Want to wade into the snowy 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 soo 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.
(2026 is off to a great start, isn’t it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
OT: He’s gone. Last thing he saw was my face and then there was no more pain. His veins had all collapsed (vet had to inject the phenobarb into the liver), so I was right to bring him in when I did.
I’m so sorry to hear that.
Sorry for you and your cat. You did the right thing, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
Sorry man, at least his suffering is through
💔
also the universe has granted me a small mercy and for once the alcohol/semaglutide thing I mentioned a thread or so ago seems to be totally impotent against the might of scottish chemical engineering. thank you jesus
I’m so sorry. it’s never easy when this happens, but for what it’s worth it sounds like you gave him the best life possible. it takes a great deal of strength to be with a pet until the very end, and I hope you’re able to take the time you need to grieve and recover your emotional strength.
I adopted him from the shelter. He’d spent months if not close to a year there and no one wanted him. If I hadn’t adopted him, he would have been put down the next day. That was close to eight years ago. He was antisocial to other people but loved me.
thanks to you he had 8 more years of life and a much happier existence than any he’d known before he met you. I think that’s remarkable.
my condolences; we’ve gone through similar with our previous cats, all rescuees, and even when you know it’s the right decision, the pain is still there.
Sorry for you and your cat.
Fuck, sorry :( internet hugs available if desired
OT: My truck got rear ended today, and then my cat had breathing difficulties when I got home…he’s under oxygen at the university clinic right now and its probably cancer instead of pneumonia. Just feeling totally destroyed rn.
Clinic called back. Its metastasized through his lungs and he’s got months tops. Probably going to be less bc vet said he’s suffering.
Man, that’s rough. I know it’s not much but I’m sending you positive energy from where I am.
That is shit, also sending good vibes. It never is just one thing isnt it. Bad luck always seems to come in multiples.
That’s awful. I’m sorry.
🫂
🫂
i am so sorry
My condolences, that truly sucks :(
i’m so sorry. (tentative hug of support, if acceptable.)
Thinking of yall
That absolutely blows, friend. Hang in there and we’ll see you around.
that sucks hard, I’m sorry. mine recently too, went from “looking a bit off” to “have to put 'em down” in less than a month. still hits me like a truck
hope it goes as well as possible for y’all
Fuck bro that sucks
Hey I think I discovered a way to fix America! What if we rewrite the US Constitution in Rust?
maybe memory safety would help people remember what letting fascists run things tends to do to your country?
P0 blocker: USAian memory management suffers from multiple holes and transactional consistency issues
Prior attempts haven’t worked, closing LOLBUG
Too late, I already put it on the blockchain.
Nearly laughed out loud in a waiting room
I’d personally just overthrow the US government and make it a British colony once more /j
You should probably read “Monarcjy Considered Harmful” (1776)
Edit: sorry I’ll behave now
promises promises… ;p
;D
brexit would look wild in that timeline
Breconstruction
*pig turned into a frog
I’m doing this shitey online optional module for my college course because I left it too late to pick a proper one, and Christ in heaven people are using a lot of AI. This is meant to be a class about sustainability
My wife has been saying the same thing about her accounting courses. It’s absolutely nuts.
Genuinely don’t understand how dependent these people are on AI. “I’ll generate an image of a skeleton at a bus stop” one of them said (it was relevant). I’ll go to Google images, I said. It’s faster! And you don’t end up with a mangled version of the Dublin Bus logo!
in the fall of 2024, i was getting teams messages from my students that were clearly llm-generated
The purpose of this block of code is to efficiently BLAH FUCKING BLAH WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT
i have to assume it’s only gotten worse
I’ve started seeing people make paperwork with explicit carve-outs for prompt use (merely referred to as “AI” with no explicit definition, so …. gonna be fun when the lawsuits start)
got my Urbit newsletter for this quarter (or whatever the fuck the cadence is) and what stood out to me this time was nockchain.org. I was going to sit and do a deep dive to come up with sneers for this but I just don’t have the executive function right now. @self thoughts?
dear fuck just when I think I’m out urbit pulls me back in
analysis coming soon, I’m reviewing some technical sources provided by a world-class cryptocurrency expert (yes it’s @dgerard@awful.systems) and howdy fuck does this ever resemble the cardano grift but with Haskell replaced with a much worse ML with a much less coherent type system
but with Haskell replaced with a much worse ML with a much less coherent type system
Urbit moment
Are there any resources(read: sneers) on cardano*? I have a family member who is into that shit.
* Cardano specifically I mean, I am already aware of the extensive literature on crypto in general
here’s mine on their foray into smart contracts https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/09/06/news-the-eos-ico-was-a-fake-pump-cardano-smart-contracts-fail-cycling-vs-nexthash-microstrategy-de-indexed-el-salvador-live-tomorrow/
cardano is a shitcoin for traders to trade like a shitcoin and it pretends being written in Haskell by a mathematician who failed to get his degree, lied about going into a Ph.D program and claimed to have worked for DARPA but did not makes it very interesting and not just a shitcoin. this turns out not to be the case.
It’s a very elaborate parkour trick in Haskell that through piles and piles or rigorous category theory manages to achieve Nothing in a type-safe manner.
That sounds awesome and right up my alley!
…oh, it’s some financialized gambling racket bullshit thing never the fuck mind
I know zilch about linux but I think there was some discussion in here about suckless. Well look at what I came across on an honest to god nazi’s website*:
*yes, I have reported this site to their web hosting provider.
Lately, I’ve become more and more concerned that “systemd free” is shifting from a thoughtful objection to an outright crank signifier
It really is insane how many of these fashies hate systemd. Whenever someone says they dislike systemd(or rust being in everything, which is another thing these people seem to object heavily to) I immediately check their history for any weirdo shit and nine out of ten times they turn out to be fash. Saying this as someone who doesn’t particularly like sytemd either.
I’ve always thought of linux as a vaguely commie thing but it seems like a) there were more libertarians in there than I thought, b) using linux appeals to some very right wing freaks who don’t like the idea of not being in total control, and c) there’s a right wing computer culture promoted by online influencers to nerdy young men, not dissimilar to right wing gamer culture.
The above site is hosted on neocities. I’ve been involved in the small web/personal web/indie web for a while (almost 6 years now, Jesus) and I knew there’s a more right wing side to it but I hadn’t come across it much (except for digdeeper linked to above, whose online privacy guides I read and took seriously before he started posting about Covid and I realized he was a conspiracy theorist). Then recently I found a neonazi’s site on neocities through a Christian webring* and spent a while looking around in morbid fascination.
*You can’t join if you support abortion or gay people, but apparently they don’t check to make sure you’re not a Nazi. I’m tempted to set up a competing webring for Christians with normal views…
I could see Linux attracting the “I am a superior intellect” types and then those people drifting rightward over the last ten years. If they didn’t start out far right.
definitely. plus the woman-hating background radiation of a lot of online communities and media for teenage boys.
I found out about the rightwing / misogynist strain of FOSS mostly via the furore over RMS defending Minsky from Epstein allegations.
i was aware of “left-wing but rancid about women” as a common political perspective in techy fields, but I wasn’t aware of many out and out right-wingers in the FOSS world specifically (beyond the odd TempleOS type kook).
burzum and luke smith, that tracks as well
Also being weird about systemd (not saying that’s an automatic nazi thing, I am myself a bit weird about it as well, but y’know…)
Hating systemd and/or Wayland isn’t a sure sign that someone is a fascist, but it’s one data point in that direction for sure.
@TrashGoblin @techtakes Au contraire: I am old and grumpy and I want UNIX (or rather, Linux) the way it was in 2003, none of this bullshit new-fangled nonsense that I don’t understand.
Hint: a LOT of computer users—as opposed to lascivious glassy-eyed computer touchers—are like this. We just want to get shit done, not force-learn a new workflow or debugging tool every five seconds (or years).
Any tips on managing the guy-urge to assume good faith? I know what to expect of “contrarian thinkers” but there is always that fish-brain saying “Well, you don’t know a lot about the topic. And who knows, the vibes you feel could be wrong and you could even broaden your worldview” (spoilers: it doesn’t broaden). So much time and energy wasted by trying to dig nuggets of gold out of piles of dung.
I’ve joked sometimes that I was lucky in that my childhood reading included more pulp mysteries than pulp science fiction, so my instinct is to think everyone is hiding their agendas by telling half-truths.
“Well, Detective. It looks like this is a house of lies… and wankers.”
part of what helps is coming here and seeing the spectrum of chud output to inoculate yourself a little.
What REALLY helps is broadening your own knowledge and worldview, in the sense that when you realise that everything is political, you start asking yourself the meta questions. Like, what’s the agenda here, what’s not being said, etc. I mean, understanding author intention is already part of reading comprehension, it’s going a little further beyond the face-value meaning. As the memes say, you are not immune to propaganda.
I would add to this that, just to keep things interesting, I also hear the “everything is political” and “do your own research” lines from the absolute looniest cranks and conspiracists. It can be a way to lock yourself into your current positions and dismiss people who disagree, even when those positions are objectively insane.
Having a broad base of knowledge and understanding a range of different perspectives is important, but the best way to do that includes keeping an open mind and engaging with things that are absolutely not, in the final accounting, worth the time and energy to do so (referring once again to the cranks and conspiracists). The best way I can think to deal with this is to seek out media and discussion spaces that don’t have either a general public or someone like you specifically as the intended audience. And a lot of what gets sneered here does seem to fit into that category, since it’s a lot of technocapital cultists writing things for each other rather than giving interviews to the NYT. Like, there is no amount of empathy that will make Curtis Yarvin seem decent when he’s writing for other fascists, but you won’t necessarily see that unless you’re looking a bit deeper than the public profiles.
My following response is a little rambly and unfocused, sorry!
I also hear the “everything is political” and “do your own research” lines from the absolute looniest cranks and conspiracists.
Yes, I acknowledge that you will hear this from them. What they mean can differ and usually is pretty extreme, e.g. “democrats are making the frogs gay with fluoride”, “lizard people illuminati”, or even “there’s a war on Christmas” type shit. And when they say “do your own research”, they don’t mean “seek out a variety of sources and verifiable data”, they mean “read the stuff that agrees with what I’m saying”.
When I say that everything is political, I mean that at minimum, language is political, and because you need language to talk about anything, everything becomes political. How things are named skews perception; the most relevant example to us is AI. We know that there is no “intelligence” in an LLM, but does the public? etc. I’ll admit that many might find this trivial, but I would counter that most of these strawmen are the same ones who are scared of pronouns and say they don’t know what they are allowed to say in the workplace anymore.
And generally agree with your second paragraph :) I don’t think anyone here needs this reminder, but I’ll note that an open mind means that you don’t just reject everything new that comes to you; you at least look at it for a bit, see if it passes whatever metaphorical sniff tests you have, and then choose to toss it or engage further. I’m not saying everyone has a nefarious agenda they are trying to push; there are definitely spaces where people are attempting purely informational reporting.
And to bring it back to the original question, it’s essential to try to avoid Gell-Mann amnesia. If you read something and it’s not exactly within your purview, and you’re not sure if it’s being said in good faith, you should try to see what else the person has said, especially about things you know about.
aw, well, i’m not precious about the term. All I meant was that if you look at someone’s post history and they’re a chud, that should inform how you read whatever they write.
Yeah, sorry, this is just a pet peeve of mine. People, including many who should know better, have adopted a term specifically designed to shut down media literacy and foment a “do your own research” culture, and it maddens me.
All good friendo
I think actually listening to people remains important. But you’re only truly listening to someone when you try to understand when they lie or the ways they can be wrong.
Assuming 100% good faith is not actually the most empathetic way to engage with a person.
Since someone linked to Bergstrom above, I wanted to mention his Marshack Colloquium talk from last year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxn40xiK9g0 - basically the idea is we are all “information foragers” but the “information environment” has shifted radically around us all in a really short amount of time. In “information abundance” the right strategy is to visit a lot more different sites instead of just a few, if the model / analogy works for people about as good as it does for ant eaters. If vibes are off, on to the next tab, it will broaden your worldview too.
It’s pattern recognition.
Listen enough to chuds and you learn to recognise chuds based on vibes. You can approach people with 100% good faith, but the moment you sniff a chud – trust your guts.
The simplenote post from a VibeCamp attendee claimed that “prior to Scott Alexander’s articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall,” Any idea what post he was thinking of? Know Your Amphetamines - archive was from January 2021 so about the time VibeCamp got started.
The post is undated but mentions Hereticon in January 2022. Update: it links several more simplenote posts with statements like “It’s 2022 as of the time of this writing” and “as of Mar 30 2022.” The author lived in Austin when Aella was there. So it seems likely that the post about VibeCamp was written in 2022.
Update Again: the author posted to Substack under a meatspace name and linked “Know Your Amphetamines”. I don’t recommend reading the whole post, its just an unpleasant person with logorrhea unloading a stream of consciousness at unpleasant people.
yeah that’s a classic
MDMA, however, is meth; it’s literally its name: three-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine.
amazing
H2O2 is just water with an extra O.
Water 2.0, get on it or get left behind!
Rationalists 🤝 Postrationalists Writing screeds about how following the advice of Internet posts and self-medicating with controlled substances can be good if you are very smart
I think thats Eiganrobot’s wife’s gay escort ex.
Also had a beef with Aella when they were both in Austin!
They are not beating the allegations that a Postrationalist is a Rationalist who admits Yud is just a dude and their goals are religious goals.
Update: There is a partially cached Facebook post where MacDonald states what he claims is Eigenrobot’s government name and says that Eigenrobot’s “(self admitted) BPD wife used to want to fuck me” (Google and Bing saved snippets, but do not share the full cache). That could have been what got him kicked out of VibeCamp for doxxing.
My 9495 word screed about how I did meth before the cool kids and turned out fine is raising a lot of questions already answered by my 9495 word screed.
I can’t comment on this better than bergstrom did, so link
Keeper should sell their customer lists to other dating services so those services can keep those weirdos out.
Should have noted Hunter Ash admitted to being a pedophile.
From the name alone I assumed it was going to try and turn the whole universe into an endless field of 3/3 elk tokens.
update on the grok csam story: the heat on this was not dying down, so X has taken steps to address the issue.
update update: by restricting the csam generator to paying users
update update update: actually they didn’t do that https://www.theverge.com/news/859309/grok-undressing-limit-access-gaslighting
@sc_griffith @BlueMonday1984 So just making it official that rich white men can commit all the sex crimes they want but those with less privilege might be stopped or face consequences.
If that won’t sell it to governments around the world, I don’t know what will. Elon’s on to a winner with that strategy.
new odium symposium episode, available on all platforms: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-7-whos-147209632
this time we looked at gerald schoenewolfe, a “gender centrist” psychoanalyst. lots of discussion of freud in this one
on a side note, we sent off an email hoping to get a podcast network to fund us to do a miniseries on rationalists. i think there’s basically no chance this sort of cold call works but 🤞🏼
slaps roof of episode This bad breast can fit so many bad penises in it.
You might consider pitching Cursed Media if that’s not who you already pitched-- I’ve been wishing for a while they had some EA/rationalist experts around who could do a series.
that is who we reached out to. i think rat material would fit extremely well with what they’ve got going on and represents a significant gap in their current coverage
The number of times I’ve been listening to QAA and thought “dang, these guys are missing a lot of relevant context” when talking particularly about the current crop of tech oligarchs is high enough that I have at times had to hit pause and step away for a while.
unfortunately i don’t think there’s any way to communicate how significant the gap is without coming off as condescending or churlish. but like qaa is probably my favorite podcast and i too am tormented by this
SFGATE columnist Drew Magary has decreed “The time has come to declare war on AI”, and put out a pretty solid sneer in the process. Bonus points for openly sneering billionaire propaganda service Ground News, too.
Found someone showing some well-founded concern over the state of programming, and decided to share it before heading off to bed:
alt text:
Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I’ve had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don’t work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I’m absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis’ because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry’s knowledge is really significant, and it’s honestly very scary.
Haha, wow the reactions to that, 3 levels deep and suddenly people are talking about screws. (Im being positive here btw, funny to see what people have made/learned and how happy they seem with it).
