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.)

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    27 days ago

    Qiaochu Yuan (no relationship to the man accused of soliciting a child) left his PhD program to become an “emotional coach.” If his old tweets are any guide then Doctor, heal thyself. G. Duleba and Ozy picked similar careers rather than coaching a soccer team or teaching freshman English like most people who want to be teachers and mentors.

    Edit / Ozy also does not like the PUA advice of Geoffrey Miller and Tucker Max. I think this is less sneering at a stranger than sneering at someone Ozy’s friends know and admire (Miller and Fleischman attend TESCREAL events).

    • TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      27 days ago

      It makes a twisted sort of sense that so many of them go into life coaching. In their hermetically sealed subculture of highly paid, socially inept nerds, it probably pays the bills to set yourself up as an authority on reading social cues.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        27 days ago

        Did you see the Brent Dill stuff today?

        No, it seems to be on the Nazi bar? So Brent Dill now has a YouTube channel and gave a talk about sasquatch.

        Some Vibecamp organizer tweeted that he organized a weekend event with young women and Brent Dill. He agrees with Scott Alexander that figures like Curtis Yarvin are sexy and attract women to your events!

        (ProTip: if you aren’t getting enough feminine energy at your events, advertising it as an opportunity to meet a reputedly DANGEROUS man is a fantastic way to fix that … Like wait…this guy who’s rumored to be <every_bad_male_coded_thing> is the same guy holding space generously and openly with no ‘grabby’ or fearful / aversive energy towards anyone? When was the last time a rationalist guy showed aptitude at THAT?! (For those who don’t know, rat-adjacent women tolerate --or, darkly, cultivate-- bizarre behavior from men as a matter of course, so it was startling that the supposed exemplar of rat-man badness was so far from that energy).

        …

        I love my friends, of course. But many live in this bubble, have never meaningfully connected outside the bubble, and don’t know how: highly unskilled at basic normie relational skills. In a way that reads as very rude if you’re not accustomed to the norms (rather, the lack thereof) in the ffgk bubble. And they have better visibility into the OUTRAGEOUS behavior of the truly danger characters in the scene --the sexual violence, the fraud, the lying, more lying…so much lying.

        …

        AND TO BE ABUNDANTLY CLEAR: sometimes Brent still says he needs outrageous amounts of power and control that no sane person should ever give a person so wounded. To which I say…DON’T DO THAT. THAT WAS REALLY STUPID WHEN BLACK LOTUS DID IT, AND IT WOULD BE BEYOND PROFOUNDLY STUPID TO REPEAT.

        A vibecamp peson replied with screenshots of a chat with with Dill where he claimed that during 2014-2018 he was living in a rationalist group home and had his expenses paid in exchange for serving as an “emotional support dom” for a barely-legal person who had had sex with housemates while under 18, and that drama inside the house lead to the accusations against him (reminder, Dill confessed to doing some very disturbing things to much younger partners on his blog).

        Yuan tweeted in response:

        i was heavily involved with brent dill for a substantial chunk of 2018, when he was embedded in the bay area rationality community. based on those experiences i never want to get involved with him ever again and i highly recommend none of you ever do so either. please note that this is the strongest condemnation i have ever written publicly about anybody

        …

        when this is happening to you, from the inside it feels like finally you’ve found someone who’s saying things that make sense, that matter, who’s bravely pointing out the elephants in the room nobody else is willing to, who is being unfairly persecuted by the popular monkeys, who’s showing you all the social rot and promising in so many words that maybe, just maybe, you and him can fix it together, because you get it, right? you’re not like the others. you see the truth. you’re so special. or whatever. he will tailor different versions of this pitch to different people based on what he’s figured out about you. the pitch includes, among other things, a sophisticated defense against any attempts to warn you about him, which look like confirmation of his persecution thesis

        Can we just take off and drop a small asteroid on Oakland?

          • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            26 days ago

            A lot of people want to know if the Law of Armed Conflict has a “wicked advisors” or “misogynist influencers” clause.

        • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          26 days ago

          this is just PUA bullshit right? Oh akshually women are ATTRACTED to “dominant” men, dangerous men, bad boyz, anyone who challenges this is just too woke to admit the truth

          • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            26 days ago

            I’m extraordinarily reluctant to take the guy’s description at face value. It seems ripe for that thing guys do where a crowd that’s 1/3 women becomes “mostly women” in their perception. But even taking it at face value, what the Hell, you know? He’s holding an event that self-selects for women who are vulnerable to predation and puts them in harm’s way. “Protip: to get more feminine energy at your events, advertise it to alcoholic women and hold it at a brewery!”

            • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              26 days ago

              Scott Alexander literally says this before his story about ‘Henry’ the patient who beat his fifth wife because she objected to him cheating with the ex who had left him after he beat her:

              I feel obligated to say at this point that the specific details of these patient stories are made up, and several of them are composites of multiple different people, in order to protect confidentiality. I’m preserving the general gist, nothing more)

              /s And male rationalists would never, ever hang out with an edgy scary person like Yarvin, Sailer, or Vassar for the thrill and bragging rights! Only teh fe-males would do such a thing. /s

            • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              26 days ago

              When I read rationalist descriptions of other people’s psychology I sense a certain amount of contempt for them (because they are not Rational and of course cannot understand themselves as well as the rationalists can understand them). In this case, the silly woman who doesn’t understand why her expectations are being defied. Maybe it isn’t meant to be contemptuous, but that’s how it comes across to me.

              I dunno, it does read like fiction. Like one of those billionaire romance novels, actually.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      26 days ago

      This sort of stuff makes me feel bad for Ozy. After a decade pushing back against this shit the community still likes it.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        26 days ago

        Yeah. I’m not gonna spring for the paid subscription to read the whole thing, but if we’re gonna be angry at reasonable general-purpose life advice being melded to a toxic and hateful and then put forward as a revolution in human thought and relationships, then I have bad news about the whole rationalist community.

    • TrashGoblin@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      24 days ago

      we don’t actually need human-like AI for paperclip maxxing

      This bit is true though; capitalism is already doing a fine job of paperclip maxxing.

    • it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      26 days ago

      The obsession with utility-maximizing Bayesian agents only gets weirder as time goes on. You couldn’t really get further from the paperclip maximizer concept than an LLM, and yet they still won’t shut up about unaligned goals and hidden utility functions.

  • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    Three scenes and a comment:

    1. Me sitting in the baking heat in my garden, thinking about my own anxiety about climate change (we currently have our 2nd once-in-a-thousand-years record-breaking heatwave in 2 weeks in Europe), food shortages, instability and genocide in the middle east and the rise of the far right across western democracy.

    2. I see another story: some AI bros posting about their “anxiety” about AI being the end of human labour and jobs whilst posing for selfies in their fancy digital nomad resort.

    3. I’m still sweating and scrolling from my garden… I see a quote about how we have to pick between the climate and AI…

    We live in the dumbest and darkest timeline if we cannot collectively see the obvious course of action here. Social media, souped up by LLMs has collectively cooked our brains and hyper-segmented us into tiny echo chambers that don’t have enough gravity to affect change. We need to break out of it

    • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      “We have to pick between the climate or AI”

      No we don’t??? One problem directly affects the other. Stopping AI data centre build-out helps with climate change.

  • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    28 days ago

    This Geekwire piece about anti-ai movement being just like the anti-gmo movement really boils my piss.

    The anti GMO movement was non scientific and the reasons to reject the tech were always vibes. Whereas AI is entirely vibes and the reason to reject it are abundant and obvious - I don’t need to list them in this forum.

    Why did GMOs win the long game? Three reasons that map almost exactly onto AI-generated content.

    First, the product is indistinguishable. Nobody can tell whether the corn syrup in their soda came from a bioengineered cob, and after a while they stop wondering. AI-written prose is already past the Turing threshold for casual reading. Many readers cannot tell a competent LLM draft from a competent human one.

    Yes because LLMs are so great at prose. They definitely don’t keep telling the same story about the same made up characters and locations. And they don’t produce hallucinations that keep getting people into trouble.

    Now the techno fascist billionaire class know how much we hate AI we shouldn’t be too surprised that the flaks are out in force trying to spin anti-ai sentiment as an unjustified position for an educated people. We’re doing something right folks. Keep fighting the good fine.

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

      @samvines @techtakes It’s also missing the point that the original GMO crops that were being promoted were engineered by Monsanto to survive being drenched in Glyphosate, a probably-carcinogenic pesticide, to produce a monopoly in those crop plants for Monsanto. Ugly side of capitalism.

      (If they’d led with golden rice, the reaction would have been different.)

      It also arrived in the late stages of the BSE cull in the UK, at a time when food supply anxiety was at an all-time high.

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        28 days ago

        the original GMO crops

        The original GMO crops would be like, broccoli existing and bananas not sucking ass. Monsanto are villains but they didn’t invent genetics or selection.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        28 days ago

        I also question the degree to which “the other 99% of readers” actually don’t care about AI slop. Even outside the awful bubble here I see AI images get met with at best a weary sigh of “I guess this is the world now” rather than actual acceptance. And I know we’ve talked at some length about how gell-mann amnesia isn’t a very useful model, but I think most people are much less tolerant of slop in areas that the know more about. Maybe I can’t tell an slopware history paper from a real one, but historians certainly can, and they hate that shit. In that sense the “median reader” statistic is misleading because the median reader isn’t particularly invested in most of what gets written anyways, and it’s the lack of investment that makes slop seem plausible. Even the concerns about deep fakes seem like they’re not separate from this general problem, since the same disconnection that makes people uncritically accept deep fakes makes them uncritically accept fake news without an accompanying video, or with a context-stripped video from an unrelated event, or whatever.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      24 days ago

      Honestly, a black comedy about the rats and/or the AI bubble would probably make bank. The years of sneers people have cooked up on them would provide plenty of material for the writers, and there’d be plenty of catharsis in seeing those responsible get ripped into for 2-ish hours straight.

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      25 days ago

      Glitch just wrapped a Youtube series by putting their final episode onto big screens in multiple countries. There’s been a lot of media noise about the difficulty of getting films into theaters, and a lot of blaming Glitch, but there’s not been any understanding about what Glitch actually did differently that is scaring Hollywood. I think it’s that, just like with the Youtubers producing Backrooms and Iron Lung and FNAF, the thing Hollywood misses is the audience demographic. Glitch and other Youtubers are targeting an emerging young-adult audience which wants edgy, gritty, emotionally sincere content that fills the gap between PG-13 and R ratings. To older folks, e.g. Murder Drones is facile cringe, while to tweens (young teens, PG-13 sensibilities) it’s too intense and scary. But it’s a happy medium for catcher-in-the-rye emo young adults, which is why every second t-shirt sold at Hot Topic has a murder drone on it.

      By literally no coincidence, Glitch’s next greenlight is a grimdark gritty deconstruction which critiques the dystopia of Disney parks, illustrated by their brand-new 2D animation department, designed by a former Disney showrunner who left because Disney wouldn’t let them tell stories aimed at young adults. (Dana Terrace, not Alex Hirsch.) Disney’s not the only game in town; Turner previously ran shows by Owen Dennis and Rebecca Sugar while putting pressure on them. Lotta animators with big dreams who have been told “no” by big producers; in particular Lauren Faust supposedly has been waiting for decades for somebody to give her an animation team without creative limits, like Glitch just gave Terrace. (Faust worked on The Iron Giant and animated the character of Sawyer in Cats Don’t Dance; the sheer poetry of her career could be enough to transform the industry (again).)

  • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    26 days ago

    Doodle, the site where you make polls to schedule stuff with friends, that Doodle, wants me to PAY THEM to have a poll with more than 10 dates xDDDDD

    I’m wheezing, I’m sorry, what xD DOODLE? A PRO PLAN for DOODLE? xDDD

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    26 days ago

    Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical (2015):

    I kind of a have a front-row seat here. On the one hand, about half my friends, my girlfriend, and my ex-girlfriend all identify as autistic. For that matter, people keep trying to tell me I’m autistic. When people say “autistic” in cases like this, they mean “introverted, likes math and trains, some unusual sensory sensitivities, and makes cute hand movements when they get excited.” On the other hand, I work as a psychiatrist and some of my patients are autistic. Many of these patients are nonverbal. Many of them are violent. Many of them scream all the time. Some of them seem to live their entire lives as one big effort to kill or maim themselves which is constantly being thwarted by their caretakers and doctors.

    So he can’t be autistic, because then he would have something in common with people who can’t have a respectable upper-middle-class life. And it gets darker:

    But even more controversially, absent such certainty that your child will flourish I think if some kind of genetic-engineering autism-cure existed, parents would have a moral obligation to use it.

    As a good eugenicist, he knows there are simple ways to stop people from passing on their genes. And Scott Alexander wants children, so Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical. QED losers.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      25 days ago

      This feels like yet another case of “what no postmodernism does to a mf”. Because I can kind of agree they ASD is a bit of a weird diagnosis in some respects, but that’s entirely because of an ongoing discussion between different social models of mental diversity. On one hand, much of the autistic community has embraced a model rooted in neurodiversity. The associated behaviors aren’t “abnormal” and happen to nearly everyone to some degree, but some people experience them in different ways that impact how they interact with other people and the world. In this model, we need to emphasize empathy and support to help everyone find a place in the world where they can be happy and fulfilled.

      But Scott as a practicing psychiatrist is strongly invested in the older model of mental illness or mental disability, where some people have mental and behavioral problems that make life more difficult and dangerous for them and those around them, and those people need help to mitigate those problems so they can exist in society. This is obviously a less kind and more authoritarian model than neurodiversity, but it’s easy enough to understand the appeal in circumstances where the challenge of “how do I help people be happy and successful” necessitates asking “how do I reduce or eliminate the risk of physical violence from this person.” Hell, compared to the other model that gets invoked to deal with that question, criminality, it still at least acknowledges that people with high support needs are people whose well-being deserves consideration. A patient is a human being at least to the same degree that a child is, effectively.

      But Scott, being afraid of postmodernism, can’t really allow himself to recognize these as separate models that are valuable in different circumstances, not the least of which is because he’s a fashy little bastard who would have to give up the authority of being a capital-D Doctor in favor of just being an expert on certain elements of the human mind and body. So instead he and his friends are totally neurotypical, yes. Don’t listen to them describe their own experiences, listen to the Doctor Man.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        21 days ago

        I think that backwards (like 1950s and earlier) views of autism are common in American psychiatry, but would love to hear more about his ideas from someone with relevant training. AFAIK no peer has ever commented on his biomedical blogging, like experts have commented on his eugenics promotion and cozy relationship with white supremacists and neoreactionaries. He never seems to have written for any professional venue either.

    • it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      26 days ago

      A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It’s also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can’t coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        25 days ago

        Its like he wrote “many of my friends identify as heterosexual, and they say I might be heterosexual too, but in my work as a forensic psychiatrist my heterosexual patients are accused rapists and sex pests and people who got arrested with a suitcase full of cocaine and a phone full of texts from a 'Brazilian model.” and never tried to reconcile the two or thought through the Bayesian logic.

        • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          25 days ago

          You’re telling me that the Autism Spectrum is a spectrum and not just the quirky thing people have?

          • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            25 days ago

            (sarcasm) I’m saying that just because I get sucked off by guys does not mean I’m one of those queers! I don’t go to pride parades or leather bars or have fashion sense and everyone knows that is what ‘gay’ means. I’m as heterosexual as Ted Haggard. (end sarcasm)

          • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            24 days ago

            You see this particular kind of bigotry quite a bit in relation to neurodivervence and disability. It’s an attempt to beat people advocating for equality and justice by claiming a moral high ground. Oh, you think disabled people can have meaningful and worthwhile lives and that differences should be celebrated?? You must be too ignorant to know just how awful life is for people who really have that disability!

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    26 days ago

    a coworker set up an argument, almost a syllogism, I can’t quite fill it in, maybe yall can

    1. enshitification
    2. shit rolls down hill
    3. therefore: ?
    spoiler
    1. PROFIT
    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      26 days ago

      1. Shit piles up at the bottom of the hill

      2. Bottom of the hill elevates until it reaches the enshittifiers

      3. Dinosaur eats man

      4. Woman inherits the earth