Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th August 2026 - awful.systems - 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.)

  • rookEnglish
    16·
    1 天前

    Today’s cognitive surrender news: people asking chatbots to generate them hiking maps and give them advice on route planning and climbing mountains, what to eat on long hikes, and where to camp in national parks. It ends about as well as you’d think.

    https://www.sfchronicle.com/outdoors/article/shasta-climbers-rescued-chatgpt-22414629.php

    (paywalled, but the popovers are easily hidden with browser tools)

    the novice climbers, from Roseville, said they’d entrusted Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, to help them craft key logistics of their trip — from the best route up the mountain to the types of food they should pack and how much water they should carry with them.

    On a separate incident:

    a man stopped rangers to ask for directions. He showed them a print-out map he’d been following and explained that he’d prompted ChatGPT to produce it for him.

    “It was terrible — terrible — not even close to accurate,” Meyers said. “It had route lines and place names that were totally off — just ridiculous. We were like, dude, you gotta throw that away.”

    The original climbing group were standard idiots, having intended to do most of their navigation by phone app, and then failing to have a backup even a working recharge power pack. They also left litter everywhere at that camp site, the usual mark of thoughtless people.

    I’ve no doubt that they’d have fucked things up in the pre-llm days too… they seem the type. But chatbots are power tools for stupidity and offer whole new ways to abdicate thinking and wander into trivially preventable danger, which in turn means more risk for park rangers and mountain rescue teams 🫤