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.
So… apparently Peter Thiel has taken to co-opting fundamentalist Christian terminology to go after Effective Altruism? At least it seems that way from this EA post (warning, I took psychic damage just skimming the lunacy). As far as I can tell, he’s merely co-opting the terminology, Thiel’s blather doesn’t have any connection to any variant of Christian eschatology (whether mainstream or fundamentalist or even obscure wacky fundamentalist), but of course, the majority of the EAs don’t recognize that, or the fact that he is probably targeting them for their (kind of weak to be honest) attempts at getting AI regulated at all, and instead they charitably try to steelman him and figure out if he was a legitimate point. …I wish they could put a tenth of this effort into understanding leftist thought.
Some of the comments are… okay actually, at least by EA standards, but there are still plenty of people willing to defend Thiel
One comment notes some confusion:
I’m still confused about the overall shape of what Thiel believes.
He’s concerned about the antichrist opposing Jesus during Armageddon. But afaik standard theology says that Jesus will win for certain. And revelation says the world will be in disarray and moral decay when the Second Coming happens.
If chaos is inevitable and necessary for Jesus’ return, why is expanding the pre-apocalyptic era with growth/prosperity so important to him?
Yeah, its because he is simply borrowing Christian Fundamentalists Eschatological terminology… possibly to try to turn the Christofascists against EA?
I’m dubious Thiel is actually an ally to anyone worried about permanent dictatorship. He has connections to openly anti-democratic neoreactionaries like Curtis Yarvin, he quotes Nazi lawyer and democracy critic Carl Schmitt on how moments of greatness in politics are when you see your enemy as an enemy, and one of the most famous things he ever said is “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”. Rather I think he is using “totalitarian” to refer to any situation where the government is less economically libertarian than he would like, or “woke” ideas are popular amongst elite tastemakers, even if the polity this is all occurring in is clearly a liberal democracy, not a totalitarian state.
Note this commenter still uses non-confrontational language (“I’m dubious”) even when directly calling Thiel out.
The top comment, though, is just like the main post, extending charitability to complete technofascist insanity. (Warning for psychic damage)
Nice post! I am a pretty close follower of the Thiel Cinematic Universe (ie his various interviews, essays, etc)
I think Thiel is also personally quite motivated (understandably) by wanting to avoid death. This obviously relates to a kind of accelerationist take on AI that sets him against EA, but again, there’s a deeper philosophical difference here. Classic Yudkowsky essays (and a memorable Bostrom short story, video adaptation here) share this strident anti-death, pro-medical-progress attitude (cryonics, etc), as do some philanthropists like Vitalik Buterin. But these days, you don’t hear so much about “FDA delenda est” or anti-aging research from effective altruism. Perhaps there are valid reasons for this (low tractability, perhaps). But some of the arguments given by EAs against aging’s importance are a little weak, IMO (more on this later) – in Thiel’s view, maybe suspiciously weak. This is a weird thing to say, but I think to Thiel, EA looks like a fundamentally statist / fascist ideology, insofar as it is seeking to place the state in a position of central importance, with human individuality / agency / consciousness pushed aside.
As for my personal take on Thiel’s views – I’m often disappointed at the sloppiness (blunt-ness? or low-decoupling-ness?) of his criticisms, which attack the EA for having a problematic “vibe” and political alignment, but without digging into any specific technical points of disagreement. But I do think some of his higher-level, vibe-based critiques have a point.
This was discussed last week but I looked at the comments and noticed someone in the comments getting slammed for… checks notes… noting that Eliezer wasn’t clear on what research paper he was actually responding to (multiple other comments are kind of confused, because they assume he means one paper then other comments correct them that he obviously meant another). The commenter of course edits to back-peddle.
We’re at the point of 100xers giving themselves broken sleep schedules so they can spend tokens optimally.
Inevitably, Anthropic will increase their subscription costs or further restrict usage limits. It feels like they’re giving compute away for free at this point. So when the investor bux start to run dry, I will be ready.
This has to be satire, but oh my god.
I’m sorry in advance for posting this meme.
My velocity has increased 10x and I’m shipping features like a cracked ninja now, which is great because my B2B SaaS is still in stealth mode.
Yeah it’s satire, but effective satire means you can never really tell…
Check out this sneer on the EA subreddit
“I’m employed, can someone explain what either of these mean?”
“i’m employed, what does it mean?” is common on r/shitposting when some obscure online/weeb thing surfaces. probably in a dozen of other places also
Im only on the normal parts of reddit, so had no idea.
Thomasaurus has given their thoughts on using AI, in a journal entry called “I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid)”. Unsurprisingly, the whole thing is one long sneer, with a damning indictment of its effectiveness at the end:
If I lose my job due to AI, it will be because I used it so much it made me lazy and stupid to the point where another human has to replace me and I become unemployable.
I shouldn’t invest time in AI. I should invest more time studying new things that interest me. That’s probably the only way to keep doing this job and, you know, be safe.
New article from the New York Times reporting on an influx of compsci graduates struggling to find jobs (ostensibly caused by AI automation). Found a real money shot about a quarter of the way through:
Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent.
You want my take, I expect this article’s gonna blow a major hole in STEM’s public image - being a path to a high-paying job was one of STEM’s major selling points (especially compared to the “useless” art/humanities degrees), and this new article not only undermines that selling point, but argues for flipping it on its head.
Well, what’s next, and how much work is it? I didn’t want to be a computing professional. I trained as a jazz pianist. At some point we ought to focus on the real problem: not STEM, not humanities, but business schools and MBA programs.
Except biology isn’t being hit as badly and that’s also STEM. I wouldn’t be surprised if other life sciences have also done better, at least until Trump started fucking with the grant system.
It’s specifically computer-touchers who are in the toilet.
It’ll be interesting to see if that holds up, with all the cuts to research funding taking place.
Quick update: I’ve checked the response on Bluesky, and it seems the general response is of schadenfreude at STEM’s expense. From the replies, I’ve found:
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Humanities graduates directly mocking STEM (Fig. 1,Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4, Fig. 5)
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Mockery of the long-running “learn to code” mantra (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4 Fig. 5, Fig. 6)
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Claims that STEM automated themselves out of a job by creating AI (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3)
Plus one user mocking STEM in general as “[choosing] fascism and “billions must die”” out of greed, and another approving of others’ dunks on STEM over past degree-related grievances.
You want my take on this dunkfest, this suggests STEM’s been hit with a double-whammy here - not only has STEM lost the status their “high-paying” reputation gave them, but that reputation (plus a lotta built-up grievances from mockery of the humanities) has crippled STEM’s ability to garner sympathy for their current predicament.
As an aging dev, we kind of do deserve some of this flak lol. Funny thing is, I went into SD because my first STEM degree made me as unemployable as a humanities major (a B.S. in physics is good for not much).
I hate the fact that now someone might look at me and surmise that I do something related to blockchain or AI, I feel almost like I need a sticker, like those “I bought it before we knew Elon was crazy” they put on Teslas
“I learnt to code before this stupid bubble”
stolen from cohost but i appreciate the succinctness of “capitalism make computer bad”
The whole joining of the fascist side by a lot of the higher ups of the tech world, combined with the long-standing debate bro both sides free speech libertarianism (but mostly for neonazis, payment services do go after sex work and lgbt content) also did not help the rep of STEM, even if those decisions are made by STEM curious people and not actually STEM people. billionaires want you to know they could have done physics - Angela Collier
you say STEM, but you seem to mean almost exclusively computer touchers, already mentioned biologists or variety of engineers won’t likely have these problems (i’m not gonna be excessively smug about this because my field will destroy you physically while still being STEM and not particularly glorious)
also it’s not a complete jobocalypse, there’s still 93% employed fresh CS grads, they might have comparatively shittier jobs, but it’s not a disaster (unless picture is actually much bleaker in that that unemployment is, say, concentrated in last 2 years of graduates, but still even in this case it’s maybe 10%, 12% tops for the worst affected). unless you mean their unlimited libertarian flavoured greed coming through it, then yeah, it’s pretty funny
even then, there’s gonna be a funny rebound when these all genai companies implode, partially maybe not in top earner countries, but places like eastern europe or india will fill that openai-sized crater pretty handily, if that mythical outsourcing to ai happened in the first place, that is
On one hand, this is another case of capitalism working as intended. You have the ruling class dangling the carrot of the promise of social mobility via job. Just gotta turn the crank of the orphan grinder for 4 years or so, until there’s enough orphan paste to grease the next grinding machine. But it’s ok, because your experience in crank will let you climb the ladder to the next, higher paying, higher prestige crank of the machine. Then one day, they decide to turn on the motor.
On the other hand? There is no other hand, they chopped it off because you didn’t turn the crank fast enough when you had the chance.
To extend that analogy a bit, the dunkfest I noted suggests that a portion of the public views STEM as perfectly okay with the orphan grinder’s existence at best, and proud of having orphan blood on their hands at worst.
As for the motorised orphan grinder you mention, it looks to me like the public viewed its construction as STEM voting for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party (with predictable consequences).
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continuing from the last weeks thread https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/the-high-costs-and-thin-margins-threatening-ai-coding-startups/
You know stuff is bad if the margins aren’t “low” or “razor-thin” but “very negative”.
The entire business idea is dumb. Yes we will pay retail for access to models run by companies also offering the same products that we do, but we’ll make up for it in volume?
Forwarding this discussion to here:
News from r/philosophy: OOP, Richard Y Chappell, posted an article containing image slop, landing them a 3-day ban. OOP writes a new article that DESTROYS the r/philosophy moderation policy on AI generated content with FACTS and LOGIC. For added flavour, OOP is an EA. OP is an SSCer. Both are participants in the thread.
Guess either term hasn’t started, or his gig as phil prof is some sort of right-wing sinecure. Dude has a lot of time on his hands.
FWIW I’d say banning a poster for including slop image in a 3rd party article is a bit harsh, but what would Reddit be without arbitrary draconian rules? A normal person would note this, accept the 3 day ban, and maybe avoid the sub in future or avoid including slop. The fact he flew off his handle this much is very very funny though.
Forget being exposed to the elements to build character. People should be randomly temp banned and use that to build/judge character. (Also a good judge of the power balance in a community, if the mod team can temp ban a power poster that predates the mod team, say lesswrong giving Yud a timeout).
power poster that predates the mod team
Does Yud predate for food or sport?
he predates for iq points
every time i read what he writes i feel dumber from the contact
Fullsquares Basilisk. Either yud stops writing, or we commit to building a basilisk which forces 2^^^2 copies of fullsquare to read more Yud. And this does more damage than a dustspeck.
Sorry did I use the wrong word there? I sometimes mess up stuff like that due to not being a native speaker, and being bad at spelling/grammar in general.
No predate was fine. I was joking and using it as in “predator”
Ah now I get it. Lol, yes. Would be amusing of they banned Yud from lw/ssc events like they did to other predators. (and that is the bans we know of).
I’m reminded of the comedy/gaming stream that I watch that opens every episode with banning a random member of chat based on a spin of the wheel. It certainly lends the community a certain flavor, even if it is more “jingly keys” rather than “strong community.”
Now im wondering, where the people of the stream itself also included, because that is what I mean. The people with the power shouldn’t be excluded from the moderation or get special privileges. (See what Twitter did to protect Trumps account, and where we are now).
The on-camera duo are exempt for obvious reasons, but they’ve definitely hit at least one of their mods. Before The Wheel was implemented I seem to remember they even specifically targeted them sometimes for the joke.
Having one of the duo just step out would also be amusing. Esp if they full chaos and roll twice.
Not sure myself, but the mods are probably either excluded from being banned by The Wheel™, or unbanned immediately afterwards, just to keep things running smoothly.
Weak mods create bad times! Bust a deal, face the wheel!
