Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 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 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. Also, happy April Fool’s in advance.)

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 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…)

  • sus@programming.devEnglish
    18·
    6 days ago

    Some dark urge found me skim-reading a recent AI doomer blog post. I was startled awake by this most unsettling passage:

    My wife wrote a letter to our infant daughter recently. It concluded:

    I don’t know that we can offer you a good world, or even one that will be around for all that much longer. But I hope we can offer you a good childhood. […]

    Though the theoretical possibility had always been percolating somewhere in the back of my mind, it wasn’t until now that I viscerally realized that P(doomers reproducing) was greater than zero. And with other doomers no less.

    Left brooding on this development, I drudged along until-
    BAhahaha what the fuck
    I can’t. This is beyond parody.

    Completely lost it here. Nothing could have prepared me for the poorly handwritten wrist tattoo.

    Creating space for miracles
    Doom feels really likely to me. […] But who knows, perhaps one of my assumptions is wrong. Perhaps there’s some luck better than humanity deserves. If this happens to be the case, I want to be in a position to make use of it.

    Oh how rational! Willing to entertain the idea that maybe, theoretically, the doomsday prediction could be off by a few days?

    I’m not sure that I ever strongly felt that I would die at eighty or so. I had a religious youth and believed in an immortal soul. Even when I came out of that, I quickly believed in the potential of radical transhuman life extension.

    This guy thought he was getting clean but he was actually replacing weed with heroin
    I really convinced myself that “doomsday cult” was hyperbole but uhh, nope, it’s 107% real.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      4 days ago

      I had a religious youth and believed in an immortal soul. Even when I came out of that, I quickly believed in the potential of radical transhuman life extension.

      My dude you’re so, so, sooo close to realising it, you should spontaneously quantum-tunnel into self-awareness any second now

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      5 days ago

      Also, man why do I click on these links and read the LWers comments. It’s always insufferable people being like, “woe is us, to be cursed with the forbidden knowledge of AI doom, we are all such deep thinkers, the lay person simply could not understand the danger of ai” like bruv it aint that deep, i think i can summarize it as follows:

      hits blunt “bruv, imagine if you were a porkrind, you wouldn’t be able to tell why a person is eating a hotdog, ai will be like we are to a porkchop, and to get more hotdogs humans will find a way to turn the sun into a meat casing, this is the principle of intestinal convergence”

      Literally saw another comment where one of them accused the other of being a “super intelligence denier” (i.e., heretic) for suggesting maybe we should wait till the robot swarms coming over the hills before we declare its game over.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      5 days ago

      At the start they state

      The disappointment of imminent death is all the more crushing because just a few years ago researchers announced breakthrough discoveries that suggested [existing, adult] humans could have healthspans of thousands of years. To drop the analogy, here I’m talking about my transhumanist beliefs. The laws of physics don’t demand that humans slowly decay and die at eighty. It is within our engineering prowess to defeat death, and until recently I thought we might just do that, and I and my loved ones would live for millennia, becoming post-human superbeings.

      This is, frankly, bonkers. I’d rate the following in descending order of probability

      1. worldwide societal collapse due to climate change
      2. we develop an AI that will kill us all for unspecified reasons
      3. we establish viable self-sustaining societies outside the limits of Earth
      4. we develop techniques that allow everyone to live effectively forever

      If the first happens, it removes the material requirements for the latter things to happen. This is an extreme form of “denial of the flesh”, the inability to realize that without food or water no-one will be working on AI or life extension tech.

      • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        5 days ago

        “Im 99% sure I will die in the next year because of super duper intelligence, but in a world where that doesnt happen i plan to live 1000 years” surely is a forecast. Surprised they don’t break their own necks on the whiplash from this take.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      6 days ago

      I don’t know that we can offer you a good world, or even one that will be around for all that much longer. But I hope we can offer you a good childhood. […]

      When “The world is gonna end soon so let’s just rawdog from now on” gets real

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      5 days ago

      Doom feels really likely to me. […] But who knows, perhaps one of my assumptions is wrong. Perhaps there’s some luck better than humanity deserves. If this happens to be the case, I want to be in a position to make use of it.

      This line actually really annoys me, because they are already set up for moving the end date on their doomsday prediction as needed while still maintaining their overall doomerism.