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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Last substack for 2025 - may 2026 bring better tidings. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Happy new year everybody. They want to ban fireworks here next year so people set fires to some parts of Dutch cities.
Unrelated to that, let 2026 be the year of the butlerian jihad.
The mods were heavily downvoted and critiqued for pulling the rug from under the community as well as for parallelly modding pro-A.I.-relationship-subs. One mod admitted:
ā(I do mod on r/aipartners, which is not a pro-sub. Anyone who posts there should expect debate, pushback, or criticism on what you post, as that is allowed, but it doesnāt allow personal attacks or blanket comments, which applies to both pro and anti AI members. Calling people delusional wouldnāt be allowed in the same way saying that āall men are Xā or whatever wouldnāt. Itās focused more on a sociological issues, and we try to keep it from devolving into attacks.)ā
A user, heavily upvoted, replied:
Youāre a fucking mod on ai partners? Are you fucking kidding me?
It goes on and on like this: As of now, the posting has amassed 343 comments. Mostly, itās angry subscribers of the sub, while a few users from pro-A.I.-subreddits keep praising the mods. Most of the users agree that brigading has to stop, but donāt understand why that means that a sub called COGSUCKERS should suddenly be neutral to or accepting of LLM-relationships. Bear in mind that the subreddit r/aipartners, for which one of the mods also mods, does not allow to call such relationships ādelusionalā. The most upvoted comments in this shitstorm:
āidk, some pro schmuck decided we were hating too hard š i miss the days shitposting about the eggā https://www.reddit.com/r/cogsuckers/comments/1pxgyod/comment/nwb159k/
A rival gang of āAIā āresearchersā dare to make fun of Big Yudās latest book and the LW crowd are Not Happy
Link to takedown: https://www.mechanize.work/blog/unfalsifiable-stories-of-doom/ (hearbreaking : the worst people you know made some good points)
When we say Y&Sās arguments are theological, we donāt just mean they sound religious. Nor are we using ātheologicalā to simply mean āwrongā. For example, we would not call belief in a flat Earth theological. Thatās because, although this belief is clearly false, it still stems from empirical observations (however misinterpreted).
What we mean is that Y&Sās methods resemble theology in both structure and approach. Their work is fundamentally untestable. They develop extensive theories about nonexistent, idealized, ultrapowerful beings. They support these theories with long chains of abstract reasoning rather than empirical observation. They rarely define their concepts precisely, opting to explain them through allegorical stories and metaphors whose meaning is ambiguous.
Their arguments, moreover, are employed in service of an eschatological conclusion. They present a stark binary choice: either we achieve alignment or face total extinction. In their view, thereās no room for partial solutions, or muddling through. The ordinary methods of dealing with technological safety, like continuous iteration and testing, are utterly unable to solve this challenge. There is a sharp line separating the ābeforeā and āafterā: once superintelligent AI is created, our doom will be decided.
LW announcement, check out the karma scores! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Bu3dhPxw6E8enRGMC/stephen-mcaleese-s-shortform?commentId=BkNBuHoLw5JXjftCP
Update an LessWrong attempts to debunk the piece with inline comments here
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i6sBAT4SPCJnBPKPJ/mechanize-work-s-essay-on-unfalsifiable-doom
Leading to such hilarious howlers as
Then solving alignment could be no easier than preventing the Germans from endorsing the Nazi ideology and commiting genocide.
Ummm pretty sure engaging in a new world war and getting their country bombed to pieces was not on most Germanās agenda. A small group of ideologues managed to sieze complete control of the state, and did their very best to prevent widespread knowledge of the Holocaust from getting out. At the same time they used the power of the state to ruthlessly supress any opposition.
rejecting Yudkowsky-Soaresā arguments would require that ultrapowerful beings are either theoretically impossible (which is highly unlikely)
ohai begging the question
good morning awful, I found you the first thing youāll want to scream at today
palantir and others offering free addictions, all in the name of āproductivityā
Zyn Bhuddists
Orthodoxycodone
Seventh Day Add-fent-ists
Freemason Freebasinā
internet comment etiquette with erik just got off YT probation / timeout from when YouTubeās moderation AI flagged a decade old video for having russian parkour.
He celebrated by posting the below under a pipebomb video.
Hey, this is my son. Stop making fun of his school project. At least he worked hard on it. unlike all you little fucks using AI to write essays about books you donāt know how to read. So you can go use AI to get ahead in the workforce until your AI manager fires you for sexually harassing the AI secretary. And then your AI health insurance gets cut off so you die sick and alone in the arms of your AI fuck butler who then immediately cremates you and compresses your ashes into bricks to build more AI data centers. The only way anyone will ever know you existed will be the dozens of AI Studio Ghibli photos youāve made of yourself in a vain attempt to be included. But all youāve accomplished is making the price of my RAM go up for a year. You know, just because something is inevitable doesnāt mean it canāt be molded by insults and mockery. And if you depend on AI and its current state for things like moderation, well then fuck you. Also, hey, nice pipe bomb, bro.
Another video on Honey (āThe Honey Files Expose Major Fraud!ā) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCGT_CKGgFE
Shame he missed cyber monday by a couple weeks.
Also 16:35 haha ofc itās just json full of regexes.
They avoid the classic mistake of forgetting to escape
.in the URL regex. Iāve made that mistake beforeā¦Like imagine you have a mission critical URL regex telling your code what websites to trust as
https://www.trusted-website.net/.*but then someone comes along and registers the domain namehttps://wwwwtrusted-website.net/. Iām convinced thatās some sort of niche security vulnerability in some existing system but no one has ran into it yet.None of this comment is actually important. The URL regexes just gave me work flashbacks.
a couple weeks back I had a many-rounds support ticket with a network vendor, querying exactly the details of their regex implementation. docs all said PCRE, actual usage attempt indicatedā¦.something very much else. and indeed it was because of
.that I found it
CW: Slop, body humor, Minions
So my boys recieved Minion Fart Rifles for Christmas from people who should have known better. The toys are made up of a compact fog machine combined with a vortex gun and a speaker. The fog machine component is fueled by a mixture of glycerin and distilled water that comes in two scented varieties: banana and farts. The guns make tidy little smoke rings that can stably deliver a payload tens of feet in still air.
Anyway, as soon as they were fired up, Ammo Anxiety reared its ugly head, so I went in search of a refill recipe. (Note: I searched āMinions Vortex Gun Refill Recipeā) and goog returned this fartifact*:
194 dB, you say? Alvin Meshits? The rabbit hole beckoned.
The āsource linksā were mostly unrelated except one, which was a reddit thread that lazily cited ChatGPT generating the same text almost verbatim in response to the question, āWhat was the loudest ever fart?ā
Luckily, a bit of detectoring turned up the true source, an ancient Uncyclopedia articleās āFun Factsā section:
https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Fartium
The loudest fart ever recorded occurred on May 16, 1972 in Madeline, Texas by Alvin Meshits. The blast maintained a level of 194 decibels for one third of a second. Mr. Meshits now has recurring back pain as a result of this feat.
Welcome to the future!
- yeah I took the bait/I dont know what I expected
That toy sounds like someone took a vape and turned it into a smoke ring launcher. Have you tried filling it with vape juice?
right? lol but I cant itās too popular with the kiddos
Wouldnāt that be the refill recipe you where looking for? Vape juice is just a mix of propylene glycol and vegetable glycerine. I think its the glycerine that is responsible for the āsmokeā.
THC vape juice?
I want a vortex ring gun.
Maybe if weāre lucky, Alvin Meshits can team up wtih https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bum_Farto for the feel-good buddy comedy of the summer. Remember, the more you toot, the better you feel!
Somewhat interestingly, 194 decibels is the loudest that a sound can be physically sustained in the Earthās atmosphere. At that point the ābottomā of the pressure wave is a vacuum. Some enormous blast such as a huge meteor impact, a supervolcano eruption or a very large nuclear weapon can exceed that limit but only for the initial pulse.
I suspect a 194 dB fart would blow the person in half.
Vacuum-driven total intestinal eversion, nobodyās ever seen anything like it
Apparently thereās another brand that describes its scents as ā(rich durian & mellow cheese)ā
upvoted for āfartifactā
This is a fun read: https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/27/how-to-ruin-all-of-package-management.html
Starts out strong:
Prediction markets are supposed to be hard to manipulate because manipulation is expensive and the market corrects. This assumes you canāt cheaply manufacture the underlying reality. In package management, you can. The entire npm registry runs on trust and free API calls.
And ends well, too.
The difference is that humans might notice something feels off. A developer might pause at a package with 10,000 stars but three commits and no issues. An AI agent running npm install wonāt hesitate. Itās pattern-matching, not evaluating.
the tea.xyz experiment section is exactly describing academic publishing
Foz Meadows brings a lengthy and merciless sneer straight from the heart, aptly-titled āAgainst AIā
Rich Hickey joins the list of people annoyed by the recent Xmas AI mass spam campaign: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/ea94e3741ff0a4e3af55b9fe6287887f
LOL @ promptfondlers in comments
aww those got turned off by the time I got to look :(
Itās a treasure trove of hilariously bad takes.
Thereās nothing intrinsically valuable about art requiring a lot of work to be produced. Itās better that we can do it with a prompt now in 5 seconds
Now I need some eye bleach. I canāt tell anymore if they are trolling or their brains are fully rotten.
Donāt forget the other comment saying that if you hate AI, youāre just āvice-signallingā and ātelegraphing your incuruosity (sic) far and wideā. AI is just like computer graphics in the 1960s, apparently. Weāre still in early days guys, weāve only invested trillions of dollars into this and stolen the collective works of everyone on the internet, and we donāt have any better ideas than throwing more
moneycompute at the problem! The scaling is still working guys, look at these benchmarks that we totally didnāt pay for. Look at these models doing mathematical reasoning. Actually donāt look at those, you canāt see them because theyāre proprietary and live in Canada.In other news, I drew a chart the other day, and I can confidently predict that my newborn baby is on track to weigh 10 trillion pounds by age 10.
EDIT: Rich Hickey has now disabled comments. Fair enough, arguing with promptfondlers is a waste of time and sanity.
these fucking people: āart is when picture matches words in little card next to pictureā
Coryās talk on 39C3 was fucking glorious: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet
No notes
lowkey disappointed to see so much slop in other talks (illustrations on slides mostly)
Really? Which ones? I didnāt notice any
at least this one https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-chaos-communication-chemistry-dna-security-systems-based-on-molecular-randomness#t=1112 and the next slide
a chunk of software was vibecoded unless i misunderstand something about it https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-hacking-washing-machines#t=2629
A few weeks ago, David Gerard found this blog post with a LessWrong post from 2024 where a staffer frets that:
Open Phil generally seems to be avoiding funding anything that might have unacceptable reputational costs for Dustin Moskovitz. Importantly, Open Phil cannot make grants through Good Ventures to projects involved in almost any amount of ārationality community buildingā
So keep whisteblowing and sneering, its working.
Sailor Sega Saturn found a deleted post on https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/dustin-moskovitz-1 where Moskovitz says that he has moral concerns with the Effective Altruism / Rationalist movement not reputation concerns (he is a billionaire executive so donāt get your hopes up)
All of the bits I quoted in my other comment were captured by archive.org FWIW: a, b, c. They can also all still be found as EA forum comments via websearch, but under [anonymous] instead of a username.
This newer archive also captures two comments written since then. Notably thereās a DOGE mention:
But I canāt e.g. get SBF to not do podcasts nor stop the EA (or two?) that seem to have joined DOGE and started laying waste to USAID. (On Bsky, they blame EAs for the whole endeavor)
The February 2024 Medium post by Moskovitz objects to cognitive decoupling as an excuse to explore eugenics and says that Eliezer Yudkowsky seems unreasonably confident in immanent AI doom. It also notes that Utilitarianism can lead ugly places such as longtermism and Derek Parfitās repugnant conclusion. In the comments he mentions no longer being convinced that its as useful to spend on insect welfare as on āchicken, cow, or pig welfare.ā He quotes Julia Galef several times. A choice quote from his comments on forum.effectivealtruism.org:
If the (Effective Altruism?) brand wasnāt so toxic, maybe you wouldnāt have just one foundation like us to negotiate with, after 20 years?
I was unable to follow the thread of conversation from the archived links, so here is the source in case anyone cares.
Does anyone know when Dustin deleted his EA forums account? Did he provide any additional explanation for it?
Does anyone have an explainer on the supposed DOGE/EA connection? All I can find is this dude with a blo wobbling back and forth with LessWrong flavoured language https://www.statecraft.pub/p/50-thoughts-on-doge (he quotes Venkatesh Rao and Dwarkesh Patel who are part of the LessWrong Expanded Universe).
The bluesky reference may be about this thread & this thread.
One of the replies names Cole Killian as an EA involved with DOGE. The image is dead but has alt text.
I mean thereās at least one. You could āno-true-scotsmanā him, but between completing an EA fellowship and going vegan, he seems to fit a type. [A vertical screenshot of an archive.org snapshot of Cole Killianās website, stating accomplishments. Included in the list are ācompleted the McGill effective altruism fellowshipā and āwent vegan and improved cooking skillsā]
(It looks like that archive has since been scrubbed, though Rolling Stone also mentions the connection)
Two of the bsky posts are log-in only. Huh, Killian is in to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (blockchain), high-frequency trading (like our friends at Jane Street), veganism, and Effective Altruism?
Two of the bsky posts are log-in only
if youāre going to do internet research, at this point itās a skill issue. Create a reader account.
Hereās another interesting quote from the now deleted webpage archive: https://old.reddit.com/r/mcgill/comments/1igep4h/comment/masajbg/
My name is Cole. Hereās some quick info. Memetics adjacence:
Previously - utilitarianism, effective altruism, rationalism, closed individualism
Recently - absurdism, pyrrhonian skepticism, meta rationalism, empty individualism
Sounds like a typical young make seeker (with a bit of Ć©pater les bourgeois). Not the classic Red Guard personality but it served Melon Huskās needs.
