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)

  • blakestaceyAEnglish
    10·
    7 hours ago

    Bethany Brookshire (who’s an old pal of mine from our ScienceOnline days) reports:

    People are using AI to impersonate real science journalists.

    And one even got PUBLISHED.

    In Science.

    Caroline Williams writes on LinkedIn:

    The person who was impersonating me managed to get an article published in Science, under my by-line. And they got paid for it!

    I’ve seen the pitches (bad), and the email chain between editors who weren’t all that impressed, but googled me and decide to take a punt. When the article came in it was dry, clunky and badly written, but after several rounds of editing they managed to get it into a publishable state. It went online in June and was up until yesterday when it became clear they (and I) had been scammed. […] The whole thing makes me feel sick. I know from my work as an editor that the reputational damage is real. Had I pitched a story to them afterwards they would very understandably have said “Hell no!”. Who has the time to do someone else’s job? They tried “me”, “I” didn’t deliver, so no thank you.

    I have no idea how many more editors out there have me on their ‘do not commission’ list because of this person’s actions. There may also be several scientists who will not want to talk to me because they’ve had a bad experience with the fake one.

    More broadly, if this is a wider scam (and based on what others have told me, I think it is), it is potentially a serious issue for science journalism and journalism in general. And I’m not sure what we can do about that.

    Science has retracted the fraudulent story.