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Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 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.)

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[-] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 49 minutes ago

what fresh hell is this

Cloudflare Introduces NET Dollar stable coin (HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45471573)

[-] rook@awful.systems 4 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I know it’s terrible being a drama gossip, but there are some Fun Times on bluesky at the moment. I’m sure most of you know the origins of the project, and the political leanings of the founders, but they’re currently getting publicly riled up about trans folk and palestinians and tying themselves up in knots defending their decision to change the rules to keep jesse singal on site, and penniless victims of the idf off it.

They really cannot cope with the fact that their user base aren’t politically aligned with them, and are desperate to appease the fash (witness the crackdowns on people’s reaction to charlie kirk’s overdue departure from this vale of tears) and have currently reached the Posting Through It stage. I’m assuming at some point their self-image as Reasonable Centrists will crack and one or more of them will start throwing around transphobic slurs and/or sieg-heiling and bewailing how the awful leftists made them do it. Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 2 points 45 minutes ago

And all this because she simply could not shut up. Which seems to be one of the oldest, modding a large community rules.

[-] rook@awful.systems 2 points 24 minutes ago

Nobody ever seems to learn the “never get high from your own supply” lesson. Gotta get that hit of thousands of people instantly supporting and agreeing with whatever dumbfuck thought just fell out.

You absolutely don’t have to hand it to zuckerberg, but he at least is well aware that he runs an unethical ad company that’s bad for the world, has always expressed his total contempt for his users, and has not posted through it.

[-] self@awful.systems 3 points 2 hours ago

here’s a good summary of the situation including an analysis of the brand new dogwhistle a bunch of bluesky posters are throwing around in support of Jay and Singal and layers of other nasty shit

here’s Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, getting called out by lowtax’s ex-wife:

here’s Jay posting about mangosteen (mangosteen juice was a weird MLM lowtax tried to market on the Something Awful forums as he started to spiral)

Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?

since Jay posted AI generated art about dec/acc and put the term in her profile, her little “ironic” nod to e/acc and to AI, my guess is this is coming very soon

[-] rook@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago

Huh, didn’t know about the guy behind tangled.org (Anirudh Oppiliappan) being a waffle enthusiast too 🫤 Just visited his bsky profile, and he’s enthusing about a “decentralised accelerationism” post by jay.

I hadn’t really seen the point of the tangled project (I’m not sure what atproto brings to version control) but I was interested in an ecosystem around the jujutsu vcs stuff. I guess I won’t find that here.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 48 minutes ago

ok plz explain what "waffles" means in this context

[-] rook@awful.systems 2 points 34 minutes ago

TL;DR: It’s all a meme-poisoned bluesky circle-jerk involving transphobes and people who desperately want transphobes to think they’re cool.

The link from self to mcc’s bluesky thread sums up this stuff with references, but to attempt to summarise the summary, there’s a tweet from the depths of time (2017) that says

Twitter the only place where well articulated sentences still get misinterpreted. You can say "I like pancakes" and somebody will say "So you hate waffles?"

Bluesky ceo jay graber uses “waffles” as shorthand referencing this post, and whipped it out when asked about bluesky’s ongoing unwillingness to do anything about noted transphobe jesse singal, who has since posted about how much he loves waffles.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 30 minutes ago

jfc

Thanks for taking the time to expand

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 12 hours ago

While most bullish outlooks are premised on economic reacceleration, it’s difficult to ignore the market’s reliance on AI capex. In market-pricing terms, we believe we’re closer to the seventh inning than the first, and several developments indicate we may be entering the later phases of the boom. First, AI hyperscaler free-cash-flow growth has turned negative. Second, price competition in the "monopoly-feeder businesses” seems to be accelerating. Finally, recent deal-making smacks of speculation and vendor-financing strategies of old.

https://www.morganstanley.com/pub/content/dam/mscampaign/wealth-management/wmir-assets/gic-weekly.pdf

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 15 hours ago
[-] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 4 points 10 hours ago

"You know, I never defrauded anyone,” says Sam Bankman-Fried

“You know, I never sent the boys across the Isonzo without believing we could win,” said Luigi Cadorna

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 12 hours ago

I predict Sam will lose big on the S&C claims. They have made fuckin bank on this bankruptcy, but also their fees have already been ruled entirely reasonable given the shitshow in question, and the near complete recovery for creditors will make them look even better.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 17 hours ago

Guys according to LW you’re reading Omelas all wrong (just like LeGuin was wrong)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n83HssLfFicx3JnKT/omelas-is-perfectly-misread

[-] corbin@awful.systems 8 points 16 hours ago

Choice sneer from the comments:

Omelas: how we talk about utopia [by Big Joel, a patient and straightforward Youtube humanist,] [has a] pretty much identical thesis, does this count?

Another solid one which aligns with my local knowledge:

It's also about literal child molesters living in Salem Oregon.

The story is meant to be given to high schoolers to challenge their ethics, and in that sense we should read it with the following meta-narrative: imagine that one is a high schooler in Omelas and is learning about The Plight and The Child for the first time, and then realize that one is a high schooler in Salem learning about local history. It's not intended for libertarian gotchas because it wasn't written in a philosophical style; it's a narrative that conveys a mood and an ethical framing.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 11 hours ago

One of the many annoying traits of rationalists is their tendency to backproject classic pieces of literature onto their chosen worldview.

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 4 points 18 hours ago

LLMs are the Dippin Dots of technology.

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 18 hours ago

That's an unfair comparison, Dippin Dots don't slowly ruin the world by existing (also, they're delicious)

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

It will always be the ice cream of the future, never the ice cream of today

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

So bit of a counter to our usual stuff thing. But a worker migrant here won a case against his employer who had linked his living space to his employment contract (forbidden) using chatgpt as an aid (how much is not told). So there actually was a case where it helped.

Interesting note on it, these sorts of cases have no jurisprudence yet, so that might have been a factor. No good links for it sadly as it was all in Dutch. (Cant even find a proper writeup in a bigger news site as a foreigner defending their rights against abuse is less interesting than some other country having a new bisshop). Skeets congratulating the guy here https://bsky.app/profile/isgoedhoor.bsky.social/post/3m27aqkyjjk2c (in Dutch). Nothing much about the genAI usage.

But this does fit a pattern, how, like with blind/bad eyesight people, these tools are veing used by people who have no other recourse because we refuse to help them (this is bad tbh, Im happy they are getting more help don't fet me wrong, but it shouldn't be this substandard).

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 21 hours ago

The Guardian shat out its latest piece of AI hype, violating Betteridge's Law of headlines by asking "Parents are letting little kids play with AI. Are they wrong?"

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Do we have a word for people that are kind of like… AI concern trolls? Like they say they are critical of AI, or even against AI, but only ever really put forward pro-AI propaganda, especially in response to actual criticisms of AI. Kind of centrists or (neo) libs. But for AI.

Bonus points if they also for some reason say we should pivot to more nuclear power, because in their words, even though AI doesn’t use as much electricity as we think, we should still start using more nuclear power to meet the energy demands. (ofc this is bullshit)

E: Maybe it's just sealion

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 4 points 17 hours ago
[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Sealions is a bit more specific, as they do not stop, and demand way more evidence than is normal, Scott had a term for this, forgot it already (one of those more useful Rationalist ideas, which they only employ themselves asymmetrically). Noticed it recently on reddit, some person was mad I didn't properly counter Yuds arguments, while misrepresenting my position (which wasn't that strong tbh, I just quickly typed them up before I had other things to do). But it is very important to take Yuds arguments seriously for some reason, reminds me of creationists.

Think just calling them AI concern trolls works.

[-] antifuchs@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Been tangentially involved in a discussion about how much LLMs have improved in the past year (I don’t care), but now that same space has a discussion of how annoying the stupid pop-up chat boxes are on websites. Don’t know what the problem is, they’ve gotten so much better in the past year?

I mean that's the fundamental problem, right? No matter how much better it gets, the things it's able to do aren't really anything people need or want. Like, if I'm going to a website looking for information it's largely because I don't want to deal with asking somebody for the answer. Even a flawless chatbot that can always provide the information I need - something that is far beyond the state of the art and possibly beyond some fundamental limitation of the LLM structure - wouldn't actually be preferable to just navigating a smooth and well-structured site.

[-] antifuchs@awful.systems 6 points 23 hours ago

Yup, exactly. The chatbot, no matter how helpful, exists in a context of dark patterned web design, incredibly bad resource usage and theft. Its purpose is to make the customer’s question go away, so not even the fanatics are interested.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

See also how youtube tutorials have mostly killed (*) text based tutorials/wikis and are just inferior to good wikis/text based ones. Both because listening to a person talk is a linear experience, and a text one allows for easy scrolling, but also because most people are just bad at yt tutorials. (shoutout to the one which had annoyingly long random pauses in/between sentences even at 2x speed).

This is not helped because now youtube is a source of revenue, and updating a wiki/tutorial often is not. So the incentives are all wrong. A good example of this is the gaming wiki fextralife: See this page on dragons dogma 2 npcs. https://dragonsdogma2.wiki.fextralife.com/NPCs (the game has been out for over a year, if the weirdness doesn't jump out at you). But the big thing for fextralife is their youtube tutorials and it used to have an autoplaying link to their streams. This isn't a wiki, it is an advertisement for their youtube and livestreams. And while this is a big example the problem persists with smaller youtubers, who suffer from extreme publish, do not deviate from your niche or perish. They can't put in the time to update things, because they need to publish a new video (on their niche, branching out is punished) soon or not pay rent. (for people who play videogames and or watch youtube out there, this is also why somebody like the spiffing brit is has long ago went from 'I exploit games' to 'I grind and if you grind enough in this single player game you become op', the content must flow, but eventually you will run out of good new ideas (also why he tried to push his followers into doing risky cryptocurrency related 'cheats' (follow Elon, if he posts a word that can be cryptocoined, pump and dump it for a half hour))).

*: They still exist but tend to be very bad quality, even worse now people are using genAI to seed/update them.

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 4 points 21 hours ago

People can't just have a hobby anymore, can they?

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

Nope. And tbh, did some dd2 recently, and for a very short while I was tempted to push the edit button, but then I remembered that fextralife just tries to profit off my wiki editing labor. (I still like the idea of wikis, but do not have the fortitude and social calm to edit a mainstream one like wikipedia). (I did a quick check, and yeah I also really hate the license fextralife/valnet uses "All contributions to any Fextralife.com Wiki fall under the below Contribution Agreement and become the exclusive copyrighted property of Valnet.", and their editor sucks ass (show me the actual code not this wysiwyg shit)).

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 4 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Gross :/ how come people have to be like that?

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 2 points 10 hours ago

It wouldn't be so bad if they just didn't care and stopped maintaining, but their site is one of the first ones you get. Which is a regular problem with these things.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Tyler Cowen saying some really weird shit about an AI 'actress'.

(For people who might wonder why he is relevant. See his 'see also' section on wikipedia)

E: And you might wonder, rightfully imho, that this cannot be real, that this must be an edit. https://archive.is/vPr1B I have bad news.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The Wikipedia editors are on it.

image descriptionscreenshot of Tyler Cowen's Wikipedia article, specifically the "Personal life" section. The concluding sentence is "He also prefers virgin actresses."

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this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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