Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th October 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
Just two weeks til’ Halloween now. 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.)

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. Happy Halloween, fellow sneerers!)

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    https://www.patreon.com/MaxRead/posts/ai-x-risk-and-ai-173181621

    worth the full read, but here’s the parts I liked

    But “x-risk” is not the only kind of “existential” risk about which AI enthusiasts and their converts tend to worry. This recent Ezra Klein column, written in the wake of OpenAI’s release of hundreds of mathematical proofs, is a nice articulation of something I’ve come to think of as “n-risk,” for “ennui risk” (with the mutual understanding that it’s not pronunciation-accurate so don’t bother making a nitpicky little comment about it): fear of the loss of comprehension, control, and meaning in the face of impossibly sophisticated godlike machines poses.

    We see the threat of “n-risk” in some of the emotional reaction of mathematicians faced with the results of OpenAI models bulldozing through open problems: a sense of having been surpassed and left behind, having the meaning from which one derives one’s worth totally emptied. In some sense, on a conceptual level and as a discursive object, x-risk is preferable to n-risk: it’s striking, dramatic, and offers us humans an ongoing chance at great feats of heroism and genius. N-risk has no such narrative reassurances. Maybe it’s better to burn out (as your body is turned into a paperclip) than to fade away.

    Here you might ask: Is the cause of melancholy and despair on the part of some mathematicians simply the knowledge that a computer system has surpassed their ability to understand or produce proofs? Or is it the realization that said computer system is privately owned and confidentially developed in service of accumulation rather than the pursuit of shared human knowledge? Or is it the contempt with which the people who work for the computer system companies and the hanger-on fans of these computer systems seem to regard the mathematicians? Or is it the sudden recognition that the pursuit of mathematical truths has already been so totally devalued by an anti-intellectual social system that you can no longer feel secure that the tradition to which you have devoted your life will continue as a space of intellectual inquiry, even given the development of these new tools? And so on.

    I mean, realistically, it’s all of the above.

    • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      1 day ago

      Holy hell the dumb takes get dumber.

      Edit: added the sources I grumpily handwaved about earlier

      So immediately after plagiarising a human mathematician’s work, OpenAi dumped 722 unverified preprints on the maths community and assumed that they would be grateful… they’re not. Just because you brute forced something in lean doesn’t mean it actually has any meaning at all. Even the one-shotted Terry Tao had some wise words on this . Many of the preprints have already been proven wrong. OpenAI just extruded a huge pile of bullshit and told people “go dig”.

      So the case for ennui is this: A computer program produces plausible sounding answers to your questions so you Eliza yourself. Then, when the computer starts producing volleys of diarrhea, instead of thinking “hmm maybe I was too quick to Eliza myself like that” it’s straight to “I’m sad and depressed because this very smart computer would never produce garbage. It must simply be smarter than me”

      That potato farm retirement is looking more and more tempting every day and I’ve got at least 2 decades until I’m pensionable age FML.

      • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        That potato farm retirement is looking more and more tempting every day and I’ve got at least 2 decades until I’m pensionable age FML.

        man, I’m aiming for a Christmas tree farm myself. 23 years to go.

        • the_morgan@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          1 day ago

          I’ve been involved with a xmas tree farm for 35 years - family run. I recommend Do not. Big box stores like lowes and home the pot take almost all of the business.

          Summers with upkeep are miserable. Winters, either cutting them down to supply the retail targets, or running as cut-your-own, is a miserable time. Tree sap is a miserable substance. Deer are a cruddy creature that don’t plan on eating evergreen but munge up the trees by felt removal from antlers or they are marking their territory. there are many small pests. It takes a wack of land to run one, nobody wants to drive out to where the land is cheap to shop. Digging trees for landscaping is stupid hard or expensive or both.