Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

23 points

So this is apparently something AI companies now think is smart to advertise with. Don’t know who’d willingly consider this something targeted at them, but here we are.

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17 points

I rewrote the ad so they can lean into their marketing strategy.

Hard book have hard word and make head hurt, AI make book easy! More book read for you. No hard word. This good idea!

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11 points

I want to make a zoolander riff but my brain just isn’t cooperating, so instead pretend I did (just like these people pretend their product is worth something)

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5 points

Hahah lol, that was pretty good.

I immortalized it for you into a meme here

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10 points

ah yes, the Simple English wiki filter but wrong

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8 points

the part of me that sometimes spends an hour just choosing the right words for the couple of paragraphs I’m writing is fucking screaming

there is a screaming noise that comes from me while I write

thanks magibook!

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4 points

can’t wait for this shit to show up in usage among people who have english as an additional language at different level of fluency to their primaries. totally don’t see it causing a cascade clusterfuck in communication and comprehension.

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4 points

there’s already a strain of this out there, with a lot of english-non-first students using LLMs to “make their work sound more polished”. similar as the strain using it for CVs etc

ran across a great thread on fedi a while back, will see if I can find it

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7 points

I can’t even

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5 points

It’s good that they’re offsetting their advantages in the marketplace of money by actively crippling themselves in the marketplace of ideas.

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17 points

Two tweets and I can tell you at least 5 substacks he subscribes to

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6 points

PrimalPoly was a sort of semi regular of the old sneerclub, so I can tell you a lot more than that.

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4 points

Fr? What’s his deal?

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9 points
*

I have such sights to show you And more

About half of evopsychgoogle’s tweets are also about him and his wife.

He and his wife (also a piece of work) have a very strange poly relationship btw, it seems to be more a constant dominance struggle than a loving poly relationship.

And you know how a lot of these people when faced with the slightest pushback turn further and further right. 2013

90% of the weird evo psych women on their period things you ever heard about, also him. (And while I don’t get the American fascination with strippers/strip clubs, I do get it is an important macho man culture thing for American men to do things with/around strip clubs so cudos for him that he managed to trick the university into sponsoring his visits).

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4 points

long term Evolutionary Psychology race scientists

also hang out in Effective Altruism, of course

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3 points

both him and his wife are quite the pieces of work

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3 points

he’s also figured here a couple of times too

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17 points

Couldn’t find the way to turn this into a pithy blog post so just dumping it here:

does anyone else feel that the rationalists want a future of a billion trillion virtual humans, each and every one with an immutable gender bit set?

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19 points

it is a little entertaining to hear them do extended pontifications on what society would look like if we had pocket-size AGI, life-extension or immortality tech, total-immersion VR, actually-good brain-computer interfaces, mind uploading, etc. etc. and then turn around and pitch a fit when someone says “okay so imagine if there were a type of person that wasn’t a guy or a girl”

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11 points

Shouldn’t they be fans of The Culture? And didn’t The Culture have people changing gender for any reason (including curiosity), and it was accepted?

(It was years since I read those books, so I could confuse it with something else.)

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12 points

Shouldn’t they be fans of The Culture?

I always assume that a large part of Rationalism is intellectual masturbatory contrarianism. (Aka contrarianism to make yourself feel smarter and better. See also how important it is for some of them that Sneerclub is a bunch of losers with no accomplisments (We don’t even blog!)). So I doubt it.

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10 points

the Culture humans accepted being subsumed into a Mind after 400 years, so Yudkowsky disapproves. He also dislikes The Minds.

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13 points
*

Case in point, or the exception that proves the rule: Is being a trans woman (or just low-T) +20 IQ?

Warning: This post might be depressing to read for everyone except trans women.

Actual warning: This post and the comments is a particularly bad example of rationalists being red-pilled sexists. Even by rationalist standards. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.


But yeah this goes way back and is really enmeshed in their worldview. Robin Hanson has been blogging terrible takes about gender for almost 20 years on Overcoming Bias, which Lesswrong split off from.

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14 points

don’t mention skull sizes for 5 minutes challenge

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4 points
*

It’s so cute (euphemism for concerning) how their image of the average trans woman is a white computer science rationalist poster and not, like, a South American sex worker or something.

Why didn’t evolution give females big heads if it would make them all geniuses? Another anecdote. My sister has a big head. She was valedictorian in high school I think. She hit her head one day in middle school during gym class by running into a wall. She also fell off a bike and hit her head in high school. I have never hit my head and I think the main reason is that my arms are strong enough to catch myself. So maybe the big headed women would-be-ancestors fell and hit their heads.[1]

Classics of Reason

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12 points

Yeah, in my opinion Slatestarcodex also said something like that, that the idea of Rationalism lead to transphobia. (others read that part as being more anti-transphobia, or with a more positive slant re Rationalism/Scott).

Not a huge surprise if you fetishise math and numbers, and miss the point of seeing like a state.

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17 points

the faster training data gets polluted the faster ai companies get fucked. therefore, I propose the deliberate creation of unmarked ai compost piles on reddit and discord: “communities” managed so as to minimize visibility to humans while generating large quantities of shit data

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13 points

We could just mix corporate and bot responses to all content at a 99:1 ratio so the AI companies struggle to tell the difference. Also no need to do anything, as this is running on reddit right now.

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10 points
*

if this were running you would be unlikely to know about it. the novel part is not spamming reddit, it’s trying to do so strictly to target ai companies, without humans ever seeing the result

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15 points

https://matduggan.com/a-eulogy-for-devops/

Possibly interesting blog post about what the idea of “devops” promised, and how it failed to deliver. With any luck, the “getting back to basics” thing will actually happen, instead of people imagining they are google and building nightmares out of kubernetes.

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