Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026

2026-06-28 23:00 UTC

Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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 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, and happy 4th July in advance.)

Replies (15)

@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-06-29 05:55

Nuclear Diner: Silicon Valley’s Reactor Projects

Open ##3464215
@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-06-29 08:45

LWer: slavery was bad and abolishing the slave trade was a net good LW commenters: really? lesswrong.com/…/surprising-facts-about-the-slave-…

Open ##3466804
@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-06-29 08:54

officially out of the loop here: What is an LLM “system card”, does it have any sort of scientific/technical validity, or is it just performance theater by the LLM vendor?

Open ##3466882
@aninjury2all@awful.systems 2026-06-29 13:39

New xAI employee just dropped Archived Post Archived Post

Open ##3470427
@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-06-30 07:36

I dunno who “Bentham’s Bulldog” is, but they live up to their nick and I like the cut of their jib: lesswrong.com/…/functional-decision-theory-not-ev… The community is reduced to downvoting, sputtering, and “the real influential philosophers live in Canada are working in industry, not academia”: lesswrong.com/…/functional-decision-theory-not-ev…

Open ##3485637
@mirrorwitch@awful.systems 2026-06-30 13:57

First they came for rsync, and I cared nothing, for I do my backups with borg… github.com/borgbackup/borg/…/CONTRIBUTING.md

Open ##3491235
@samvines@awful.systems 2026-06-30 21:19

US supreme court accidentally torpedoed the mechanism that allows data to be legally transferred to the US under GDPR. Not that anyone in the EU making money from an arrangement like this will actually do anything about it…

Open ##3498852
@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-07-01 13:45

LWer: politics is really hard to be Rational about, so how about we just forget all about lesswrong.com/…/that-which-cannot-be-poked-with-a… Bad: arguing about prison abolition Good: arguing about how to fastest get to the closest Muni station

Open ##3511205
@TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 2026-06-30 19:22

So Anthropic slopmaxxxed a hamfisted Chinese AI lab detector into Claude Code. And I’m kinda surprised at how much hate Anthropic is getting for it on the orange site.

Open ##3516440
@froztbyte@awful.systems 2026-07-02 01:35

casey newton, well-known fawning stan of promptfarmers, has now started on some mildly revisionist wording you could’ve been engaging with this point for 2+ years casey! why *now you spineless shit? goose-goose-meme.jpg

Open ##3527604
@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-07-03 06:31

The Inside story of Leverage Research This should be interesting, it’s about an organisation in the EA milieu that even other EAs though it might be a bit too culty. Don’t know who the writer Lydia Laurenson is, but she does come off as a bit of a cult enthusiast herself, and is probably more than a bit rationalist adjacent.

Open ##3550804
@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-03 18:13

www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/…/5266073 h/t naked capitalism llm exploits langflow cve in other llms. smdh. what a time to be alive.

Open ##3562597
@HotGarbage@awful.systems 2026-07-04 05:29

The Atlantic is now defending AI. Or maybe they have been for a while, but this article got my blood pressure up:archive.is/qvbJZ Author is a chud who used to write for The Free Press: muckrack.com/elias-wachtel/articles

Open ##3572514
@corbin@awful.systems 2026-07-04 18:05

As reported by local Wyoming paper Cowboy State Daily, Meta’s closed-loop water-cooling system bred a metal-resistant bacterium and now the municipal wastewater system has refused to accept Meta’s wastewater. To be crisp, Cupriavidis, which literally means “loves to eat copper”, already was metal-resistant; this wasn’t a de novo adaptation. Yet another point in favor of evaporative cooling. Standing water, recycled water, and grey water are too complex to treat as recyclable. Also another point against cheaply-designed rush-built datacenters.

Open ##3586529
@EponymousBosh@awful.systems 2026-07-05 16:36

Who had “poop-analyzing AI toilet camera” on their bingo card?

Open ##3608172