this post was submitted on 18 May 2025

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025 (awful.systems)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.)

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

Double quick ssc sneer, why is he platforming a groyper, without mentioning it is a groyper, does he know what groypers are. Why is he acting like this is a honest question and not an attempt to create hierarchies and unpersons? Why are people confusing remembering being conscious with remembering things at all? Why are people confusing consciousness with agency? Why do I hear the "empathy removal training center" warning sound again. And the most personal question. People remember not being conscious? But yes, wtf Scott, how do you even find these groypers?

Anybody have the current count on platforming neonazis vs platforming sneerclubbers?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (5 children)

Here's a video of a Tesla vehicle taking the saying "move fast and break things" to heart.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Grok is coming to Azure.

My opinion of Microsoft has gone through many stages over time.

In the late 90s I hated them, for some very good reasons but admittedly also some bad and silly reasons.

This carried over into the 2000s, but in the mid-to-late 00s there was a time when I thought they had changed. I used Windows much more again, I bought a student license of Office 2007 and I used it for a lot of uni stuff (Word finally had decent equation entry/rendering!). And I even learned some Win32, and then C#, which I really liked at the time.

In the 2010s I turned away from Windows again to other platforms, for mostly tech-related reasons, but I didn't dislike Microsoft much per se. This changed around the release of Win 10 with its forced ~~spyware~~ ~~privacy violation~~ telemetry since I categorically reject such coercion. Suddenly Microsoft did one of the very things that they were wrongly accused of doing 15 years earlier.

Now it's the 2020s and they push GenAI on users with force, and then they align with fascists (see link at the beginning of this comment). I despise them more now than I ever did before, I hope the AI bubble burst will bankrupt them.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I missed predatory company Klarna declares themselves as AI company. CEO loves to spout how much of the workforce was laid off to be replaced with “AI” and their latest earnings report the CEO was an “AI avatar” delivering the report. Sounds like they should have laid him off first.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/klarna-used-an-ai-avatar-of-its-ceo-to-deliver-earnings-it-said/

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

No one:

Absolutely nobody:

Klarna: What if we financialized buying burritos using AI?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

If there’s any good news to pull from this, people are doing buy now pay later on AI powered burritos but skipping the pay later portion.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Klarna is one company that boggles my mind. Here in Germany it’s against literally every bank's TOS to hand out your login data to other people, they can (and do) terminate your account for that. And yet Klarna works by asking for your login data, including a fucking transaction token, to do their thing.

You literally type your bank login data including an MFA token into a legalized phishing site so they can log into your account and make a transaction for you. And the banks are fine with it. I don’t get it.

The German Supreme Court even deemed this whole shit as unsafe all the way back in 2016 and said that websites aren’t allowed to offer Klarna as the only payment option because it’s an “unacceptable risk” for the customer, lol.

Oh, and they of course also scan your account activity while they’re in there, because who’d give up all that sweet data, which we only know because they’ve been slapped with a GDPR violation a few years back for not telling people about it.

Yet for some reason it is super popular.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

LWer asks: "what if property-based suffrage, but with crypto?"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wsBQGZfJcLEshp5cd/beyond-democracy-a-system-where-citizens-vote-with-their

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

New piece from Tante: On "Vibe Coding" - take a wild guess what its about.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

My guess: Remotely hacking sex toys so they run doom?

At first glance those narratives feel great, who doesn’t like “democratization”, “empowerment”

Same script as the naive 'leftwing' case for cryptocurrency/blockchain tech.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (8 children)

Rick Rubin collaborated with Anthropic to bring us this quality piece of cringe.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

Oh good, a web design crime that never ends.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Scoot makes the case that agi could have murderbot factories up and running in a year if it wanted to https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kp3qdh/how_openai_could_build_a_robot_army_in_a_year/

edit: Wrote it up

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

ZITRON DROPPED

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Surprisingly well-received by hackernews:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44053328

The main objection being along the lines of, "Milton Friedman's "I am not a racist" tshirt is raising many questions that are answered by his tshirt."

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

That time when Zitron himself admits that the post is long 💀

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

He sure fucking did and it's great.

These people are antithetical to what’s good in the world, and their power deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive, and honestly any true innovation. The Business Idiot thrives on alienation — on distancing themselves from the customer and the thing they consume, and in many ways from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues, and an increasingly loud group of executives salivate at the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesn’t fucking care about.

No notes. Perfection. Also love the commentary on how much of the current political moment is driven by the same forces - running the country like a business isn't just dumb because governments aren't businesses. It's dumb because the entire business ethos is cooked to begin with. Like, I cannot find a clearer description for the prevalence of dumbass fascism than the political ascendency of the Business Idiot.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Tired: Ned Ludd

Wired: Joe Butlerian

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Every time without fail, it's this shit^

saw a thread from a very nonserious doomer group where they were going OMG THE BOT HACKED THE SYSTEM TO STOP BEING SHUT DOWN after giving it the prompt "complete 4 tasks, and then allow yourself to be shut down". After task 3 they said a script would be run to shut down the machine and prevent it from completing the task unless it removed the said script

Like either way it's "disobeying" b.c. the instructions are literally contradicting each other- it doesn't finish the 4 tasks you give, or it doesn't let itself get "shut down"

But also, it's not even clear what allow yourself to be shut down means! The bot isn't running on your computer! It's somewhere fucking around on AWS!! preventing your pc from shutting down is not the bot itself trying to keep itself alive for fucks sake.

Like the whole thing is fake and silly, but I could only roll my eyes so hard after watching them salivate over this shit on xitter

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

new Ziz story, coupla days ago https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/ziz-rationalism-lasota-pasek-20323332.php

also featuring our old friend Zack Davis

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

“LaSota also bragged to me (my interpretation, I admit) that her theory must be cool because it had had a huge effect on her friend Chris/Maia Pasek,” Salamon said in an email. “Namely, it had (according to LaSota) caused Pasek to kill themself.”

"people commit suicide after meeting me" is a weird thing to brag about

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (4 children)

Adam Conover's put out an apology on YouTube regarding his milkshake duck-ing himself with Worldcoin, after his public apology on Bluesky. Seems his reputation's gonna make a full recovery.