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)

  • ArchiteuthisEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    Nice to see he’s been keeping productive now that he apparently got banned from bsky.

    Just in time for TESCREAL (“the weirdo sf harry potter sex cult that runs AI”) to go viral too.

    • fullsquareEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      unfortunately segyges is back (got 3d for posting 911/charlie kirk meme) and posted 51-post long thread on why rats are a cult, conveniently one day after zitron dropped 1h long podcast on the same topic

      • o7___o7English
        8·
        1 day ago

        Entryism in the sneersphere will be a problem sooner or later, won’t it?

        They’ll have always been against this.

        • rhamphEnglish
          2·
          17 hours ago

          Haha, check out this comment from the other Sneer Club:

          They had me till the part near the end where they say doing an LLM slowdown is like banning medical research and if you don’t like it you are literally an ‘enemy of humanity’.

          Like is this accelarationists doing sneer entryism? What’s happening?

          Also the thread could’ve used a nod towards the pervasiveness of eugenics in the ratsphere but I guess that’s not the audience segyges’s going for.

          edit: A distressing number of replies to that doing the opposite of sneering slop 😔 edit2: … which could in itself be construed as sneer entryism

      • ArchiteuthisEnglish
        9·
        1 day ago

        51-post long thread on why rats are a cult,

        Jjust finished reading it.

        woke:

        Everyone is polyamorous, everyone attends the same events, everyone lives in group homes together, everyone venerates the same few authors, and everyone is very worried about AI doom. They are all very contrarian together.

        Rationalism as a whole is a religious movement. Not everyone takes marching orders. The core people who mostly live together and attend events and especially orgies in Berkeley are a sex cult, and the ones that aren’t having any sex are part of the wider movement and are its recruiting funnel.

        Any time you get more than a few people who are deeply concerned with AI doom together, it seems like their natural form of organization looks like a cult; rationalism as a whole is less of a cult than it is a cult factory. Some of these cults have gone very badly. One of them is the Zizians.

        broke:

        I feel about [CEOs talking about AI progress slowdown] roughly the same way I would feel about all the pharmaceutical companies getting together to say they wanted to waive anti-trust laws so they could form a cartel to ban medical research:

        these people are the enemies of humanity.

        Also: Much of AI research IS medical research. They are very literally proposing to stop a pretty good chunk of medical research in its tracks so that they don’t have to fear the paperclipper.

        It’s possible he has a similar affliction to Doctorow, where he thinks this tech is neutral on its own and can be sufficiently decoupled from its hypercapitalist pushers who would much prefer democracy be swapped for modernised feudalism, or who at least think it’s fine to collapse global systems of knowledge transfer for a quick buck.

        Still, attributing medical research to AI without discriminating between LLMs and vintage orthodox machine learning that doesn’t actually need infinity GPUs inside a climate regulated warehouse the size of the Peloponnese that also needs to be powered by two active volcanos to work is very TESCREAL coded, LLMs doing Great Things Worth Ruining The World Over in medical research only works under the assumption of some singularity type event being just around the corner. And also the part where he thinks it’s normal to declare people who fuck with AI as enemies of humanity.

        Basically segyges feels like controlled opposition, just not by EAs, perhaps other people who don’t mind that he never brings up the pervasive eugenics angle? He certainly posts (including in LessWrong) like it’s his day job.

        Or maybe he just really wants the basilisk to like him.

        • fullsquareEnglish
          3·
          10 hours ago

          now you have it straight from source:

          e/acc, distinct from EA, is a rival ideology about technology.

          (somewhere in this mix someone called me e/acc. i am not. if you’re going to classify me in this space, i am something like a Kurzweilian h+

          e/acc is a troll ideology for upsetting EA people and scamming pmarca.)

          then he complains about sneerclub for some reason, damn i can’t guess why

          if anyone has Rat Explainer For Normal People 101, not written by weirdos (derogatory) that would be useful i think now that what is known here for decade broke into mainstream

          LLMs doing Great Things Worth Ruining The World Over in medical research

          there are entire wet labs whose software stack predates openai. go and ask anyone who works in a moderately long operating lab if there’s any load bearing Thing that runs under windows xp control or older (there will be). there are some extremely limited applications of pre-llm ml in drug design, but it’s trained on entirely different type of data and it does entirely different thing and i’d say it’s not load bearing. these things are expected to be fed with new data from testing new things provided in previous iterations and if you hit something you’ll get there on your own. all of that data is noisy

          • ArchiteuthisEnglish
            2·
            8 hours ago

            Had to google Kurzweilian h+, apparently h+ is kurzweil’s brand of transhumanism.

            This is very anticlimactic.

        • istewartEnglish
          6·
          20 hours ago

          Basically segyges feels like controlled opposition, just not by EAs, perhaps other people who don’t mind that he never brings up the pervasive eugenics angle? He certainly posts (including in LessWrong) like it’s his day job.

          Maybe, but I’m also willing to buy that Gyges (and the other tech-employed wannabe-calm AI centrists populating Bluesky) genuinely believes in the broad concept of “AI” as the necessary next stage of techno-progressivism. He and his fellow travelers are just positioning themselves as the sane, sober, starched-shirt Presbyterian sort of believer, as opposed to the tongue-speaking, snake-handling Pentacostals that are the hardcore rationalists.

          It’s important to understand that the eugenics aspects are never going to be a particularly high concern for people like Gyges. They’ve comfortably made it past the selection filters in education and employment that are relics of the eugenics movement, so they think IQ-supremacy and neo-phrenology can’t hurt them anymore. It’s when this attitude curdles into fear that someone might revoke the status conferred by passage through such selection filters that you get a DHH, Shuttleworth, etc. I think that’s a prominent root cause as to why I, and many of us here, can’t trust a Gyges type. They may differ with the fascists right now, but they also have no innate defense against ethical freefall.

        • SoyweiserEnglish
          7·
          1 day ago

          is less of a cult than it is a cult factory.

          Cult incubator. Use the correct Silicon Valley terms please.

          • swlabrEnglish
            4·
            1 day ago

            Omfg, parachuting in here to say that going out of one’s way to shit talk luddites is like saying protests are bad because of vandalism or property damage etc. Fuck this guy

        • o7___o7English
          1·
          24 hours ago

          I feel like he lifted “cult factory” without attribution. Was that Robert Evans?

          • ArchiteuthisEnglish
            4·
            22 hours ago

            People have been calling them a cult incubator for ages, not sure who said it first.