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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th September 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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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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[–] 7 points 10 hours ago* (13 children)

Good God. Sometimes I wonder how small the population that understands all these references and knows all this deep lore and history is. How few people really understand the true nature of this bunch of people and how their ideas have ruined so much. When I go to conferences I get to have 4 hour conversations over beer with astrobiologists explaining how ideas from a blog in 2009 started showing up uncited in their literature 8 years later (when late undergrads who read a blog post start writing papers during their PhDs) and have since completely fucked whole subfields. They are flabbergasted at first, but then they see it, and see the damage done. So few people actually see this.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago (1 child)

    right? and even then you have to go slow with explanation, otherwise you just sound like a crank

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  • [–] 1 point 37 minutes ago* (last edited 16 minutes ago)

    It helped that the first person I explained this to at a conference was explicitly working on deconstructing models of the origin of complex life that imply that it's slow and unlikely that have been uncritically accepted in a lot of circles without actual evidence, and he was already confused about why following the chain of citations bottomed out at weird economist named Robin Hanson and why his naive model was ever taken seriously... oh MAN we had a fun evening.

    Amusingly enough, something much like this has happened to me twice two years apart. The scientists deconstructing this stuff are always the most interesting people too.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 hours ago

    It was kinda wild studying physics while this was starting.

    People were getting all these starry-eyed ideas while anyone actually doing well was realising that the future is going to look a lot like the present because god hates us and we're not allowed nice things.

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (9 children)

    In the TESCREAL lore iceberg, "Aella Sankey chart" is above the waterline.

    • Existence of HPMoR
    • Existence of Zizians
    • Aella Sankey chart
    • Aella not showering

    ...

    • Topher Brennan leaks Siskind emails

    ...

    • "AI datacenter water usage is fine actually" Substack

    ...

    • Cremieux's alleged old Reddit handle

    ...

    • Scott Aaronson anti-feminist breakdown
    • Scott Aaronson goes full Zionist

    ...

    • Glowfic

    ...

    • su3su2u1 review of HPMoR

    ...

    • Robot God deduces general relativity in three frames with the power of Bayes

    ...

    • Scott Aaronson makes airport cops sympathetic

    ...

    • TracingWoodgrains attempted hatchet job against David Gerard

    ...

    • Eliezer Yudkowsky is That Guy when recommending scifi books
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  • [–] 2 points 36 minutes ago

    TracingWoodgrains attempted hatchet job against David Gerard

    Out in the wild, I’ve actually seen somebody cite that piece earnestly… as an example of how Wikipedia still has problems even if it’s generally a useful source of information.

    It’s like praising with faint damnation.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

    su3su2u1 review of HPMoR

    obi-wan-theres-a-name.png

    what ever happened to them anyway? Probably has tenure by now, hopefully?

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  • [–] 1 point 22 minutes ago

    As someone who has started guarding their internet anonymity jealously after a series of VERY weird events (which fortunately do not involve our 'friends') I remember this incident soooo much...

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  • [–] 3 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

    Aella Sankey chart

    I'm really being tested on my liberation and sex positive values here. Gosh that's a very weird and kinda gross thing to do.

    What motivates someone to chart their fetish fulfillment?

    Well whatever. I hope people had fun, seems like it must have been very scheduled and regimented though...

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