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 so 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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
So, uh, remember that call for stories set in a world where we ‘somehow’ don’t get AGI and instead get modern-style LLMs providing such incredible value to the world that it is transformed? That tells people not to use LLMs to write it because its writing is low quality? https://www.gpuworld.org/
(Incidentally, this reminds me strongly of ‘Project Heiroglyph: Stories and Vision for a Better Future’, also by Neal Stephenson, somewhat desperately trying to pretend that there is a bright future ahead of us rather than slow grinding decline)
Somehow we got… this. I can’t even. I really just can’t even.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6hFByFwDLxtnbvje/a-normal-friday-in-2042
I thought I had lost my ability to be surprised by these people. In here we get:
As always with LW, we can adapt the vector definition of “normal”, i.e. what is being said is completely orthogonal to reality
Ugh. I got to the point with the cutesy redefinition of “CPU” and rode the nopetopus out of there.
Edit to add: Welp, I went back, and it got a whole lot worse.
Oh, I should say that I got “nopetopus” from the comments at Cliff Pervocracy’s place, back in the Before Times.
I mean… what is this? It’s even weirder than usual
It’s the regurgitation of an insular community’s bizarre beliefs, up to and including sexual fixations, back to that community for unquestioning consumption… a vore-ouboros, if you will.
Edit to add: I think there’s a concentrated lump of illustrative lesswrong in this passage:
Yes, “ZKP” is dropped in without elaboration or definition. But more fundamentally… why, though? This reads like someone has thought too long and yet also too superficially about kink. Why has “almost everyone” developed these bizarre new tastes? What taboos are they transgressing, what vulnerabilities are they exposing, what strictures of life are they seeking to escape? What’s the itch?! And yet look at the fetishes that are specifically named: “spankings” (literally, not figuratively older than Aristotle) and a thinly science-fictionalized kind of swinging. This isn’t a new frontier in depravity; it’s a bachelorette party for normies. The whole thing feels like a product of a mind that’s strongly confined to a narrow understanding. It unhesitatingly accepts the importance of “freaky” sex and goes out of its way to bring that into the story, but it has nothing to say about the subject it has locked upon.
the future of humanity is kink on a blockchain <- this is what rationalists actually believe
also, this bit
i have to keep in mind that this is coming from people who had problems with opening a jar
Rationalists have a disconcerting mix of boundless confidence that they are so special, and sexual practices and abuse that any beat reporter has seen many times over.
One reason you will see less of me here is that learning about these people turns me off people.
I wonder if that ‘frontier progress stoops as of 1 steptember 2026’ is part of this apparently coordinated push to try to freak people out and get the government involved. Maybe the AI labs are angling to make that the cutoff and stop shoveling money into the furnace of training. This is all too conveniently timed.