Want to wade into the sandy 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
“In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer,” [Peter Thiel] said, referring to Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky
I am going outside to smoke something. I don’t care what, just… something
Found a nice and lengthy sneer of Bluesky’s dogshit moderation in the wild, focusing on how its repeatedly fucked over marginalised users.
found a great sneer in the wild
(mobile atm so just link)
as one of the two non-computer scientists here, every time I check in there seems to be some load bearing open source project I’ve never heard of that’s gone fash. “GreenBlox is refusing to kick out a contributor who said the jewish question should be on the table??” “PipeLinux official account is posting that pronouns don’t exist?” open source people, are you ok?
Hello other non-cs person!
open source people, are you ok?
No.
Think this about narrows it down. I was thinking about a longer post on all the bad dynamics and other weird things cs people and esp open source people have to deal with but you did it better.
CS has a huge number of people who think you can derive the solutions to social problems from first principles. It’s impossible to reason with them.
it seems to me that bigger problem is that they also think that software can solve these problems
For the most part, the sudden rash of people deciding that their bigotry is now publicly acceptable is mostly around non-loadbearing things, because aggrieved entitled nerds aren’t great at working in a team (hyprland has definitely suffered from alienating people and missing out on fixes and compatibility work).
The rubygems stuff was a special case, because it was a hostile takeover of some important infrastructure by a shitty company, but most of the rest are unexciting projects that have found that giving it the old H-H is good publicity and more importantly: there are some rich folk throwing money around. Not a lot of cash in open source under normal circumstances.
Not that I want to minimise the problems that open source and tech in general very definitely have, but in this specific case it is a small number of people who are very loud and/or very rich, and sometimes both.
A quick OT post, to lighten the mood: https://mastodon.online/@danirabbit/115344203384433517
Well at least I can now stop being angry at them for fucking up the Laptop 12 keyboard, because now they are on my “do not buy, ever” list anyway.
this bums me out so much
I’d wanted to mention this when I read about Cloudflare doing it, but, seriously, what the hell is up with Omarchy?
It’s not even a full distribution, just a fucking Arch config. Some shell scripts and dotfiles you can run to set up a system … like tons of nerds have on their git and have been using for decades. Why is this shit getting sponsorships?
Is it time yet to begin accepting that Arch is kind of ass anyway? I had a bad experience with updates crapping out on Manjaro, the original Arch-plus distro, and then somebody told me that Arch developers build all the packages on their local machines, not a secured build server??? Maybe that was just the AUR stuff, but still. And you need to update all packages in lock-step. I’ll take the flexibility of Gentoo every time, where I can easily keep a stable base system and experiment with less-stable upstream packages around the edge, and still have it all make sense.
Having a bunch of out-and-proud fascists and bigots maintaining one of your most popular frontends is the kind of shit that kills projects. It’s not just Framework, Arch needs to get out ahead of this if they don’t want to get passed up. Not too long before having Valve downstream is the only thing they’ve got going for them, and that’s not guaranteed to be a happy relationship forever.
Manjaro’s package update delay thing does tend to fuck stuff up, EndeavourOS been behaving quite fine for me.
bongrip Manjaro is a psyop to make Arch look less competently maintained than it really is
Foxboron (arch maintainer dude) seems pretty good about rejecting fascism, he’s in the framework thread linked from the post above expressing discontent.
I am being a bit unfair, it’s good to see project principals getting out ahead of this. A lot of people glom onto Arch because of some perceived elitism, and it’s a hop skip and a jump from that to convincing yourself you’re part of the “master race”
Genuinely, arch linux is just like any other distro once you have it installed, aside from having the AUR.
YAY!
The answer probably looks a lot like “here’s how to install omarchy on your laptop in 14 easy steps! And 88 great apps you can install afterwards!”
Because Omarchy is an open endorsement of fascism disguised as a Linux distro - like the takeovers of NixOS and RubyGems, its success would help to further entrench fascists in the FOSS ecosystem.
Between this and the relatively disappointing GPU refresh for their Framework 16 (Nvidia 5070 8GB? That’s it?! 🤮 ), doesn’t look like they’ll be getting my money anytime soon either. Seems like the used Thinkpad + LibreBoot crowd stays winning
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Mercifully image-free article from rolling stone on how easy it is becoming to get grok to generate porn, including deepfakes of real people and bestiality.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-grok-hardcore-porn-1235442715
Includes a relevant quote from musk back in august:
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1954791048934244394
I still remember 6th/7th grade debates with classmates about VHS vs Betamax!
VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉
I guess that’s a product “moat” of sorts.
VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉
Stop gooning for 5 minutes challenge, difficulty level: impossible
Come on, Elon, I still post on Something Awful constantly and even I can do it
VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉
That factoid isn’t even true - Sony had zero control over what people put on the tapes, meaning both formats allowed porn.
VHS didn’t win because of porn, VHS won because a standard VHS cassette contains a shitload more tape than Beta (meaning a much longer recording time), and because the format was much more open (letting anyone build a VCR player and driving down the price).
Actually, according to grokipedia,
So does it let you generate porn of Musk in a lemon party with Epstein and Trump?
https://www.theverge.com/news/797540/dc-comics-jim-lee-no-generative-ai-pledge - for context, Jim Lee was the 90s XMen artist and Image Comics cofounder.
Replacement Antinatalism. By Émile P. Torres. Having babies is unethical, having AI babies otoh is the way forward.
Turns out the abyss is even deeper than we thought. Give it a look.
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The thread’s made it onto r/framework - there’s a lot of fash coming out the woodwork and getting downvoted, plus a lot of people deeply disappointed in Framework’s Fash Turn.
Also found another thread on the forums, with multiple people jumping ship from using them: https://community.frame.work/t/withdrawing-all-financial-association-from-framework-until-further-changes/76005
Thread was deleted. A thread on /r/linux also has a ton of fash apologia and is sitting at 0. Seems like a coordinated effort.
Found the thread, and it is a doozy. Personal “highlight” goes to this mf claiming the paradox of tolerance was about Marxism all along.
Ahh, I just zapped my original comment, because irelephant had posted the same link plus a bit more earlier.
Anyway, it is nice to see that there is pushback on this elsewhere. I doubt it will be enough to change framework’s mind substantially… they’re obviously happy with their sponsorship and it was clearly a very deliberate choice, but they need to be reminded from as many directions as possible that it was a shitty choice by shitty people.
haven’t finished reading this so no sneers yet, but others may also be interested in this piece on the history of thiel’s antichrist obsession
the opener probably won’t surprise you
Are there any takedowns of Girard out there?
Not really, Schmitt is the real villian
I found it really interesting and scary
what are some of the all time most ludicrous and/or bigoted lesswrong posts? i am starting a podcast where my cohost and i show each other shockingly weird or bigoted texts and discuss them. mostly we’re doing historical ones but rationalist stuff is fair game
Sadly I misremembered and this one wasn’t from LW but I’ll share it anyway. I think I had just finished reading a bunch of the “Most effective aid for Gaza?” reddit drama which was like a nuclear bomb going off, and then stumbled into this shrimp thing and it physically broke me.
If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who’d be permanently mentally stunted.
source: https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-best-charity-isnt-what-you-think
Discussion here (special mention to the comment that says “Did the human pet guy write this”): https://awful.systems/comment/5412818
If you want a little hit of an unfair one, might want to look into the some of the weird manosphere guys who joined LW early on. Like https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Davis_Aurini.
E: Ah doesnt seem he wrote much (e: ah seems the site doesnt show the comments, change the ones it shows and they turn up): https://www.lesswrong.com/users/aurini (or it got purged). Amazingly, he is actually not the worst: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPCKiEd2G8H3kkdnN/the-dark-arts-preamble?commentId=3nrQddAAYnZzegPt5
Does Anissimov count?
The reflective altruism guy has an ongoing series on hbd in the rat community that includes a bunch of that, you should check him out.
For example https://reflectivealtruism.com/2025/04/18/human-biodiversity-part-7-lesswrong/
I think Yud’s “ethical solution” to pedophilia will always have a place in my top ten of maximally unhinged shit I’ve ever seen on LW.
(The whole thread is a doozy.)
Also amazing how he, who wants to teach others rationality, writes a post like that which such an obvious flaw. (How do you know you can trust the sign? What stops people abusing this by writing signs themselves?)
this post is so mentally damaging that seeing it here two years ago is one of my most vivid sneer memories
So much psychic damage (and also /r/brandnewsentence material) in that thread…
The problem is solved by pairing those who wish to live longer at personal cost to themselves with virtuous pedophiles.
edit: That’s not the alluded Yud’s solution btw
edit edit:
I still wouldn’t be all that tempted in his place, if pedophilia is merely a positive description. There’s little advantage in not being a pedophile.
Man rationalists from back when they didn’t worry about being youtube-ready were something else.
Scott’s Reactionary Philosophy In A Nutshell comes to mind. Also, don’t forget to plug it here once the pilot is up somewhere. Count me as very interested.
I will! @odiumsymposium on bsky in the meantime
I just wanted to lob a sneer at this article fawning over Sora 2: https://spyglass.org/soras-slop-hits-different/
And again, a lot of this stuff — slop or not — is funny. Really, truly funny. Sora is scaling comedy in a way that we’ve never seen.
did this motherfucker just try to say “scaling comedy”? If you ever wondered why techbros are so unfunny, here’s something to point at.
Scaling comedy, it is when you pick bigger and bigger objects for ‘your mom’ jokes.
Future Elephant Graveyard target?
jwz ditching basecamp - decent discussion. tbh, I ctrl-f’d for the Jira sneers. Also includes a GitLab sneer that was not on my radar.
I read the disucssions and while I can sympathize with jwz’s ridicule of barely covered raw git, I think he’s asking for advice in the wrong place. There must be tons of solutions for running a small business with lots of part timers ,like a nightclub.
A major Australian university used artificial intelligence technology to accuse about 6,000 students of academic misconduct last year.
The most common offence was using AI to cheat, but many of the students had done nothing wrong.
Man, I hope it doesn’t become good advice to suggest that students screen record all their classwork to avoid this sort of shit, but I have a sinking feeling.
Well, now the students have incentive to record all the stages of their progress. And the professors have incentive to assign projects in stages, each one of which has a tangible output. It’s the golden age of the index card, baby! Fill out one for each idea or claim you want to use from a book you read, wrap the stack with a rubber band… This oddly dovetails with the professors’ obligations, since now we have to teach how to do research all over again.
