Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st November 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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. Happy Halloween, fellow sneerers!)

Welcome to November, and 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.)

  • gerikson ( gerikson@awful.systems ) English
    6·
    10 hours ago

    you unfortunately have to dig quite deep for sneers in this weird post about datacenter votes in the recent US elections, but they’re there

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8vakRzGKXLknQNJ9M/stephen-martin-s-shortform?commentId=ec8LnnTjBMcow3C82

    especially “Noosphere89” smugly stating that datacenters will just move somewhere else, like Iceland (retracted after someone points out that Iceland is probably even more woke than, say, Vermont) and Paraguay (which recently had a digibank seized and closed, leading to the president stepping down).

    Then there’s this gem

    Data center inputs, unlike almost anything else are much more subsitutable than any other input, and can be built in places where humans don’t care to raise NIMBY concerns.

    So cutting through the jargon, “inputs” in this case means

    • power
    • cooling
    • construction / planning
    • the actual fucking contents in the racks
    • data

    All of these are constrained in various ways. The places with abundant accessible power tend to be relatively developed parts of the world. Same with water which is the most efficient mode of cooling.

    Building your datacenter in Texas means you’re on familiar ground with local laws and regulations, and can draw on skilled manpower to actually construct the thing and keep it running. I’d wager that the actual hardware is cheaper than almost anywhere else. Once it’s built it’s in the security zone of the USA, which means property is efficiently defended by LEO and emergency services.

    Paraguay? You need to find a skilled workforce there, or import it. Same for all the bits and bobs needed. Then you probably have to pay more for the same, as well as having to deal with an unfamiliar planning process. Not to mention political instability. And you might have to build a shit-ton of supporting stuff yourself, like power generation and fiber comms.

    These people are delusional.

    • lurker ( lurker@awful.systems ) English
      2·
      1 hour ago

      especially “Noosphere89” smugly stating that datacenters will just move somewhere else

      there’s no fucking way people will happily accept data centres near them after Big Tech has so happily made clear that they’re on the side of MAGA and fascism

      • gerikson ( gerikson@awful.systems ) English
        6·
        5 hours ago

        I think they’re saying that stopping a datacenter won’t do squat to stop AGI takeoff

        at least this a reading of

        Efficiency gains from AI are absolutely massive, and while they don’t apply to training, they do apply to inference, and even accounting for endogenity, state bans only slow AI progress by 9 days at the absolute most pessimistic.

        so we can re-state this as a form of Pascal’s wager:

        1. if I stop a datacenter near me, the world will still be taken over by a superhuman intelligence, albeit 9 days later, and my local environment will be moot
        2. if I stop a datacenter, and no superhuman intelligence appears, I won’t have a datacenter near me

        I’m not Blaise but I feel that stopping a datacenter is a win, all in all.

    • lurker ( lurker@awful.systems ) English
      7·
      13 hours ago

      Found another stellar AI 2027 take

      ” They don’t go through scenarios where AI doesn’t happen because they are unrealistic given what we know now, and even if that did happen somehow, it’s just business as usual in that case? So they don’t have any commentary to give.”

      Yeah I’m sure the massive tech stock selloff and Big Tech allying themselves with the now widely despised and crumbling MAGA party and Anthropic’s IPO becoming shakier and shakier and all those voters saying data centred and tech were key issues that lead to them voting and all those anti-data centre bills being approved except one means that AI not being big is totally unrealistic

      • Architeuthis ( Architeuthis@awful.systems ) English
        11·
        10 hours ago

        The comment got so downvoted reddit now autocollapses it when you open the page. /r/BetterOffline posters seem to be good people:

        Icy-Recognition-7453 wrote

        My brother in Christ, it is dreamed-up rubbish. It comes from an offshoot of EA/Rationalist thinking where the foundational documents are Terminator 3 and a Harry Potter fanfic written by an “AI researcher” who never went to high school. The pay-off of the “good” scenario is you get to live as an emulated human on AI God’s hard drive.

    • rhamph ( rhamph@awful.systems ) English
      7·
      16 hours ago

      Credit to the tweeter behind the original screenshot, at least they call AI 2027 a ‘blog’, and not e.g. a ‘paper’ like at least one of the reddit commenters does.

    • lurker ( lurker@awful.systems ) English
      4·
      14 hours ago

      Shockingly the comments are calling out that there’s no way the 30% stock market rise is happening, among other things, but to single out a specific comment:

      “RSI in 2026 isn’t predicted by that forecast. They predict AI-assisted speedups of progress. We are currently observing that, in fact a little ahead of schedule. According to METR’s best guess, we have the level of speedup now that AI 2027 had expected in Mar 2027. It isn’t “misleading” for a model to present things you consider boring or incremental and then be scored as correct when the boring or incremental things happen. That’s just being right”

      Afaik this is a lie? METR’s time horizons graph still hasn’t updated past Claude Mythos, unless this comment is referring to another piece of METR data that I don’t know about.

      Edit: quickly looked it up, they’re probably referring to this

      Edit 2: yeah, I think this comment is some baloney. AI 2027’s coding ability in March 2027 is listed at 2.3x (and goes up to sped up by 30x). METR estimates Anthropic has been growing at roughly 1.9-2x the rate they were going at March 2024-Oct. 2025 (though they outright state that the estimate is given with high uncertainty)

      Edit 3: BetterOffline post better explains why this is bullshit

  • lurker ( lurker@awful.systems ) English
    12·
    1 day ago

    Tech industry is coping well with the midterms it seems

    “The results offer little evidence of a voter mandate to crack down on AI or data centers,” Kovacevich said, per Ars, noting that “Democratic gubernatorial candidates who opposed data center bans won at a higher rate than those who supported them. “Let’s not confuse an anti-Trump wave with an anti-tech mandate,” he added.

    Except every single anti-data centre measure made it through the ballot

  • nfultz ( nfultz@awful.systems ) English
    9·
    1 day ago

    todays adexchanger had a lolworthy note that the binance hack began with a search ad.

    If you hadn’t heard, Binance was totally pwned in a $6 billion crypto heist last week, suspected to be a North Korean operation. Well, Binance has now published what amounts to a preliminary autopsy report of the incident.

    The heist began when a Binance Wallet DevOps team member accidentally downloaded a malicious copy of Homebrew – a popular open-source tool – from a mirror site promoted in a search ad. The malware was spotted, but not before the hackers had obtained the real identities of Wallet DevOps team members.

    Using those identities, the North Korean hacking unit spent months targeting Binance’s wallet team with covert schemes. One involved a prolonged fake job interview that lured a Binance DevOps engineer into downloading an “assignment” onto their work device.

    After taking control of the Binance DevOps engineer’s laptop, the hacker used an unnamed internal AI tool to log in to the devices of other engineers. Access to multiple credentials allowed the heist to go through.

    Binance guy fell for “top link is ads”. COME ON.

    Never understood why my employer would drop $30m on Crowdstrike but not add uBlock Origin to their company chrome profile for free.

    • rhamph ( rhamph@awful.systems ) English
      4·
      24 hours ago

      Never understood why my employer would drop $30m on Crowdstrike but not add uBlock Origin to their company chrome profile for free.

      Ugh, using websites on work computers is such a completely different experience from at home. And yeah, it’s such an easy defence against malware!

  • lurker ( lurker@awful.systems ) English
    2·
    1 day ago

    Okay yet another post about Yud’s book and its website but finally managed to find that one page I was looking for again. They only put one computer science expert in the praise category shockingly enough (two if you count Scott Aaronson)

    Also the main page appears to endorse Dwarkesh’s “AI civilisations” narrative and buys the Claude Mythos hype (its under a read more)

    • samvines ( samvines@awful.systems ) English
      7·
      1 day ago

      The website puts expert consensus at 78% but does not disclose who those experts are. I have a PhD in computer science and natural language processing and I think this is horse shit. As do most of my peers and my PhD supervisor/prof who I still talk to. I don’t remember being asked and pretty sure my network weren’t either.

      I suspect:

      We got 10 of my EA friends together. Seven of them agreed and one of them got a bit waffly so I put them down for the 8%.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn ( sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems ) English
      7·
      2 days ago

      Clearly written by someone who spends more time chatting with chatbots than talking to actual people. The bulk of the argument is that he asked the chatbots when AI was gonna foom and they told him “In a few years I guess my man”.

      The “reading progress” widget bugged out for me and got stuck at 92%, it also links to a page that doesn’t exist.

      Still curious? We’ve answered 50+ more questions. […] Showing 22 of 22 questions

      I was promised 50+ FAQ questions :(

      Anyway I stumbled across the arbitration clause so I’d better stop looking at the website in case I ever have to sue this guy for any reason!

      • lagrangeinterpolator ( lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems ) English
        6·
        2 days ago

        Vibe coded websites really are the epitome of AI: there’s tons of flashy stuff that looks impressive at first glance, but shit starts breaking down with the slightest breeze. The reading progress widget was working perfectly for me at first, but then I clicked around a bit (the “see what’s coming” link in that widget straight up leads to a 404) and then it got stuck at 88% for me. The slider in the “Timeline Explorer” is also extremely laggy for me, with an update taking 1-2 seconds. There’s also some UI elements that don’t make sense, like the four options in the bar above the “Countdown to AGI Achievement” box are duplicated in the “AGI scenarios” sidebar on the right side immediately below. Sometimes the drop down menus from the top just open randomly when I’m clicking something else. Also some buttons break occasionally and I need to refresh to fix them.

        Even though my own work does not involve any coding, I have seen a vibe coded project secondhand from someone who wanted to use it because they thought it would save time. It is very impressive at the start, since it can just pump out tons of features very quickly. But then disillusionment sets in as the project turns into a game of whack-a-mole where you yell at the AI to fix an issue and then two more pop up. And no way in hell are you fixing things yourself, because the codebase is an unreadable pile of spaghetti.

    • rhamph ( rhamph@awful.systems ) English
      4·
      2 days ago

      What on Earth do these percentages mean? I scrolled all the way to the bottom and I am none the wiser. No obvious hints in the DOM either. Maybe their chatbot told them it sums to 100%?

      Four panels for each prediction: optismistic, median, risk, and conservative. Each is given a percentage with no context; 25%, 50%, 15%, and 30% respectively.

        • rhamph ( rhamph@awful.systems ) English
          3·
          1 day ago

          That would be quite the slopbro’s take on probability. Time is continuous, and every fool knows the probability of a continuous variable being equal to something is zero. You can give a probability for it being less than some value, or greater, or within some other range… but none of the percentages relate to the dates in any consistent way. For example, it couldn’t be 30% before 2035 because then you couldn’t possibly have 50% before 2029. But if you just treat it as categorical, as probabilities for safety and risk… then it still doesn’t work, because the categories are all mutually exclusive.

  • flere-imsaho ( mawhrin@awful.systems ) English
    19·
    3 days ago

    just a quick note that our very favourite mr. musk spent half a bil in us dollars on election shenanigans and all he got is blue texas, and i mean it, texas is now blue across the whole slate, including the governor and the u.s. senator.

    the very effective mr. musk!

    • froztbyte ( froztbyte@awful.systems ) English
      4·
      1 day ago

      it was quite funny how, while counts were going up, he just entirely shut the fuck up for about 3~4 hours. not a tweet in sight

      must’ve been tragically hard overcome that rage. poor pissbaby, so sad. anyway,

    • lagrangeinterpolator ( lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems ) English
      10·
      2 days ago

      Although my district wasn’t very contested, I am still happy that I voted. For the past two years, the oligarchs have operated under the assumption that they are immune from consequences. The AI bros believed that politics was an irrelevant pastime beneath their notice. If anything, I am happy knowing that they now feel fear.

      • istewart ( istewart@awful.systems ) English
        4·
        2 days ago

        I have more hope for putting serious pressure on my middle-of-the-road Dem rep. The district here only really turned Dem around 20 years ago thanks to the influx of Bay Area bedroom-community commuters, but there are still plenty of families around who immigrated as ag workers. So he already felt a degree of pressure, but now I feel like urging him to get on board with properly punishing the very worst Trump excesses might (might!) not be an empty gesture anymore.

      • Sailor Sega Saturn ( sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems ) English
        20·
        2 days ago

        Trans people continue to be very worried about US politics despite the blue wave. In Washington and Colorado the trans sports ban is ahead. In Colorado the trans youth healthcare ban is ahead. A lot of the transphobic democrats are doing OK vote wise.

        The very real risk here is that trans rights continue to backslide even under a democratic congress or, two years from now, a democratic congress and executive branch.

        So while the transgender for everyone memes are appreciated, we’re not out of the woods yet. Liberals are also susceptible to anti-trans propaganda and boy howdy there has been a lot of it.

        All that said: the trans council does not bestow the honor of transition on Musk. He must remain cis and miserable.

          • YourNetworkIsHaunted ( YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems ) English
            5·
            2 days ago

            I am at least glad that hunting down trans people and burning down any place where people (especially kids) can get gender affirming care is probably not going to be an active priority up and down the various levels and branches of government the way it seemed to be for a while there. I’m not entirely convinced it’s a step in the right direction yet, but it should at least be a temporary halt in most areas.

    • Soyweiser ( Soyweiser@awful.systems ) English
      8·
      2 days ago

      This is a pattern, with the exceptions of AFD and Trump, every time he supports a guy they lose. The guy has the moneybags of death.

      Anyway well done US voters. Yall won a decisive battle now win the war.

        • lagrangeinterpolator ( lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems ) English
          9·
          2 days ago

          The rationalist attitude towards politics really is something else. Either politics is a pointless sideshow compared to the machine god, or they are the ultimate politics understanders. I could not come up with a worse way to market AI than they did.

          I’m not the most politically astute person, but even I know that AI is a perfect symbol of the hated oligarchy. AI is a tool for the rich to plunder the labor and resources of the poor, all while dehumanizing them in favor of the machine. Of course AI is politically toxic. The rationalists are so far up their own asses that they can’t even think of this basic viewpoint.

          I used to dislike when Bernie Sanders would take the warnings of the AI doom prophets too seriously, but now I realize that it is still a shrewd strategy, because the outcome is good in the end (bad for the AI companies). If they start talking about how AI will cause human extinction, it is bad either way if they are sincere or if they are grifting. Jon Ossoff even referenced the human extinction narrative in his victory speech. The political reaction was not “please help the AI companies figure out AI safety,” but “shut that shit down right now.” And that is the right thing to do.

          • scruiser ( scruiser@awful.systems ) English
            10·
            2 days ago

            or they are the ultimate politics understanders.

            A lot of them fail to grasp how rightwing they (rationalists) actually are. Others have ideas that are extremely simplistic, like there are lots of lesswrong post proposing one cool trick to get trump on their side or get normies to understand AI doomerism.

            The political reaction was not “please help the AI companies figure out AI safety,” but “shut that shit down right now.”

            Yeah, they have all these big brain plans for research programs into aligning AI, not getting that if they actually get the public or any major political figures to really believe their doomer ideas “shut that shit down” with maybe a side of “throw some people in jail” is the common sense response.

            • istewart ( istewart@awful.systems ) English
              9·
              2 days ago

              A lot of them fail to grasp how rightwing they (rationalists) actually are.

              When I first encountered people trying to expand upon the Mark Fisher interpretation of hauntology, a few years ago, I thought they were perhaps overreaching. But after a few more years of observation, now I no longer think so. The rationalist project isn’t really about predicting the future, and perhaps never really has been. Its conservative essence is to enshrine and protect a certain, mainly pop-cultural, framework about what the future should look like, and events are now passing that framework by. It only gets stranger from here.

              • gerikson ( gerikson@awful.systems ) English
                3·
                2 days ago

                Its conservative essence is to enshrine and protect a certain, mainly pop-cultural, framework about what the future should look like

                This is such a great way of looking at it, thanks.

                Of course, a lot of the creators of that future were themselves politically right-wing or libertarian. Think Heinlein.

  • lurker ( lurker@awful.systems ) English
    4·
    2 days ago

    the midterms made Scammy A loopy

    "OpenAI is against the notion that it would be acceptable for people to be relegated to a role of doing things that ‘AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans,'” he wrote. “People should not cede control of the future to superintelligence, and that requirement should ultimately constrain AI progress.”