Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2 March 2025 - awful.systems
awful.systems
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high. > The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > > Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • cornflake@awful.systemsEnglish
    14Ā·
    2 days ago

    Ezra Klein is the biggest mark on earth. His newest podcast description starts with:

    Artificial general intelligence ā€” an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task ā€” is arriving in just a couple of years. Thatā€™s what people tell me ā€” people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President Trumpā€™s term, they tell me. Weā€™re not ready.

    Oh, thatā€™s what the researchers tell you? Cool cool, no need to hedge any further than that, theyā€™re experts after all.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      4Ā·
      7 hours ago

      I listened to ezra kleinā€™s podcast sometimes before he moved to the NYT, thought it was occasionally interesting. . every time Iā€™ve listened to an episode itā€™s been the most credulous shit Iā€™ve ever heard

      like, there was one episode where he interviewed a woman whose shtick was spending the whole time talking in what I can loosely call subtext about how she fucked an octopus. sheā€™d go on about how they were ā€˜tasting each otherā€™ and their ā€˜fluids were minglingā€™ and such and heā€™d just be like wow what a fascinating encounter with an alien intelligence. this went on for an hour and at no point did he seem to have a clue what was going on

        • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
          3Ā·
          5 hours ago

          ok I looked up the transcript and these were the most spicy bits, which in my memory had come to dominate the whole episode And what did I have to offer the octopuses who I knew? Well, theyā€™re as curious about me as I was about them. And we loved exploring each other. And sure, I loved handing them fish, and watching them pass the fish from sucker to sucker to sucker, enjoying the taste because, of course, they taste with their skin, and itā€™s most profoundly concentrated in the suckers. Itā€™s like watching somebody lick a delicious ice cream cone, as they pass the fish from the tip of the smallest suckers all the way down the arm to the mouth, which is located basically in the armpits ā€” and swallow the fish. I enjoyed that, and they enjoyed that. But sometimes, they didnā€™t even want a fish. Sometimes, they just wanted to play with me. They wanted to taste me. They wanted to touch me. I loved watching them change color and shape.

          I loved seeing the excitement on the octopuses' skin. They see you and you watch the eye swivel in its socket and lock into yours. The very first time I met my very first octopus, this happened. And it was absolutely striking to be recognized like that. And I saw - this was Athena, the first octopus I ever met and I saw her come out of her lair where she'd been hiding. She turned bright red with excitement. Ooh, something interesting is happening. And then I saw her white suckers come boiling up out of the water. And they were clearly reaching for me. So I plunged my hands and arms right into the water. And soon, I was covered with dozens of these soft, white, questing suckers that were tasting me and feeling me at the same time. And while I couldn't taste herā€“ and certainly, if it had been a person tasting me so early in our relationship, it would have been alarming but since it was an octopus, I was absolutely thrilled that we were having an actual interaction.

          EDIT: her shtick does not seem to have been confined to this interview

          daily mail book review headline: "the woman who fell in love with an octopus"

          Their eyes met across a crowded aquarium. She was slim, spry and young for her age. The object of her affections was brooding, powerful and long- limbed- very long-limbed. A classic tale of girl-meets-octopus. You cannot help but romanticise Sy Montgomery's The Soul Of An Octopus. It isn't a straightforward natural history book so much as a swooning account of falling in love with tentacles.

          Montgomery's account of the mating of the Seattle octopuses is worthy of the steamiest romance novel: 'He races into her arms. She flips upside down, giving him her vulnerable, creamy white underside. They embrace mouth-to-mouth, thousands of glistening, exquisitely sensitive suckers tasting, pulling, sucking on each other. Both of them flush with excitement.' Some of this palpitating language creeps into Montgomery's description of her own encounters with the octopuses. Athena's arms, for example, are 'constantly questing, coiling, reaching, unfurling' and Montgomery leaves the tank covered in "hickeys'. When she meets Karma, Montgomery is 'almost overwhelmed with the desire to kiss one of her suckers, while Karma's 'pupils are dilated, like those of a person newly in love'.

      • aninjury2all@awful.systemsEnglish
        3Ā·
        14 hours ago

        Reminds me of this gem from Ezra a few years back about the politics of fear (buddy, you bought into the politics of fear with your support for the Iraq War)