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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)

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[-] gerikson@awful.systems 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

So there are 2 explanations to why mssrs Altman and Amodei have decided to 'slow down' "AI" development:

  1. it's too dangerous, any misstep could awaken the evil Robot Satan and kill us all
  2. the rate of progress in new GenAI models has slowed down dramatically, and there's no obvious way to fix that

I'll let you guess which explanation I find most likely.

edit I missed "blatant regulatory capture"

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/14/big-ai-sets-out-its-terms-for-regulatory-capture-and-calls-it-pace-the-frontier/5296067

[-] Jmelloy@vis.social 2 points 1 hour ago

@gerikson @cstross no obvious way to fix that, (and previous attempts were expensive)

[-] SoftwareTheron@mas.to 7 points 20 hours ago

@gerikson @BlueMonday1984
Also they dare not actually let the market price their shares.

[-] grievousangel@ravenation.club 10 points 23 hours ago

@gerikson My assumption is that they want a regulatory moat to protect “frontier” models from “open weight” / AKA cheap models.

It’s just margin protection.

[-] gbsills@social.vivaldi.net 10 points 1 day ago

@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 Yeah, the whole idea is to perpetuate the myth that these companies are really close to coming out with a product that people will actually pay to use. A product that people will pay enough to cover its cost. They want to simultaneously make an excuse for why it is taking so long while making gormless investors think it is just around the corner.

[-] BioMan@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

The symbiosis between the rabid cultists, the technofedual wannabe-lords, and the get rich quick grifters is so weird to watch.

[-] samvines@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Also the frontier "labs" are rapidly running out of money and having to raise more and more insane investment rounds. This is a great way to save face and back away from burning $$$$ on training runs that push the frontier of can a model rearrange some arbitrary coloured squares by 10% next they just need to solve the problem of how to make their customers pay cost+ on inference when they've been giving it away at steep discounts for nearly 4 years... Easy!

this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2026
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