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.
(December’s finally arrived, and the run-up to Christmas has begun. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Bay Area rationalist Sam Kirchner, cofounder of the Berkeley “Stop AI” group, claims “nonviolence isn’t working anymore” and goes off the grid. Hasn’t been heard from in weeks.
Article has some quotes from Emile Torres.
https://archive.is/20251205074622/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/sam-kirchner-missing-stop-ai/685144/
Jesus, it could be like the Zizians all over again. These guys are all such fucking clowns right up until they very much are not.
Yud’s whole project is a pipeline intended to create zizians, if you believe that Yud is serious about his alignment beliefs. If he isn’t serious then it’s just an unfortunate consequence that he is not trying to address in any meaningful way.
fortunately, yud clarified everything in his recent post concerning the zizians, which indicated that… uh, hmm, that we should use a prediction market to determine whether it’s moral to sell LSD to children. maybe he got off track a little
the real xrisk was the terror clowns we made along the way.
Bayesian Clown Posse
robots gonna make us Faygo, better stab a data center and by data center I mean land lord who had nothing to do with AI shit.
Whoop whoop
A belief system that inculates the believer into thinking that the work is the most important duty a human can perform, while also isolating them behind impenetrable pseudo-intellectual esoterica, while also funneling them into economic precarity… sounds like a recipe for
delicious browniestrouble.just one rationalist got lost in the wilderness? that’s nothing, tell me when all of them are gone
@fullsquare
The concern is that they’re not “lost in the wilderness” but rather are going to turn up in the vicinity of some newly dead people.
Is it better for these people to be collected in one place under the singularity cult, or dispersed into all the other religions, cults, and conspiracy theories that they would ordinarily be pulled into?