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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[–] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (40 children)

the next 72 hours are about to get interesting (if this is true)

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

    The lesswrong reactions are hilarious: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s76hbGpaMkhiNwbTX/matrice-jacobine-s-shortform?commentId=B2WSExeg8wfgDqZiM

    One commenter realizes the truth, but is heavily downvoted:

    For anyone who was at all unclear on the subject: He's not on your side. He's against you. He wants you to fail. Stop trying to fix him. AI safety is in the same situation as measles prevention, free trade, military readiness, or the prosecution of the remaining Epstein offenders. Trump & co. are against these things, and they're not going to be converted just because you tell them again how important these things are.

    Sorry bud, if lesswrongers were capable of grasping this they wouldn't have fallen for FTX, or kept falling for Anthropic's half-hearted gestures of placation to doomer-cultists. And of course, many lesswrongers are genuinely very right wing and will thus rationalize justifications for the more centrist lesswrongers to suck up to Trump.

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

    Another comment:

    My knowledge of politics is nil, but <steelman about what if trump actually wasn't trump>

    (emp mine)

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  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 child)

    Rationalist have never run into a right-wing talking point or person they were unwilling to steelman nor a leftist they were unable to screw up steelmanning.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago

    I recall the motte, where the one leftwinger who still tried to debate got the complaint he was just explaining basic leftwing concepts over and over (with good reason).

    It was also amusing to see people on r/ssc complain on how leftwing politicians never think about X and Y, while our local Dutch leftwing politicians were talking about those subjects the same week.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    if trump says "rokos basilisk" on tape I'm done

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  • [–] 10 points 2 days ago*

    Nobody knows statistics like me. My uncle, great professor, great genes, he knew, frequentist is the worst. Now, Bayes-e-an statistics is the best, the biggest statistics. You gotta have priors! You have a belief, a tremendous belief, beautiful belief in your head. And then you learn, you get the data, and frankly its nasty and unfair, fake news.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 days ago (30 children)

    Do the AI doomers/Yuddites REALLY want their signature policy tied to one of the least competent, least popular presidents in history? I would be thinking very hard about this one if I were part of their crew. "You know who took p(doom) seriously? TRUMP!" is, ah, not a marketing coup, to put it mildly

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (23 children)

    They think this is their last chance to save the entire universe forever and ever amen and will take anything that does not lead to extinction and the conversion of the entire universe into something that does not experience happiness. Keep in mind these are the people who thought that the world could suddenly blow up from a new innovation in a lab in 2015 and had psychotic episodes on that basis.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago (21 children)

    Trump could personally fly up and prevent a 100 kilometre long asteroid from falling on the Earth and I still wouldn’t give him a Nobel Prize

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  • [–] 10 points 2 days ago (20 children)
  • [–] 18 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (15 children)

    I hate hate hate that my niche internet morbid fascination from my college laptop in 2009 is now an oval office power struggle.

    Quotes from the president of the united states in the last twelve hours:

    "The only control or guardrails that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT"

    "There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers"

    "Americanism, not effective altruism" (!!!!!!!!!!!!)

    "AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA"

    ...I guess the Peter Thiel faction won.

    Are we gearing up for a lepoard face moment from the cultist faction of the cultist / oligarch-technofedual-lord / grifter / authoritarian alliance?

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  • [–] 8 points 2 days ago (13 children)

    Are we gearing up for a lepoard face moment from the cultist faction of the cultist / oligarch-technofedual-lord / grifter / authoritarian alliance?

    Nah, lesswrongers don't even have that level of introspection. Plus a lot of them are outright pro-oligarch-technofedual-lord, at least enough so that it outweighs their doomer-cultists allegiance.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 days ago* (12 children)

    I hate to turn this into a screenshot fest but i mean...

    They're calling out effective altruism BY NAME from the white house. The president is still ranting about this. This is NEW.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 days ago (10 children)

    This is hilarious. I didn't think it was possible, but maybe the lesswrongers and EAs will finally realize they are in a leopards-eating-face moment?

    Or maybe they will double down? I.e. they conclude that if they were less woke maybe Trump wouldn't have turned on them? Haha.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 days ago (6 children)
  • [–] 11 points 2 days ago (4 children)

    Lol, I called it without even having to see it. Doubling down and blaming EAs for being too left even as the right curbstomps them. How does that boot taste?

    Also, WTF does Eliezer even think "leftist" means?

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  • [–] 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

    And here come the brain worms:

    'New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday there should be a "far greater response" from the federal government on "incredibly alarming" reports of out-of-control AI agents, referencing the possibility of the "end of humanity." '

    This is going to be an amazing few months. Not in a good way. The factions in the US government taking sides in an angels on the head of a pin debate. All the warring brainworms of 2010 web forums making a nest on Capitol Hill.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 days ago

    To say that our system of governance is ill-equipped for the present moment seems like an understatement. Welcome to the turning of the jackpot death spiral, the orgy of technological self-destruction and institutions of sham democracy captured by capital, the bill for all the problems we never solved coming due with interest. Sucks to be us.

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

    "Democrat-polarized" is such a word choice. Like, ah yes, it is clearly the Democrat's fault the right goes batshit at even a hint global warming is real or at any sort of gun regulation or any social safety net expansion.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    You hardly need me to explain this, but the primary thing a conservative seeks to conserve is their own wealth and influence. Of course the deflation of the bubble begins Yud's conversion process

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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    I actually suspect he really does think he is above that and is unlikely to go down the right wing grifter rabbithole. The 'only i can save the world' fix is so much stronger than any other weaksauce dopamine he could get from that.

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  • [–] 3 points 16 hours ago

    Even though things are bad now, the conservative movement in America is likely to be severely fractured post-Trump. I don't think there'll be a unified movement there for Yud to flop into. I think the shape of Yud's conservatism will skew towards a) conserving the pop culture he lives and breathes and b) conserving the idea that computers are (or can become) inscrutably superintelligent entities that are wholly separate entities from their users, rather than tools for humans. He'll probably always find an audience among SaaS CEOs who are desperate to cling to their annual recurring revenue.

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

    It would be hilarious if the AI doomers actually did manage to get Trump to sign some of their ideas into action with executive orders, only for him to reverse course or fail in implementation details, and then a hard tide of anti-Trump sentiment in the next administration to totally undo them.

    Sadly it looks like we will only get the more immediate humor of Trump going hard against them.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    And unfortunately several democratic party luminaries getting the AI doom brainworms in response

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Coxon (that Anthropic employee) Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon have all joined forces against AI

    All I will say is please god let Anthropic’s bullshit backfire and have them pass Bernie’s bill to completely shut down all AI development it would be so fucking funny

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 child)

    They are going to try to, in rough order of ease and plausiblity:

    • provide a legal excuse for them to stop shoveling money into a furnace of training for exponentially diminishing returns that they can no longer pretend about
    • attain regulatory capture where their weirdos are in charge of everything
    • to thereby make open source AI illegal, only things that go through THEIR gated portals can be used
    • Maybe make ownership of the means of computation for ANY reason illegal so you cannot own anything and have to rent everything from them for any purpose because YOU MIGHT BE SUMMONING THE DEMON IN YOUR GARAGE!!!!!!oneoneoen its only a coincidence that this means you have to rent GPUs for games and rent datacenter space from oligarchs rather than buy them or do what you want on your own hardware
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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

    Confirmed

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/14/google-deepmind-ai-warnings

    The shape of the solution is simple: stop companies from allowing AI to self-improve into an uncontrollable level of intelligence. Treat compute, the main ingredient in AI training, like fissile material. Track it and restrict access to quantities large enough to improve AIs beyond known-safe levels. More specifically, the AI Futures Project’s “Plan A” is a credible starting proposal that limits AI harms while allowing fast AI progress to continue to benefit the world. We have real options for verifying compliance with international compute-restriction treaties, without trusting adversaries like China.

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