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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th September 2026 (awful.systems)

submitted 6 days ago by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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.)

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[–] nfultz@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

https://www.patreon.com/MaxRead/posts/ais-sheryl-crow-169107221

Imagine a hypothetical future history of machine learning, perhaps one that focuses on the politics of AI in the 2020s. You may be thinking to yourself, Given the rapid pace of change, it's hard to say what this book will contain, but there's one thing I know for certain will not be in this book: Sheryl Crow's Instagram account.

Well—think again:

"We know and have always known that AI has the capacity to outsmart us and eliminate us in order to continue," the "All I Wanna Do" singer wrote on Wednesday. "It will have the codes. It will have the capacity to eliminate our energy grids. And, it has the financial data of every single person on the planet."

In the future, I think, we will remember this as the "Sheryl Crow moment": The week that, effectively overnight, everyone—which is to say previously uninterested normies, previously skeptical pundits, opportunistic politicians and many other people who had never before heard the words "light cone" and whose browsers had never navigated to LessWrong—suddenly started taking "AI safety" seriously.

E: holy shit that Joe Allan quote. that guy.

[–] rhamph@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

It will have the capacity to eliminate our energy grids.

This would be a sensible course of action, since AI famously doesn’t require any significant source of energy to operate.

[–] lurker@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

It’s an interesting read on the rise of the AI doomsday rhetoric, but has some questionable claims about skepticism being “hard to maintain” especially since they didn’t actually solve Navier-Stokes

“We know and have always known that AI has the capacity to outsmart us and eliminate us in order to continue,”

…do we now?

“It will have the codes. It will have the capacity to eliminate our energy grids. And, it has the financial data of every single person on the planet.”

How? Why? What will it do with those things? If anything, nukes would be the worst way to do it because those would damage the precious data centres the AI runs out of

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

“We know and have always known that AI has the capacity to outsmart us and eliminate us in order to continue,”

These things get tripped up by random Internet memes, they sure as hell ain't outsmarting us any time soon

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

The trouble with the Millennium Prize problems is that they didn't pick one involving counting letters in fruit.