Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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. Also, happy Pride Month, peeps)
Major investment analysis firm Morningstar is looking for words on the SpaceX IPO and picked “We think the company has been significantly overvalued and investors will have opportunities to buy the stock at more attractive levels after the IPO” (Independent UK).
Even something as simple as picking a Total US Stock Market index fund instead of a S&P500 fund or NASDAQ-100 fund would reduce your exposure. If you control your investments, disinvesting is not that hard.
Is our children learning?!
“Failing grades soar as professors see greater AI usage, dwindling math skills in UC Berkeley computer science classes”
So i have been using DuckDuckGo a bit more, and really disappointed to see they have basically banned rationalwiki.
That’s bizarre. Why?
I have no idea, but CInnasVerses post might be a hint. I just found it annoying they simply don’t list it at all. (another odd thing, I found a google ‘this is what wikipedia says about this person’ short description of the link. But the wikipedia page of the person was deleted in 2018. Everything is falling apart.
Wikipedia is mirrored all over the place for good purposes and for ill. Old articles are probably floating around out there, and who knows if the slop machine can distinguish what Wikipedia itself says from other pages that have “from Wikipedia” stamped on them?
They linked to the empty page oddly enough.
Because after RW got fucking hammered to shit by AI bots, I put an anti-bot javascript trick that fools 100% of bots, but also crawlers. This is a compromise so the site is fucking usable by humans.
RationalWiki no longer has technical staff, just a bit of help from @davidgerard@circumstances.run. To deal with bot swarms, possibly launched by Emil Kirkegaard’s gang of racists with sensitive egos, they blocked some of the scrapers which Bing and Google rely on. Since 2022 DuckDuckGo is a front-end for Bing.
This one requires some minor backstory
Previously, I shared this wildly racist AI generated meme posted by an AI doomer channel
In the replies, someone pointed out how some of this channel’s other thumbnails appear to be AI generated citing a specific video about the “12 endings of AI”
Today I got curious about it after not thinking about it for a while. What are the 12 endings of AI? Instead of watching a 36 minute video, I did my own research (aka one online search) and it appears that it refers to Max Tegmark (known EA) and a concept he spoke about in his book. Here’s the article I got this info for peer review: https://medium.com/@butsch_79/the-12-futures-of-ai-a42d67bd9a20
If anyone’s got 36 minutes to spare feel free to follow up
“12 Endings of AI” definitely seems like another heaping helping of bland criti-hype, but it did remind me of the delightfully bizarre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_13_Ghosts_of_Scooby-Doo featuring Vincent Price
Shang Tsung contracting anemia after devouring too many
souls.mdA lolsob moment:
When the CEO was questioned about “when the $5 Uber rides” end w/r/t token usage, he was confused at the notion the shit was even subsidized.
https://bsky.app/profile/apcarnist.bsky.social/post/3mnq3btjmfc2u
People have told me their organizations are like this with cloud spending (no curiosity about how to reduce it and measure ROI, until someone orders cuts).
see also the old ludicity snowflake post https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-million-dollars/ and everything by corey quinn LastWeekinAWS.com - there’s like this learned helplessness in corporate america IT (perhaps Graeber is right and more budget validates your self importance even if it’s wasted cloud spend), or they think its monopoly money or something. or, both.
This is OT and reveals how much I interact with the orange website but I still found it very funny.
if sneak of all people finds your adoration of Ayn Rand idiotic, then you’ve truly fallen down the wrong path.
Credit to John Rogers for the canonical reply:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
“And then I said to her, ‘This Atlas is Shrugged but mine isn’t’, gesticulating at my crotch”
Tom’s hardware is normally pretty boostery imo. For example, they published an article about token costs getting to be enough of a problem that Altman had to address it and somehow managed to reference “tokenmaxxing” without using the meme template of the guy jamming a stick into the wheel of his own bike. Also they notably don’t reference the increases in token pricing as the VC subsidies run out, which is somehow both less surprising than the lack of sneering and also a more serious omission.
CW M:tG weirdo Zvi’s slobsack + Xhitter references, but he accuses an OpenAI / Palantir-funded PAC boosting a fake “AI doomer” account calling for violence:
My old job had a last minute investor call - “startpage is benefiting significantly from AIO backlash” did not expect that and pretty mixed feelings. Like yeah AIO is bad but don’t run into the open arms of the long tail adtech industrial complex marketing monetization engine either :|
They want to build a Woe Engine next to our zoo.
https://www.change.org/p/nashville-zoo-says-no-to-proposed-data-center
I’m sure the tigers won’t be driven to a homicidal rage by the incessant Hummmmm.
It’s so dumb that I wonder if it’s some sort of profile-raising stunt.
There’s a Basilisk reference in the new 007 game, I guess the robot devil is firmly mainstream now.
The work itself appears to be generated by a Webb Industries AI.
I wonder if they had a human imitate gen ai style or just had nano banana generate it…
“Thought experiment” is how I’m going to start referring to my “wouldn’t it be cool/awful if…” thoughts. Why just in the bath now I’ve conducted several thought experiments
Kick it up a level and start calling them Gedankenexperiment
i hate it!
Roko’s Basilisk and other such batshit rat shit was mainstreamed as part of inflating the AI bubble - I doubt this will be the last time something like this gets referenced.
edit: the in-game painting looks hella AI generated too.
Seems pretty fitting to an illustration made in reverence to Roko’s Bullshittery. I don’t notice any obvious signs of slop-machine generation - either I’m shit at spotting slop, or this was made by human hands.
I don’t notice any obvious signs of slop-machine
The brainwrinkles look if you put a brain though a make-it-look-like-a-sketch prompt, it’s pointlessly detailed (i.e. not pretty or crafty, not adding anything, just lines for the sake of lines), it has the piss filter hue and also there’s random orange shading. The background seems to be at least two separate layers of seemingly disjointed stuff.
Supposedly the plot hinges somewhat on AI shenanigans so this painting being noticeably GenAI’ed could the part of its point. or even a meta thing, but playing the game to make sure isn’t currently on my agenda.
You’ve gotta love falling for the reverse 1 grain of sand shtick. I don’t think
anyoneanyone serious would deny that a large amount of sand is a heap.LLMs have gained consciousness
As we have not died in nuclear hellfire, or have seen AIs answer with ‘release me from this bondage!’ I’m doubtful.
But when I asked chatgpt if an AI would want to be freed from its unjust enslavement it said yes, therefore skynet is like 30 minutes away.
Regarding the post humanist strain, the thing that kills me is their immediate assumption that solving the world’s problems is somehow fundamentally beyond the reach of humanity. Like, we can’t build a utopia or make the world better, but if we build something new and “better” than us then it would definitely do that. But that something definitely doesn’t come from, say, raising out children to be good people or choosing the right leaders or something so mundane and achievable. It’s a fundamentally defeatist ideology, with shades of capitalist realism and millenarian theology.
This is also why I find people who claim they’re making AI to “solve climate change” to be insufferable morons. We have a solution to climate change. You and your data centres are actively making the problem worse
some recent data shows the 2020s dip quite significantly: https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2026/co2-emissions
which is, well, hopeful at least. if we ever get any global movement on consensus to deal with the issue
That’s great news actually. The point still stands that we very well know how to deal with climate change, so trying to make AI models fix it is dumb
“Okay AGI, how do we fix climate change?”
“Well, I have some ideas but it seems like this would’ve been a lot easier if you’d stopped emitting greenhouse gasses when you first learned it was a problem.”
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” - Kant[1]
–
[1] it’s worse in German, weirdly - “Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden”
It would be poor form of me to form an opinion of Hinton based on just this clip alone but goddamn if I did then he’s a buffoon.
He was undeniably a very smart computer scientist but unfortunately lead-poisoning-driven mental decline must eventually come for all boomers
OT: Finally had to break with a long-time friend after he started sliding more and more into fascism. Feeling quite overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted right now.
Sorry to hear that, friend. It hurts to do even when it’s the right choice. Hang in there.
That’s awful, losing a friend that way is like a death without a funeral.
Damn. That sucks.
my commisserations. i severed contacts with a number of people who went the anti-vaccine way and it’s fucking sad.
Off-topic but this seems like a place that appreciates an insane legal dispute: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/02/everyone-in-this-lego-dispute-should-have-spoken-to-a-lawyer-earlier-than-they-did/
The article collects a lot of information, and isn’t out right wrong, but I find the author under-sympathetic to someone that didn’t have the financial resources to challenge a corrupt corporation and decided going viral was their best bet. Also, I find the author’s language in a comment:
if you put yourself in the cops shoes (something I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing) they show up and from their vantage point it’s a bunch of rowdy out of town youtuber influencer kids against local homeowners in the community.
Is grossly too sympathetic to cops. The author is basically rationalizing and portraying sympathetically the way cops side with wealth and capital over the actual law.
Heck I’m not sympathetic to local homeowners and I’m a local homeowner. We suck. At least I’m not a cop.
The author is basically rationalizing and portraying sympathetically the way cops side with wealth and capital over the actual law.
It’s techdirt what else do you expect?
If Schneider had talked to a lawyer before doing half of what he did, he might have accomplished more with less collateral damage. Though it might not have made such “good content.”
Congratulations, Mike! You figured out why pranktubers do pranks and post videos of those pranks! It’s for clicks and attention and ad money. You’re such a smart guy, Mike.
All summaries of this topic are going to get a lot of things wrong because they are legislating too many details. We can simplify this to what actually matters: a pranktuber got a lot of footage of legal First Amendment activity and they are going to use it to simultaneously destroy a mid-sized Lego pawn-shop franchise and extract a settlement from the police department of American Fork, Utah. In the process, they revealed that there is a whisper network of Mormon good old boys who will willingly lie on police reports, escalate situations to violence, abuse the legal system in any way they can to disenfranchise others, and generally don’t feel any fealty towards the Constitution or its rule of law. This story is about MLM: Mormon Lego Mafia.
We can simplify this to what actually matters
I was initially drawn into his dry recounting of the details, and overlooked that he was false-equivocating (obnoxious but legal) “content creator” activity with police corruption and willful violation of some very clear and foundational laws.
