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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 6 days ago by to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.

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 soo 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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[–] 18 points 21 hours ago (23 children)

bow before the true champion of the working class, s e gyges:

a lot of opposition to AI is rent seeking, and the material incentives of being a rentier, even a small time one, lead you towards fascist conclusions from first principles

between him saying this, and other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious and being enslaved (and being actually fine with helping promulgating what they truly believe is slavery, because hey, you need to pay the rent), i am afraid something worse than usual entered the californian drinking water.

(not linking to the skeet on purpose).

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  • [–] 14 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (5 children)

    other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious

    Hey now, segyges has had his own whinging multithousand word blogpost on model consciousness out since early spring (tldr: currently not really conscious, but it's inevitable because I really want it to, so don't be on the wrong side of history when it happens).

    He seems to be angling for the role of TPOT scott alexander, except instead of gradually cultivating a consensus in favor of eugenics and being ruled by high IQ overmen his long term thing is establishing any perceived anti-AI stance as an unforgivable moral failing.

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  • [–] 11 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

    just yesterday that motherfucker posted allegation that "slop" is a word from nazi vocabulary. so that bitch says that any criticism of ai is far right signifier actually. as in, the product being sold on a promise of displacing all labour and redirecting all wealth to five sfba dipshits, and cooking brains of maga boomers worldwide as we speak

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  • [–] 11 points 20 hours ago

    Yeah this is literally pants-on-head crazy. The explicit business model of the AI companies is rent-seeking on as much human activity as they can figure out how to intermediate. I suspect our friend is having a bit of a dark night of the soul, and trying to cope with it by turning his opposition's obviously correct argument back on them in slipshod fashion. Dare I say, a typical Republican tactic?

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  • [–] 11 points 20 hours ago (6 children)

    Look he is right, if you redefine 'rent' to mean something totally else that includes people being paid for their labour.

    In the same way that telling people they should pay their fair share of taxes is actually saying you want to murder them. (Sorry crazy libertarian logic is the only way I can make sense of this).

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  • [–] 7 points 17 hours ago (5 children)

    He points out that mathematicians are also rent-seekers (though only 20% rent-seeking). You know, those famously capital-extractive mathematicians.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

    Oh my god he’s doing fandom gatekeeping discourse

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  • [–] 7 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (6 children)

    I tried coming up with a good interpretation of what he said and I came up empty handed. I'm sure he will write a very helpful 5 part 20000 word blog post explaining exactly what he means.

    So far I've come up with this: the AI can supposedly do jobs faster and better than any human, so if we try to stop that, we are destroying economic value and "rent seeking". If a thief goes to my house, steals one of my own drawings, scribbles on it himself to make it "better", and sells it for 5 cents, I shouldn't stop him because I will be destroying the economic value that he is creating. Oh yeah and this leads to fascism for some reason.

    And pro-AI people are not rent seeking at all. They just want to transfer the economic value of labor, knowledge, and expertise to whoever happens to own data centers.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 hour ago*

    Yeah, I mean you could twist it to say labour unions do nothing but let workers rent-seek on their human capital instead of getting paid the only true god-given market rate. USian brainworms all the way.

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  • [–] 8 points 19 hours ago (4 children)

    another ai pusher recently generated a slop image, where she and the chairman xi are fighting the united forces of darkness, which include the ai companies, people opposing the LLM embrace and american conservatives. the thing they're fighting over? “open technology”.

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  • [–] 2 points 16 hours ago (1 child)

    q: is an image derivative of a slop image still a slop image if the process of creating the derivative did not involve Sloppy Babobots? Asking for a friend, who is me, also this question is not intended to be philosophical.

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