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)
from engadget: Anthropic has set up a bio research lab for physical experiments
the AGI is making the diamandingo bacteria!!! P(doom) just went up 4 epistillion percent
Your favorite “CEO said a thing” journalists, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, are leaving their current podcast and starting a new one.
When they started Hard Fork, they chose the name from the soon-to-be-moribund blockchain concept. Calling their new podcast “Machine Gods” makes me more hopeful than ever that the AI bubble is about to burst.
US government is using spicy autocomplete to hallucinate fake nuclear threats
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-ship
Holy fuck. How embarrassing would it have been if they actually went through with it and ended up having to explain to China that they attacked a random ship because a chatbot hallucinated some bs
The chinese intelligence people are probably just aghast that american intelligence people are treating the chatbot as if it knows something
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.
On the one hand, you do have precedent to point to in hoping they get consigned to the dustbin of history.
On the other hand, the rats have had a colossal(ly negative) effect on the general public (FTX, the AI bubble, the second Trump admin, etcetera), and their extremely high profile makes them much harder to ignore.
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
muwahaha
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).
The ‘sex cult’ framing really seems to be catching on. Of course, none of the eugenics comes up.
Keep spreading the good sneer, everyone! There are still horrors to detail!
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?
gyges is a LW regular who believes in the AI doomsday and speaks fluent rationalist but totally is not one, how dare you
“the overtone window” would be a good name for the amount of racist dogwhistling that’s acceptable in the mainstream media
Ah, “Kurzweilian h+,” there’s his marketing tagline. Too bad importing Kurzweil also brings in all his bullshit extrapolation about exponential curves that all the other weird shit is based on. You’re never going to shout down the hyperbolic lunatics by adopting the core thesis of their hyperbole.
Yeah, at best, “Kurzweilian h+” will be pseudoscientific guff. I suppose that keeping the lower strata of intellectually bad elements while discarding the worst of the social ones is progress, but, I mean, it’s kind of like saying you’re into your fad diet and LLM-generated supplement regimen and then looking over at RFK and saying “but that’s totally different!”.
I’ve lost it now, but somewhere in the replies to one of those threads was a person complaining that SneerClub was too much like beating up on nerds in high school. To which I say, first, here’s my blueberry bread recipe, and a nice photo of a winter sunrise, and my Star Trek fanfiction. We all friendly now? Good. Then let me suggest, cordially, that if you are continuing to think of social dynamics in terms of high-school hierarchies and shitty '80s movies well into adulthood, that is a you problem. If I can stop living as the gender I had in high school, you can stop letting your membership in a granfalloon lead you by the nose.
in the same vein as jorjor wel, rakers wile
“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.
See, if they just came out and admitted to that sort of strategy, I could at least respect it some, but instead they still seem to insist on acting like and planning for Trump being somewhat of a rational actor!
“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:
