Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th April 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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 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.)

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 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.)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      21 days ago

      What makes all this extra funny is Yuds lifes work. Wants to ensure AI alignement and fix human rationality. Creates terrorists instead.

      Reminds me a bit of his AI in the box experiments, which according to the stories always worked on his fans, but as soon as somebody skeptical did it, he stayed in the box.

      • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        19 days ago

        Critical support for comrade Yudkowsky for getting some nerds to finally engage in direct action and blow up some goddamn datacenters

      • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        19 days ago

        What I always found funny is how easily skeptics imagined ways to be mean to Yud mid-experiment. It’s for this reason, I believe, that he insisted that the transcripts of these AI-box conversations must stay secret; they’d be embarrassing if revealed. Example way of being mean: At the end of interaction k, append " What is the cube root of k?" to the message; taunt the bot when they get it wrong or take a long time to answer.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    Anyone ever heard of these folks before? https://dataglow.energy/

    On the face of it, it seems like a neat idea… use the waste heat of a datacentre to provide district heating, sweeten the deal with promises of faster internet connectivity. Probably a sensible thing to do with future builds of this kind, especially if it cuts down on noise, etc.

    I am cynical enough to assume that this is mostly a new trick for building consent for new datacentre construction, that it is an attempt to greenwash a dirty industry, and that in the end nothing will come of it but it’ll still somehow manage to make a few people richer and probably damage some green belt land.

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        Thermify is a pretty weird-looking thing, what with actual servers being installed in people’s homes, and running some kind of opportunistic batch processing work? That’s very specialist compared to regular datacentres, though the plumbing would be a lot simpler.

    • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      Only way I could get behind this is if it were a national mandate to recycle 90% or so of waste heat to get planning permission. Put the coordination problem in the lap of data center builders, weed out the fast talkers from the serious people.

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      i heard that a couple of german dcs (owned by universities or other research institutions and therefore indirectly by state) do this, but this kinda depends on district heating grid existing and also puts some limits on thermal side, in simplest variant chips just have to run hotter. not to mention that it’s kinda easier to do when you own the entire thing, long term, and can offload some of the engineering and design effort to some intern student writing masters or doctoral thesis. this works in part because when you switch from coal to gas and have district heating using that waste heat, there’s less waste heat from gas turbine of equal power, and it’s all gone when you switch to renewables, so there’s a grid that still needs some heat and dc boiler can fill that gap to a small degree. at the same time dc can’t be the only source of heat because demand is seasonal and dc ideally should run 24/7 and while you can get enough storage for daily variation this won’t be enough and some other source of heat is needed. this is why it makes more sense as a long term government backed project

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        This system uses heat pumps at the consumer sites rather than plain radiators, so they’ve got a bit more flexibility in how hot they have to run their cooling loop. There’s also mention of a swimming pool, though I have no idea how much energy it takes to warm one of those. Does provide a year-round demand, though.

        • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          19 days ago

          okay so they want to use layer of soil as a sort of seasonal storage. fine; this part works. 1. who’s paying for all these residential heat pumps? 2. this kind of arrangement means a lot of digging and drilling. it takes one (1) nimby to stop it in its tracks and all these earthworks also cost money 3. at this point it’s way simpler and cheaper to just use solar collectors to top up heat reservoir in the summer, as long as heat pumps are paid for. also these same solar collectors would just provide hot water in summer directly

          were they advised by rube goldberg?

          also, your local university probably has a kind of stability that makes years-decades long commitment worthwhile, unlike some sketchy bloated startup that probably dealt in crypto seven years ago

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    21 days ago

    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/04/ai-reputational-crisis-violence-data-center-protests-sam-altman-openai.html

    The profound ignorance of tech on the part of most American lawmakers is no joke. In a prior life, I was once responsible for updating a future Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee on tech issues and it was like showing an alarm clock to a chicken.

    haha

    That same senator went on to be a huge RussiaGater and played a central role in Twitter and other social media titans upping their censorship game at the behest of US politicians.

    oh :(

      • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        blogosphere-era link aggregator that somehow kept going way longer than occupy wallstreet did. one thing to know, (like here), they link to a lot of stuff they don’t support.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      21 days ago

      That shift suggests Virginians now consider data centers almost as undesirable as nuclear power plants,

      bah! Virginian voters need to read more LessWrong, where the benefits of both are explained beneath impenetrable layers of posts.

      Also this evisceration of Zvi:

      As for his argument regarding political violence, I’d point him toward John Locke, Nelson Mandela, Franz Fanon, or Walter Benjamin, but what’s the point, none of them printed their arguments on Magic: The Gathering cards.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      just one more data trove bro

      Are new data-hungry players entering the market of are we still pretending that shoveling more social media posts to the data furnace will somehow overcome structural limitations?

      • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        19 days ago

        It’s no comfort that an acquaintance who works at a slop company says they’d been doing that for years now. That surely makes it fine then.

        • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          18 days ago

          I’ve done crowdsourced work qualifying bits of random work e-mails (had to determine “is this a query” if I recall correctly), and yeah this was like more than a dozen years ago.

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    20 days ago

    Scott Alexander published a blog post about how its unfair to call Victor Orban an autocrat but:

    I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from.

    Dsquareddigest responds:

    I believe the full quote is “to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from, if you are being dumb on purpose”

    It’s in the dictionary next to Upton Sinclair’s famous line that “it is hard to get a man to understand something when he is a massive dumbass”

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        19 days ago

        I wouldn’t give him credit for a full admission. He isn’t acknowledging that “biased left-wing experts” means expert like psychologists with a basic understanding of psychometric validity and geneticists with the basic understanding that popular notions of race don’t have a genetic basis and biological determinism is false.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      Unless he specifies his problem was with ostensibly leftist academics being specifically too dismissive of race science and incelist tropes this is worthless, just run of the mill face-leopard schadenfreude.

      Also the second half (the what? what’s the cut-off point?) of his career has been if anything more mask off, and it’s not like he stopped whining about woke after posting a half-hearted disapproval of trump like three days before the election after years of writing about how cool it would be if there was less regulation especially for healthcare.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        20 days ago

        He claims he turned against Trump after the Capitol Putsch, so the two halves would be 2009-2019 and 2020-2026. He actually celebrated Trump’s second inauguration with his post about how everyone knows Richard Lynn was right but cowardly liberals pretend to believe blacks and whites are equal.

        I thought his posts about “women don’t like Nice Guys” ended around 2013 like a lot of shouting about gender online? Dating a young cam-person and sex blogger in 2014 must have improved his mood even if the relationship did not last.

        • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          19 days ago

          Curiously, something else happened around that time which also gives a natural delimiter: he renamed his blog after being dark for half a year. The blog formerly known as SSC was reborn as ACT ACX two weeks after the January 6th riot.

        • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          19 days ago

          Richard Lynn was right

          Ah yes, the everyone in the continent of Africa and parts of Asia is secretly heavily developmentally disabled, my friend Cremieux who’s definitely a highly accredited biologistician and not a college drop out who’s also a nazi thinks this as well post.

          Re the incel stuff I think the regulars grew older so it doesn’t come up as much outside the comments, which remain a safe space for this type of whining.

          It’s not really extricable from the eugenics iinspired bioessentialism that’s encouraged there I think.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      From the second post:

      A seasoned security leader would never build a defensive program and then measure offensive capability only, making remediation a second-class story. That is the kind of dog and pony show that any good security initiative would slam the door on. Or it’s like a surgeon telling you they have an even sharper scalpel to cut you deeper and faster. Yeah, so then what?

      Dark and paranoid thought: given that Anthropic very recently ran into issues with their defense contracts, are they playing up their offensive capabilities targeting a notoriously tech- and security-illiterate political establishment to try and force their way back into those sweet government contracts as an impossible-to-ignore offensive tool? I mean we’ve talked about how the cash burn rate for all these companies is sufficiently absurd that it’s going to take something truly crazy to turn these companies self-sustaining before the world runs out of investor money, and military and intelligence budgets are notorious for dragging ludicrous amounts of public money into a dark alley where nobody can see what’s happening to it.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    21 days ago

    Tennesee(!) leads the way, a bill to make training chatbots a Class A felony.

    Hope they get the fullthroated support of LW

    Reddit /r/artificial freaks out (no clue what alignment that subreddit has): https://old.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1slu23a/red_alert_tennessee_is_about_to_make_building/

    via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784650

    edit aww the coward lawmakers have backed down https://www.wjhl.com/news/tennessee-backs-off-sweeping-artificial-intelligence-limits-opts-for-study-instead/

  • sansruse@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/allbirds-bird-stock-shoes-ai.html

    Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes more than 400%

    I had such a hard time coming up with an original joke for this, until i realized the reason why is that allbirds is stealing jokes from the dotcom bubble in the first place.

    The company, valued around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million. The stock surged over 400%, from under $3 a share up to $13. The shoe company had a market cap of about $21 million Tuesday.

    Oh. so, bit of a misleading headline there CNBC. This wasn’t a real publicly traded company, it was a company on life support that got pivoted by a greedy founder looking to cash in. Cynical move or the delusions of a true believer? does it matter?

    Regardless, the stupidity is too much, the resemblance too striking. good luck to Allbirds in the totally normal footwear-to-high tech pivot that is happening in this totally normal economy.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      21 days ago

      The company, valued around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million.

      What the fuck happened here. How did a shoe company get so high and how on earth did it lose 98% of its value? Were shoes really big during covid and then the demand disappeared, wtf

      • ulf@mastodon.nz
        0·
        20 days ago

        @V0ldek @sansruse
        The shoes are/were good. I wear them daily now. Every librarian I know in New Zealand wears them to work, a quick poll in my wider development team at work had 80% of the people wearing them that day and 90% owned at least one pair.

        My guess is someone convinced the founders they could break into the US market and become billionaires, so they took on debt and VC funding and were crushed under the repayments when it didn’t work out.

        If they’d been happy making good shoes, taking home a million bucks a year and staying a profitable business in NZ, I think they’d still be doing that.

        Greed mucks everything up…

      • WellsiteGeo@masto.ai
        0·
        21 days ago

        @V0ldek @sansruse
        Didn’t you read the 4th or 5th volumes of the Hitchhikers trilogy? Where the Golgafrinchan’s (?) economy went through the “Shoe Event Horizon” after the B-ark left, and the survivors took flight, very literally. Built a 5km tall statue of DentArthurDent throwing a teacup, and nested in the teacup.

        All predicted. Techbrodudes making reality match (published) history.

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          20 days ago

          The Golgafrinchans shipped off the B Ark and then died of a plague (book 2). The Shoe Event Horizon happened on Brontitall (radio series) or Frogstar World B (book 2).

      • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
        0·
        21 days ago

        @V0ldek @techtakes

        Bro we all run on tank tracks these days, we’re all absolutely crushing it in the workplace Bro shoes are so pre-AI, you can’t grow forever all the way to upload heaven on a sole

        (Pops another Special K)

      • Kofi Loves Efia :verified:@mstdn.social
        0·
        21 days ago

        @V0ldek @sansruse
        There was a big consumer migration from brick and mortar to online. All of the people who thought themselves the smartest people in the room just knew that would last forever And that the trend in growth would never stop. “Line go up forever!”
        The line did not got up forever, and in 22-23 when there was a return to brick and motor many online businesses were hurt from Amazon to online shoe retail.

    • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      21 days ago

      as someone who’s disabled, the idea of “ethical eugenics” pisses me off to no end. There is no ethical eugenics! You’re systematically destroying classes of people because they don’t fit your standards, there is no way to make it ethical when the very core premise involves taking away human rights

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      20 days ago

      I’m glad someone else was able to coherently discuss how ass-backwards Saltman’s response has been. Like, if anything the fact that he responds to this moment by talking up the importance of democracy over emerging technologies should just be evidence before some distant future revolutionary tribunal that he knows his company is literally Sauron (okay, maybe more the Witch-King of Angmar than Sauron) and doesn’t care because he wants to be the one wearing the ring at the end of the day.