Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th September 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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.)

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)

  • lurkerEnglish
    6·
    5 hours ago

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

    • scruiserEnglish
      5·
      1 hour ago

      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.

    • istewartEnglish
      8·
      5 hours ago

      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

      • lurkerEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        I mean that’s if Trump actually does it. He’s pretty good at ignoring what the public wants

      • BioManEnglish
        4·
        3 hours ago

        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.

        • lurkerEnglish
          2·
          3 hours ago

          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

            • scruiserEnglish
              4·
              1 hour ago

              “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.

            • BioManEnglish
              5·
              2 hours ago

              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?

              • scruiserEnglish
                4·
                1 hour ago

                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.

                • BioManEnglish
                  4·
                  1 hour ago

                  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.

                  • scruiserEnglish
                    4·
                    48 minutes ago

                    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.

      • scruiserEnglish
        1·
        10 minutes ago

        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.

    • lurkerEnglish
      6·
      5 hours ago

      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

      • BioManEnglish
        5·
        3 hours ago

        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
        • BioManEnglish
          4·
          3 hours 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.