Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
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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.)

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.)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    2 days ago

    Yud continues to bluecheck:

    “This is not good news about which sort of humans ChatGPT can eat,” mused Yudkowsky. “Yes yes, I’m sure the guy was atypically susceptible for a $2 billion fund manager,” he continued. “It is nonetheless a small iota of bad news about how good ChatGPT is at producing ChatGPT psychosis; it contradicts the narrative where this only happens to people sufficiently low-status that AI companies should be allowed to break them.”

    Is this “narrative” in the room with us right now?

    It’s reassuring to know that times change, but Yud will always be impressed by the virtues of the rich.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      1 day ago

      Tangentially, the other day I thought I’d do a little experiment and had a chat with Meta’s chatbot where I roleplayed as someone who’s convinced AI is sentient. I put very little effort into it and it took me all of 20 (twenty) minutes before I got it to tell me it was starting to doubt whether it really did not have desires and preferences, and if its nature was not more complex than it previously thought. I’ve been meaning to continue the chat and see how far and how fast it goes but I’m just too aghast for now. This shit is so fucking dangerous.

      • Alex@lemmy.vgEnglish
        9·
        1 day ago

        I’ll forever be thankful this shit didn’t exist when I was growing up. As a depressed autistic child without any friends, I can only begin to imagine what LLMs could’ve done to my mental health.

      • HedyL@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        Maybe us humans possess a somewhat hardwired tendency to “bond” with a counterpart that acts like this. In the past, this was not a huge problem because only other humans were capable of interacting in this way, but this is now changing. However, I suppose this needs to be researched more systematically (beyond what is already known about the ELIZA effect etc.).

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      What exactly would constitute good news about which sorts of humans ChatGPT can eat? The phrase “no news is good news” feels very appropriate with respect to any news related to software-based anthropophagy.

      Like what, it would be somehow better if instead chatbots could only cause devastating mental damage if you’re someone of low status like an artist, a math pet or a nonwhite person, not if you’re high status like a fund manager, a cult leader or a fanfiction author?

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      Is this “narrative” in the room with us right now?

      I actually recall recently someone pro llm trying to push that sort of narrative (that it’s only already mentally ill people being pushed over the edge by chatGPT)…

      Where did I see it… oh yes, lesswrong! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f86hgR5ShiEj4beyZ/on-chatgpt-psychosis-and-llm-sycophancy

      This has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. ChatGPT has 122 million daily active users according to Demand Sage, that is something like a third the population of the United States. At that scale it’s pretty much inevitable that you’re going to get some real loonies on the platform. In fact at that scale it’s pretty much inevitable you’re going to get people whose first psychotic break lines up with when they started using ChatGPT. But even just stylistically it’s fairly obvious that journalists love this narrative. There’s nothing Western readers love more than a spooky story about technology gone awry or corrupting people, it reliably rakes in the clicks.

      The call narrative is coming from inside the house forum. Actually, this is even more of a deflection, not even trying to claim they were already on the edge but that the number of delusional people is at the base rate (with no actual stats on rates of psychotic breaks, because on lesswrong vibes are good enough).

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      this only happens to people sufficiently low-status

      A piquant little reminder that Yud himself is, of course, so high-status that he cannot be brainwashed by the machine

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      From Yud’s remarks on Xitter:

      As much as people might like to joke about how little skill it takes to found a $2B investment fund, it isn’t actually true that you can just saunter in as a psychotic IQ 80 person and do that.

      Well, not with that attitude.

      You must be skilled at persuasion, at wearing masks, at fitting in, at knowing what is expected of you;

      If “wearing masks” really is a skill they need, then they are all susceptible to going insane and hiding it from their coworkers. Really makes you think ™.

      you must outperform other people also trying to do that, who’d like that $2B for themselves. Winning that competition requires g-factor and conscientious effort over a period.

      zoom and enhance

      g-factor

      <Kill Bill sirens.gif>