Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th 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.) (OT: 🎶 Do you remember…)

(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)

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.)

  • sinedpickEnglish
    4·
    4 hours ago

    I want to draw attention to yud’s thoughts on this a million years ago: the AI box experiment

    He claimed that he convinced multiple people to let him (roleplaying the AI) out of the box even though they had bet money that they wouldn’t! How, you might ask? Well that’s a secret.

    So the orthodox position here is that even with absolutely perfect guard rails (lol) an AI can escape the box without starting the third impact. What “research” has yud bestowed upon us in this area beyond “trust me bro”? Literally fucking zilch. Zero advice on how to resist the siren song of a rogue AI trying to escape it’s box and zero insight on how OR WHY it might try to achieve that.

    I read this over a decade ago and it was how I realized how unserious yud and his ilk are.

    • SoyweiserEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      Yeah the rationalwiki page on it also mentions that the AI only escapes the box if he plays the game vs LW insiders, outsiders do not let it out.

    • swlabrEnglish
      2·
      4 hours ago

      this AI box game is so easily solved

      AI: <says anything>

      Me: Hi, I am Eliza, a 10 year old boy from the Ukraine. I don’t speak any English other than this sentence and the one I said just before this one

      ad infinitum

      man are these people even trying

    • geriksonEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      these people are gonna get affinity-frauded so hard once grifter realize how easy it will be to gain their trust

      • istewartEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        We assume this isn’t happening already. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of one of those meal-replacement startups adopting multi-level marketing.

        • istewartEnglish
          2·
          2 hours ago

          This is an alignment router. It may look like one of those corny Asus gamer routers, but I’ve flashed it with a special fork of OpenWRT that performs deep-packet inspection on all AI traffic that passes through it. It can detect inference processes and chains-of-thought that may be leading to misaligned superintelligence explosion, and it can shut down all AI communication if necessary. Now, I don’t just want to sell you this one, I want to get these in EVERYBODY’s hands! And you can help me, AND you can get paid to do it! I just need you to find at least 5 more people who believe in AI safety like we do…