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.)

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    6 days ago

    NYT covers the Zizians

    Original link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/business/ziz-lasota-zizians-rationalists.html

    Archive link: https://archive.is/9ZI2c

    Choice quotes:

    Big Yud is shocked and surprised that craziness is happening in this casino:

    Eliezer Yudkowsky, a writer whose warnings about A.I. are canonical to the movement, called the story of the Zizians “sad.”

    “A lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided they’d found their new home,” he wrote in a message to me, “and some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible.”

    Good news everyone, it’s popular to discuss the Basilisk and not at all a profundly weird incident which first led peopel to discover the crazy among Rats

    Rationalists like to talk about a thought experiment known as Roko’s Basilisk. The theory imagines a future superintelligence that will dedicate itself to torturing anyone who did not help bring it into existence. By this logic, engineers should drop everything and build it now so as not to suffer later.

    Keep saving money for retirement and keep having kids, but for god’s sake don’t stop blogging about how AI is gonna kill us all in 5 years:

    To Brennan, the Rationalist writer, the healthy response to fears of an A.I. apocalypse is to embrace “strategic hypocrisy”: Save for retirement, have children if you want them. “You cannot live in the world acting like the world is going to end in five years, even if it is, in fact, going to end in five years,” they said. “You’re just going to go insane.”

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      6 days ago

      Yet Rationalists I spoke with said they didn’t see targeted violence — bombing data centers, say — as a solution to the problem.

      ahem

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        5 days ago

        Ah, you see, you fail to grasp the shitlib logic that the US bombing other countries doesn’t count as illegitimate violence as long as the US has some pretext and maintains some decorum about it.

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      6 days ago

      “A lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided they’d found their new home,” he wrote in a message to me, “and some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible.”

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      6 days ago

      Re the “A lot of the early Rationalists" bit. Nice way to not take responsibility, act like you were not one of them and throw them under the bus because “genuinely crazy” like some preexisting condition, and not something your group made worse, and a nice abuse of the general publics bias against “crazy” people. Some real Rationalist dark art shit here.

      There is some dark irony here in that the “we must make sure the AI doesnt turn bad” people cant even stop their own people from turning bad after looking at their own ideas. Wonder if they have already went “musk isnt a real Rationalist” (imho he isnt but for some reason LWers seem to like him) after he turned Grok basically into a neonazi (not sure if it is was reported here but Grok is now doing great replacement shit when asked about Jewish “control of the media”).