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)

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[–] 11 points 2 days ago* (8 children)

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
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  • [–] 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 days ago (3 children)

    I mean... what is this? It's even weirder than usual

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  • [–] 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

    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.

    Edit to add: I think there's a concentrated lump of illustrative lesswrong in this passage:

    Also especially popular these days is a ZKP of your own tastes: as almost everyone has developed kinks that put a relatively normal goblin kink to shame, people have become more anxious about unaccepting people finding out. So now you can confirm that you and your girlfriend have a CPU-cuck fetish in common without her ever finding out that you and your grandma both enjoy spankings—amazing!

    Yes, "ZKP" is dropped in without elaboration or definition. But more fundamentally... why, though? This reads like someone has thought too long and yet also too superficially about kink. Why has "almost everyone" developed these bizarre new tastes? What taboos are they transgressing, what vulnerabilities are they exposing, what strictures of life are they seeking to escape? What's the itch?! And yet look at the fetishes that are specifically named: "spankings" (literally, not figuratively older than Aristotle) and a thinly science-fictionalized kind of swinging. This isn't a new frontier in depravity; it's a bachelorette party for normies. The whole thing feels like a product of a mind that's strongly confined to a narrow understanding. It unhesitatingly accepts the importance of "freaky" sex and goes out of its way to bring that into the story, but it has nothing to say about the subject it has locked upon.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago

    the future of humanity is kink on a blockchain <- this is what rationalists actually believe

    also, this bit

    When she saw he was holding a shovel, she tried running away at first (you can't imagine how creative people can get)

    i have to keep in mind that this is coming from people who had problems with opening a jar

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago

    Rationalists have a disconcerting mix of boundless confidence that they are so special, and sexual practices and abuse that any beat reporter has seen many times over.

    One reason you will see less of me here is that learning about these people turns me off people.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days 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.

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