompetent (which is deeply unsurprising and thus, in the Shannon sense, conveys no information).