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submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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.)

(OT: 🎶 Do you remember...)

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[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 1 points 2 minutes ago
[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 6 points 2 hours ago

Drew DeVault diagnoses the orange site, explaining why it's the vanguard of the tech-fash pipeline. Of course HN immediately flags it into oblivion.

[-] flowerysong@awful.systems 6 points 3 hours ago

Radicle, the peer-to-peer Git forge designed by cryptocurrency weirdos, made a little whoopsy-doodle and left the encryption out of their transport layer and the authentication out of the authentication handshake: https://radicle.dev/2026/09/23/disclosure-of-vulnerability-in-network-protocol

Shot:

Anyone who can observe the network path between two nodes can read the data they exchange as the data is sent in plain text.

Chaser:

Peer authentication in the connection handshake is broken and allows impersonation. An attacker can connect to your node and present a Node ID that is not its own.

[-] jaschop@awful.systems 1 points 19 minutes ago* (last edited 19 minutes ago)

The concept seemed interesting to me, but they did seem to enjoy making everything as complicated as possible.

I did find a CLAUDE.md when I was browsing their core repos a while back. That was only the web frontend I believe, not the core algorithm. Though it seems generous to assume they weren't slopping up that one too.

[-] antifuchs@awful.systems 4 points 3 hours ago

Because somebody brought up the idea of “recursive self-improvement”, a sneer bubbles to the top: The same people already certain they're accurately evaluating human talent via job interviews and performance reviews are talking about recursive “improvement”. That might tell one something.

[-] lurker@awful.systems 2 points 2 hours ago

Apparently on the WSJ podcast they started claiming that they’ve achieved RSI

wonder why they said that on a podcast and not on a peer reviewed paper…

[-] antifuchs@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago

One more: I gotta check with my physical therapist if her job is safe now that RSI is being taken over by AI

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 2 hours ago

clearly they meant RSI as in repetitive strain injury, from jerking each other off so much

[-] antifuchs@awful.systems 3 points 2 hours ago

Jokes on them, I’ve developed chronic RSI for free, decades ago

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 8 points 7 hours ago

https://reason.com/2026/09/22/the-ai-safety-movement-is-making-ai-less-safe/

(Torres, ironically, misidentifies TESCREAL as a form of "libertarian transhumanism," not realizing how horrifying the TESCREAL utopia would be to most libertarians.)

"most" lol

[-] istewart@awful.systems 4 points 6 hours ago

https://reason.com/2026/09/22/the-ai-safety-movement-is-making-ai-less-safe/

The folks at Reason continue to misidentify as libertarians, not realizing they're advocating for the shambling corpse of what was already an unhealthy movement

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 4 points 7 hours ago

I don't know this newspaper but

AI starts believing in God, ghosts and the Loch Ness Monster

Google boffins discovered that disabling safety protocols led AI to profess belief in phantoms, vampires and the Loch Ness monster.

One sec, updating my priors. P(Nessie) > P(doom).

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2 points 6 hours ago

Looks to be a spinoff of the red-top tabloid the Daily Star. So, hardly a solid source of info.

Still, good to show what kinda shit LLMs spew out on a constant basis

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

Zvi "I made my chops playing pro MtG" Moskovitz discovers that baldly stating that AI will kill us all fails to convince people who have a lot of money riding on the status quo, and freaks out about it

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8eDaCvSRzzKCxKSEk/politics-gets-interested-in-those-trying-not-to-die

New York Post gets way more attention than that rag deserves, tbh

You wanna dance with Murdoch Sacks and Trump, you best bring your A game. Maybe use some of that FTX cash to hire some real lobbyists and skip the blogging.

[-] lurker@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 2 points 10 hours ago

An ai generated site, r/sneerclub really went downhill

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 4 points 13 hours ago

Ah yes I always wanted to read an article in the form of a lot of teeny tiny boxes with lots and lots of janky scrolling.

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 17 hours ago

TESCREAL schism indicator

[-] BioMan@awful.systems 6 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

It is claiming that Yud is wrong in saying Doom before Massive AI-Caused Economic Boom boosts GDP growth above 5% by saying the boom is here.

Nah.

This is totally from some accelerationist or oligarch-toadie beefing with someone harshing their vibe

[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 3 points 3 hours ago

I think you're probably right. I originally thought it must have been created by a rationalist, but an e/acc author makes more sense. After all, most of them are postrationalists.

[-] istewart@awful.systems 5 points 17 hours ago

Damn, who knew this would yield material for my boy-band cover/parody project. Foom flop, doo wop wop wop...

[-] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 7 points 18 hours ago

Despite the fact that it highlights all the times Yudkowsky was wrong, this site feels like it could have been produced by a rationalist. In addition to all the AI slop, it just has that feel.

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 8 points 18 hours ago

it just has that feel.

yeah. Looking past the initial quiz, a lot of the complaints about Eliezer's predictions feel like rationalist inside-baseball about takeoff speeds and alignment strategies, as opposed to calling the whole thing bunk.

[-] scruiser@awful.systems 4 points 19 hours ago

Wow... I actually failed to get some of the times Eliezer has been wrong! His predictions are even worse than I remembered!

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 4 points 21 hours ago

people have noted that the writing style unfortunately appears to be ai-generated

Fittingly ironic, in my opinion.

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

Donald Trump is claiming superintelligence is here

also Sam Altman’s gonna be at the UN tonight, which is definitely not a concern

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 1 points 2 hours ago

Is this a play to get openai out of its obligations to microsoft?

[-] lurker@awful.systems 1 points 36 minutes ago

It’s probably a play to “beat” China by claiming they ‘‘made’’ superintelligence before China did

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 16 points 1 day ago
[-] EFreethought@awful.systems 2 points 18 hours ago

I guess OpenAI's attitude towards its users is: Quality for me, slop for thee.

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 16 points 1 day ago

And not just from AI getting fed into the AI:

404 Media spoke to a fourth contractor who has worked on training models for various AI companies. They said they sometimes purposefully chose the worst responses because they wanted to actively sabotage the models’ training.

“I did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start,” they said. “I either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely choose the [worst] output. I’m not sure how much of a difference it actually makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results, but it does feel like I’m getting paid to make AI worse.”

[-] schnoopy@awful.systems 5 points 17 hours ago

This person understands sabotage and is wielding more power than any defeatist.

They are doing a politics, as opposed to performing being political.

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[-] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

I’ve been seeing some new terms pop up around AI use, namely “cognitive surrender,” and also “cognitive offloading”. I’m not in the mood for the full etymology dive, so the source I’m stopping at on the provenance would be a paper from Wharton. The meanings are pretty intuitive, at least based on how I’ve seen them used. Offloading would be when you delegate some of your thinking to something else, and surrender would be complete offloading.

I am not under the impression that people here haven’t seen these phrases before. “cognitive surrender” has been mentioned, as far as I can tell, only one time on this instance. So just thought I’d bring it up.

[-] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 4 points 18 hours ago

I think cognitive offloading has come up a number of times here, but I don't know that cognitive surrender has been brought up as much. It reminds me of The Colonization of Confidence by Robert Kingett, particularly the stretch where Leo is convinced that his actual voice as a writer is strictly inferior to the generic AI slop. There's a sense of active despair there that seems worth acknowledging if we're going to have that conversation.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 3 points 18 hours ago

My bad, it was late when I posted and I only searched for surrender.

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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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