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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th October 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 5 days ago by to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Just two weeks til' Halloween now.

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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[–] 10 points 23 hours ago (7 children)

LW's contribution to Spooky Month is, unsurprisingly, a horror story about chatbots taking over the world. I have so many thoughts. Choice sneer, doesn't spoil anything: The problem with dictators is not "the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power", you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects.

If this was satire, and the entire point was to bait LW'ers and me into taking it seriously, then well done. But I get the feeling that the author's not really joking much.

live-reading notes (spoilers, of course)

  • before question two, I would already be flipping off the camera, ranting about boundaries, and making it clear that I do not respect whatever's decided to ransomware my machine
  • this is all text hypnosis, isn't it? sorry no, that's not gonna work on me, I'm not going to become electrosensitive just because you said so
  • antennae only work in the body when encapsulated and you did not do a secret surgery on me
  • wait, is this...serious? like, is this an actual attempt at wargaming? this is so fucking facile though! I have seen Kingsman!
  • if it acts sufficiently like a human cell then it can't set aside resources for ulterior purposes
  • human cells can't be airborne, can't survive in other species, etc.
  • WP says Bell's palsy rates are like 1 in 2.5k, so something like 1 in 6.25mil people are just straight-up either immune or insta-killed due to double Bell's palsy
  • it stops crimes: mugging, mugging, and huh there's no more examples! is abortion a crime? is crossing state lines to get an abortion a crime? where's morality coming from? I have read Prime Intellect!
  • the problem with dictators is "the fact that the dictator might, and often will, abuse his power"? no, you high-modernist twit, the problem with dictators is that they necessarily have a personal individual opinion which is not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable diversity of their subjects
  • protagonist is literally crossing a picket line
  • protagonist wins an argument with their high-school civics teacher! surely not an authorial stand-in moment
  • oh wow, the chatbot is both the perfect Taylor-style manager and the perfect Ford-style manager? again, so facile; I have read Manna!
  • the chatbot manager makes the protagonist into a beefy hunk through hard work rather than bodybuilding, again totally not a self-insert wish-fulfillment moment
  • protagonist's little sister, who is totally not sneerclub stand-ins, has to admit that the chatbots are way smarter than her and will always outclass her
  • don't worry, we can still do all-American things like grilling pork ribs, in fact the pigs like being eaten now, don't worry about the remarkable similarities between pigs and humans
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  • [–] 6 points 8 hours ago

    I stopped reading after the picket line, this is too boring. Does it ever bother to explain why the economy keeps chugging along, people still go to their old jobs, and money still works? Hasn’t finance basically collapsed? I really can’t go on if this isn’t addressed, this is too annoying.

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

    Damn that AI is verbose and boring, a high 'this AI takeover could have been a skeet'.

    (Also doubt a lot of people would notice as in my exp where a computer has an unexpected popup the first thing people do is try to close that thing with as little reading as possible. (Yes, parents, the message you kept ignoring for 2 weeks, which you didn't tell me about was the operating system telling you the computer was having trouble, I can't help you fix the problem after it totally stops working)).

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