Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st November 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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. Happy Halloween, fellow sneerers!)

Welcome to November, and 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.)

  • SoyweiserEnglish
    6·
    14 hours ago

    especially “Noosphere89” smugly stating that datacenters will just move somewhere else

    Why didn’t they start out there then?

    • geriksonEnglish
      7·
      10 hours ago

      I think they’re saying that stopping a datacenter won’t do squat to stop AGI takeoff

      at least this a reading of

      Efficiency gains from AI are absolutely massive, and while they don’t apply to training, they do apply to inference, and even accounting for endogenity, state bans only slow AI progress by 9 days at the absolute most pessimistic.

      so we can re-state this as a form of Pascal’s wager:

      1. if I stop a datacenter near me, the world will still be taken over by a superhuman intelligence, albeit 9 days later, and my local environment will be moot
      2. if I stop a datacenter, and no superhuman intelligence appears, I won’t have a datacenter near me

      I’m not Blaise but I feel that stopping a datacenter is a win, all in all.

      • lurkerEnglish
        4·
        6 hours ago

        state bans only slow AI progress by 9 days at the absolute most pessimistic.

        I don’t know, I think that’s insanely optimistic

      • SoyweiserEnglish
        4·
        8 hours ago

        And this is why they invented the basilisk.

    • lagrangeinterpolatorEnglish
      7·
      11 hours ago

      Sometimes you miss a few shots. Well, sometimes you miss 40 shots in a row with those anti-data center ballot measures. I’m sure their streak of bad luck will end eventually and they’ll find tons of people who love having data centers near their homes.