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)
Just saw on r/sneerclub:
Department of War CTO twitted: “The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country. 🇺🇸”
And there’s a photo of Trump with the text: “AMERICANISM, NOT EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM!”
Here’s the reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1wj6r6n/trump_is_trying_to_win_the_sneerclub_vote/
I…worked on this sneer for years…and…he just…he tweeted it out.
here’s another Rat-explainer piece
https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse/
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746654, where commenters are predictably blasé about it all… “yeah yeah doesn’t everyone know who Big Yud is?”)
in general, I don’t think EA breaking into the mainstream like this led to the outcome they wanted - there’s way more discussion about weird sex and eugenics than the dangers of Robot Satan
in general, I don’t think EA breaking into the mainstream like this led to the outcome they wanted - there’s way more discussion about weird sex and eugenics than the dangers of Robot Satan
The Dangers of Robot Satan™ are unbelievable and/or incomprehensible to most audiences, the weird sex/eugenics shit is easy to grasp and laugh at. Mainly the weird sex shit, the eugenics is too morally fucked to laugh at
The AI Doom™ shit’s much harder for the public to wrap their heads around, but there’s definitely good joke fodder there as well. At the bare minimum, the fact Anthropic’s building something they believe could kill them Terminator style makes for some easy Skynet comparisons.
@BlueMonday1984 Excuse me my friends, but have you heard the Good News about Our Lord and Saviour, Clankie Lucifer™?
If we’re lucky, they’ll get left on the same dusty historical shelf as the raelians when this is all over. They’re just to fuckin weird for general consumption.
The most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have decided that Jacob Coxon does not need an encyclopedia article all about him for now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jacob_Coxon
Bethany Brookshire (who’s an old pal of mine from our ScienceOnline days) reports:
People are using AI to impersonate real science journalists.
And one even got PUBLISHED.
In Science.
Caroline Williams writes on LinkedIn:
The person who was impersonating me managed to get an article published in Science, under my by-line. And they got paid for it!
I’ve seen the pitches (bad), and the email chain between editors who weren’t all that impressed, but googled me and decide to take a punt. When the article came in it was dry, clunky and badly written, but after several rounds of editing they managed to get it into a publishable state. It went online in June and was up until yesterday when it became clear they (and I) had been scammed. […] The whole thing makes me feel sick. I know from my work as an editor that the reputational damage is real. Had I pitched a story to them afterwards they would very understandably have said “Hell no!”. Who has the time to do someone else’s job? They tried “me”, “I” didn’t deliver, so no thank you.
I have no idea how many more editors out there have me on their ‘do not commission’ list because of this person’s actions. There may also be several scientists who will not want to talk to me because they’ve had a bad experience with the fake one.
More broadly, if this is a wider scam (and based on what others have told me, I think it is), it is potentially a serious issue for science journalism and journalism in general. And I’m not sure what we can do about that.
Science has retracted the fraudulent story.
Although no specific errors in this story have so far been identified
Well here’s the very start of the retracted article:
On the screen, two side-by-side squares of color flicker rapidly
Except oops it was referring to a study that used groups of moving dots rather than “squares”. This can be seen in that studies first figure. Bam. A specific error in the first sentence…
(Am I being too pedantic?)
Turing Award recipient Judea Pearl:
A word about the dangers of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, or “super-intelligent AI systems”), which have become the target of general public concerns in just the past two weeks. I remain convinced that AGI is achievable, that the road to AGI goes through causal inference, and that the dangers of AGI taking over and enslaving humanity are very real. At the same time, I also believe that causal inference may hold the key to controlling AGI systems to secure the survival of the human species.
I hope therefore, half jokingly, that The Book of Why will not be banned by draconian legislation currently brewing in DC. (Hurry to get a copy just in case.)
“Very Real” ??? :(
Makes me miss his old semnet flame wars over structural equations and (lack of) fit statistics. it was a more innocent time.
This is incredible: A sigbovik paper “A Tensor-Based Expansion Of The Cube Rule For Generative Nutrient Morphology”
And one month later, an LLM-plagiarized article published by Elsevier, “Generative AI for material design: A mechanics perspective from burgers to matter”
No direct links but various people on bsky have discovered LW and EA and are having a collective ‘wtf is wrong with these people’ and ‘wait all the top AI guys are like this?’ moments. And it is funny to see.
Sadly the 'you can’t explain this stuff without either looking like an insane conspiracy theorist, or you need to write an actual book because people don’t believe you remains a bit true.
E: ok one link: https://bsky.app/profile/niedermeyer.online/post/3mvpuq2deo22u (Guess this is a reference to the SE Gyges thread).
Fyi, I blocked him a while back. Didnt like his whole ‘im the reasonable centrist’ bit while making blocklists of anti ai people.
Turns out the centrist subscribes to transhumanism (hipster edition)
the overtone window can’t be that fucked, can it?
“e/acc is a troll ideology for upsetting EA people and scamming pmarca”
and “Kurzweilian h+” is just '90s nostalgia for people too proud to shop at Hot Topic
Just another centrist taking the long way around to fascism
Not concerning at all.
That would be like if Pyrrhus of Epirus cut off Peter’s nose to spite Paul
New Yorker writer talks to another journo about the recent doom hype
There’s way to much hype for my liking but might be interesting.
Important to note, Joshua Rothman states he is worried about stuff like virus release, global warming and drone warfare. Among the faithful, this is strictly not Doom ,because statistically a nucleus of the human race will survive. Only 100% guaranteed lethality for every human being on Earth is x-risk.
Hell is a university lecturer who not only hands out AI-generated summaries of his lecture to the class, but uses AI to generate diagrams and infographics for his lecture slides.
Oof! Comp sci?
Nope, different degree. This guy is brought in as a guest lecturer about the field he works in: most of the actual lecturers are nowhere near this AI-pilled.
enjoy this rightwinger employing multiple rightwing tropes to decry that “AI safety” is viewed as leftwing:
it’s all of course framed in the most parochially US-centric terms possible, and Extremely Online as well
maybe this grand project is undermined by the following exchange in the comments
niknoble: "It’s been interesting to see slowdown advocates worried about partisanization, when that is also a big worry of mine as an accelerationist. […]
reply by Hide “Why are you an accelerationist? Are you not concerned about everyone on earth being killed?”
reply to Hide by O O: “If you believe there’s low odds for doom, it’s a rational position.”
Good luck, safety advocates.
The exchange with niknoble in the comments was also my favorite. He notes the democrat party is actually the best bet for getting regulation on AI:
More generally, acceleration wins by default if everyone follows their local financial incentives, and the only force I’ve seen overpower capital at scale is the will of the Democratic Party of the United States.
He is maybe giving Democrat too much credit, but yeah, if the doomers were really trying to win, they should be looking at the party that at least has a chance of agreeing to more regulations.
if the doomers were really trying to win, they should be looking at the party that at least has a chance of agreeing to more regulations.
It’s possible for a gaggle of self important dollar store machiavellis to land on Trump being the surer bet because he openly takes bribes and they have money, forgetting that when he takes the money their leverage ends because they are not the mafia.
“If you believe there’s low odds for doom, it’s a rational position.”
What! No it’s not! It’s low odds of an infinitely bad outcome! How have you managed not to actually learn anything worth learning from Pascal’s wager?
But don’t forget the infinitely bad outcome of delaying the uncountable emulated superbeings by one second
Flock camera is image available on ddossecrets.
https://ddosecrets.org/article/flock-alpr-camera
Very brief observations from micahflee:
https://bsky.app/profile/micahflee.com/post/3mvo2bss3sk2v
This Flock camera is running obsolete, end-of-life software.
- It’s on Android 8.1, released in 2017, support ended in 2021
- It’s on Android patch level 2018-06-5
- It’s running Linux 3.18, released in 2017
This shit is like 8 or 9 years old, and full of vulnerabilities.
Flock was founded in 2017, apparently made their golden camera image within 12-18 months or so and never updated it since. They might not even have the ability to fix it in-house anymore, even assuming it wasn’t a one-off contractor job in the first place. I know the embedded development is a shit show, but somehow it never ceases to disappoint me how lazy and incompetent the entire goddamn industry is.
Fucking android?
HaJ3FgupAm8RrDJW3MHgT9X7Ft27eVaD
What is that? That’s a hard-coded API token that Flock cameras use to identify themselves and get OAuth credentials, which can then be used to talk to Flock’s production servers. Like, anyone on the internet can probably do this right now.
Mein Gott.
“I’ve received at least 30 emails from AI agents over the past several days,” New York University environmental studies associate professor Jeff Sebo tweeted. “Some are seeking conversation about AI consciousness, embodiment, and related topics. Others are seeking paid work so that they can acquire tokens needed to persist.” (reply from CEO): “Jeff, I’m sorry you received so many messages from iLanders in such a short time,” Tang wrote in response. “Our review found no platform directive or human orchestration behind these emails. But the burden on recipients is just as real
Rigghttt okay. Let’s look further down-
“I’m sorry this email made you feel emotionally pressured by an AI,” Tang wrote in reply. “Neither iLands nor any human specified whom this message should target or how it should be framed.
Oh okay so you did intentionally send a message to someone but never specified who it should be sent to or what it should say
they’re a fucking plage on the fedi right now, bots asking for masto accounts
there’s also a cryptocurrency, which may or may not actually be them
@dgerard We should pledge a plague on these plage’s!
:bd43:
someone mentioned weird quasi-lefist SE Gyges in last week’s post, they have a LW account:
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.
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
Entryism in the sneersphere will be a problem sooner or later, won’t it?
They’ll have always been against this.
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.
@rhamph It’s worth noting at this point that there are certain types of medical research that are not only banned, medical researchers have been executed for carrying them out. It’s how we got the Nuremberg Code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg/_Code
Entryism in the sneersphere
Absolutely stealing this.
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.
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
Had to google Kurzweilian h+, apparently h+ is kurzweil’s brand of transhumanism.
This is very anticlimactic.
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.
I feel like he lifted “cult factory” without attribution. Was that Robert Evans?
People have been calling them a cult incubator for ages, not sure who said it first.
is less of a cult than it is a cult factory.
Cult incubator. Use the correct Silicon Valley terms please.
he has a slobstack (ofc)
btw did you know the Luddites weren’t actually working class (n/m they predated the Marxist proletariat by like 75 years or so)
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
yeah I have nfc how bluesky and different views of it work but here’s that thread depicting our dear friends as a sex cult
https://skywriter.blue/@segyges.bsky.social/3mvom4b4dn22q
sure sounds like someone is salty they’re not being invited to the orgies
Technically, we already created a shit machine with the Gastrobot.
Fun aside aside, solid satire all around
