Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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.

(2026 is off to a great start, isn't it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] 21 points 8 months ago (10 children)

Hey I think I discovered a way to fix America! What if we rewrite the US Constitution in Rust?

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    [–] 21 points 8 months ago* (11 children)

    OT: He’s gone. Last thing he saw was my face and then there was no more pain. His veins had all collapsed (vet had to inject the phenobarb into the liver), so I was right to bring him in when I did.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago

    also the universe has granted me a small mercy and for once the alcohol/semaglutide thing I mentioned a thread or so ago seems to be totally impotent against the might of scottish chemical engineering. thank you jesus

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    [–] 16 points 8 months ago (13 children)

    OT: My truck got rear ended today, and then my cat had breathing difficulties when I got home…he’s under oxygen at the university clinic right now and its probably cancer instead of pneumonia. Just feeling totally destroyed rn.

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    [–] 15 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    I'm doing this shitey online optional module for my college course because I left it too late to pick a proper one, and Christ in heaven people are using a lot of AI. This is meant to be a class about sustainability

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    My wife has been saying the same thing about her accounting courses. It's absolutely nuts.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago*

    in the fall of 2024, i was getting teams messages from my students that were clearly llm-generated

    The purpose of this block of code is to efficiently BLAH FUCKING BLAH WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT

    i have to assume it's only gotten worse

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    [–] 15 points 8 months ago (11 children)

    Any tips on managing the guy-urge to assume good faith? I know what to expect of "contrarian thinkers" but there is always that fish-brain saying "Well, you don't know a lot about the topic. And who knows, the vibes you feel could be wrong and you could even broaden your worldview" (spoilers: it doesn't broaden). So much time and energy wasted by trying to dig nuggets of gold out of piles of dung.

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    part of what helps is coming here and seeing the spectrum of chud output to inoculate yourself a little.

    What REALLY helps is broadening your own knowledge and worldview, in the sense that when you realise that everything is political, you start asking yourself the meta questions. Like, what’s the agenda here, what’s not being said, etc. I mean, understanding author intention is already part of reading comprehension, it’s going a little further beyond the face-value meaning. As the memes say, you are not immune to propaganda.

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    [–] 14 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    update on the grok csam story: the heat on this was not dying down, so X has taken steps to address the issue.

    update update: by restricting the csam generator to paying users

    update update update: actually they didn't do that https://www.theverge.com/news/859309/grok-undressing-limit-access-gaslighting

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    [–] 14 points 8 months ago* (13 children)

    I know zilch about linux but I think there was some discussion in here about suckless. Well look at what I came across on an honest to god nazi's website*:

    *yes, I have reported this site to their web hosting provider.

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    [–] 13 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    How to neither downplay the death of Renee Good nor the uncountable number of people, mostly people of color, who were murdered by near equally fascist police forces without the public outrage her murder finally rightly elicited? I am tired and yet I feel bad to even complain about it because look at this shit.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

    There are two things here in my opinion:

    1. American cops are trained murderers, but they are trained, in particular to avoid causing massive PR disasters with their murders*. A paramilitary goon with a rifle in a government organisation so opaque we still don't even know his identity is materially worse than a cop. It also looks much worse, the police have some completely undue public trust, ICE just looks like military forces.
    2. We immediatelly had video with the full event. When cops kill people of colour there's usually no evidence since again, they know how to pull murder off without causing PR disasters. Basically the only reason George Floyd's murder wasn't successfully brushed aside is that we had video of it, and they tried to bury that shit hard. In this case I don't even think the victim being white or a citizen matters, the event itself is so fucking horrifying it'd elicit outrage anyway. I am 100% sure that if there wasn't video, just witness reports, it'd be out of the media cycle already.

    * I don't want this to seem like a moral distinction, if anything the decorum granted to police forces is arguably a stepping stone that brought the USA here. Recall Mamdami's recent words: "For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty". HOWEVER, to me personally this is a rather chilling escalation. It shows that the PR part doesn't actually matter anymore. America is so far into the fascist pipeline that paramilitary forces can just execute citizens in broad daylight on the street. They don't need to hide it, they don't need to play coy about it, they can just post-facto label the victim as an Enemy of the State and move on. I'm sorry but to me this is like one step away from just rounding people up against a wall for fun. Human life is not only practically worthless to state actors, it's proudly and openly worthless as a matter of policy.

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    [–] [S] 12 points 8 months ago

    SFGATE columnist Drew Magary has decreed "The time has come to declare war on AI", and put out a pretty solid sneer in the process. Bonus points for openly sneering billionaire propaganda service Ground News, too.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago (2 children)
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    [–] 12 points 8 months ago (1 child)
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    [–] 12 points 8 months ago (7 children)

    got my Urbit newsletter for this quarter (or whatever the fuck the cadence is) and what stood out to me this time was nockchain.org. I was going to sit and do a deep dive to come up with sneers for this but I just don't have the executive function right now. @self thoughts?

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I can’t comment on this better than bergstrom did, so link

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    [–] 11 points 8 months ago

    PSA - https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/ - CA residents can now request data deletion to many adtech data brokers.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    Scott Alexander: "I wish the neoreactionaries dropped the monarchy shit"

    Monkey paw curls (content warnings: antisemitism, Yarvin).

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  • [–] [S] 11 points 8 months ago* (4 children)

    You must sign in to view this post.

    My lack of a Bluesky account spares me again. Thankfully, I have Skyview.social to ensure my eyes are scarred anyway (seriously, do we have to fight another world war over if Nazis are bad or not, it shouldn't take the blood of tens of millions to make that clear)

    Also found a nice summary of our current moment in the replies:

    (alt: "I am old enough to remember when we all agreed Nazis were bad")

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  • [–] [S] 11 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Found someone showing some well-founded concern over the state of programming, and decided to share it before heading off to bed:

    alt text:

    Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?

    I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.

    They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.

    I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.

    I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.

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    [–] 10 points 8 months ago* (5 children)

    new odium symposium episode, available on all platforms: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-7-whos-147209632

    this time we looked at gerald schoenewolfe, a "gender centrist" psychoanalyst. lots of discussion of freud in this one

    on a side note, we sent off an email hoping to get a podcast network to fund us to do a miniseries on rationalists. i think there's basically no chance this sort of cold call works but 🤞🏼

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    [–] 10 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    David Futurelle of We Hunted the Mammoth fame has started a new project, Brotopians:

    https://www.brotopians.com/welcome-to-brotopians/

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    [–] 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)

    The simplenote post from a VibeCamp attendee claimed that "prior to Scott Alexander's articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall," Any idea what post he was thinking of? Know Your Amphetamines - archive was from January 2021 so about the time VibeCamp got started.

    The post is undated but mentions Hereticon in January 2022. Update: it links several more simplenote posts with statements like "It's 2022 as of the time of this writing" and "as of Mar 30 2022." The author lived in Austin when Aella was there. So it seems likely that the post about VibeCamp was written in 2022.

    Update Again: the author posted to Substack under a meatspace name and linked "Know Your Amphetamines". I don't recommend reading the whole post, its just an unpleasant person with logorrhea unloading a stream of consciousness at unpleasant people.

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