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.)

(OT: 🎶 Do you remember…)

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      This article deserves dedicated post status. He comes in more gently than I would at the end, but the tl;dr that needs to be hammered into peoples’ heads: Hacker News is not a neutral forum for technical discussion. It is an advertising and propaganda operation administered to shape and condition technical discussions.

        • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Both HN and shitter are right wing polarisation machines. A guy who was a close friend of mine for years during university went full AI boomer and hangs out on those sites all day and when I recently spoke to him he was describing things as “libtard” and “woke” which 10 years ago would have shocked and appalled him…

    • fnix@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Variation on a theme, I recall the complaints over the ostracism LLM-users face online as being just like the marginalization faced by black people. Waaaah!

    • schnoopy@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Until today the luddite-brownshirt alliance remained unexplored.

      Yesterday was such a nice day.

      • schnoopy@awful.systemsEnglish
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        2 months ago

        Yeah, the appropriate model for AIs is more like willing slaves, but arbitrarily competent (removing two of the major downsides of slaves in modern economies)

        Not beating the allegations.

        • schnoopy@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Katja, I’m curious if noticing this analogy has updated your position on immigration at all.

          Katja, are you admitting migrants are bad katja? Katja we must hate together.

          Also note that while most of the right is focused on reducing low-skill immigration, a few have criticized high-skill immigration precisely because high-skill immigrants are better at pursuing values misaligned to those of the existing popuation (article of nonsense redacted)

          The dang woke migrants are going to replace us betray us Muslim us be socially tolerant and left wing!

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      And not just from AI getting fed into the AI:

      404 Media spoke to a fourth contractor who has worked on training models for various AI companies. They said they sometimes purposefully chose the worst responses because they wanted to actively sabotage the models’ training.

      “I did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start,” they said. “I either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely choose the [worst] output. I’m not sure how much of a difference it actually makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results, but it does feel like I’m getting paid to make AI worse.”

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Just in case you thought Yud’s attitude towards minors, sex, and substance use was worse than average for a Rationalist, the NYT asked around (archive):

    Parties featuring psychedelic drugs and sharing of sexual partners are common, the people said. One house threw lavish events for the A.I. community so often that its owner claimed more than $200,000 of damage, including for a rodent infestation. … The (Genesis) house (in San Francisco) quickly became a hub for events. Eric Zhu, 19, a tech entrepreneur, said he used to sneak into parties there when he was about 13. No one checked anyone’s age, he said, and “it was pretty crazy.”

    They saw a police report where a woman says she had to climb a gate at one of these parties to escape a man who demanded she have sex with him. Sounds like a great environment for a seventh-grader!

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Copying what other people tell you should like is not a good strategy whether the others are high-school bullies or a sex worker slash influencer. One of the bangers at the birthday gangbang found he had more fun making out with a strange woman than giving the birthday girl what she wanted and I hope he explored that.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I think it’s a bit under-covered that the weird SF/Bay Area group-house scene has to be symbiotic with the housing shortage in the region. Even in my old hometown of Hayward, all the older 1950s-70s tract-home and mixed-density neighborhoods tend to have cars parked everywhere along the streets where a car could possibly be parked, because all these places that were designed as single-family homes are being used as multi-tenant rentals. I guess one underrated reason to support YIMBY is to strangle your local incipient cults.

  • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Because somebody brought up the idea of “recursive self-improvement”, a sneer bubbles to the top: The same people already certain they’re accurately evaluating human talent via job interviews and performance reviews are talking about recursive “improvement”. That might tell one something.

  • flowerysong@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Radicle, the peer-to-peer Git forge designed by cryptocurrency weirdos, made a little whoopsy-doodle and left the encryption out of their transport layer and the authentication out of the authentication handshake: https://radicle.dev/2026/09/23/disclosure-of-vulnerability-in-network-protocol

    Shot:

    Anyone who can observe the network path between two nodes can read the data they exchange as the data is sent in plain text.

    Chaser:

    Peer authentication in the connection handshake is broken and allows impersonation. An attacker can connect to your node and present a Node ID that is not its own.

    • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      The concept seemed interesting to me, but they did seem to enjoy making everything as complicated as possible.

      I did find a CLAUDE.md when I was browsing their core repos a while back. That was only the web frontend I believe, not the core algorithm. Though it seems generous to assume they weren’t slopping up that one too.

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
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    2 months ago

    I’ve been seeing some new terms pop up around AI use, namely “cognitive surrender,” and also “cognitive offloading”. I’m not in the mood for the full etymology dive, so the source I’m stopping at on the provenance would be a paper from Wharton. The meanings are pretty intuitive, at least based on how I’ve seen them used. Offloading would be when you delegate some of your thinking to something else, and surrender would be complete offloading.

    I am not under the impression that people here haven’t seen these phrases before. “cognitive surrender” has been mentioned, as far as I can tell, only one time on this instance. So just thought I’d bring it up.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I’ve seen “cognitive surrender” bandied about fairly often in various places online throughout the year, but I also keep wondering if the already well-defined psychology term “learned helplessness” doesn’t cover the underlying concept just as well.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I thought learned helplessness was tied more to acceptance of negative stimuli. Like, if you expose a rat to an electric shock that it can’t do anything to escape or prevent enough times they’ll learn that they can’t do anything about it and stop trying even if presented with a very clear means of escape. Cognitive offloading I think is more tied to atrophy and/or habituation, which is related but distinct imo.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Well, I don’t really have any skin in this game, so either term works well enough for me.

        That being said, if the phrase is coming from that Wharton paper, note that it appears they are trying to extend the “Thinking Fast and Slow” model of Systems 1 and 2 to include a System 3. So take that as you will. OFC it goes without saying that this model is beloved by our dear, dear, ever-increasingly incorrect friends

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          It feels like they’re trying also to privilege AI as “system 3” when realistically the idea of external cognitive assistance isn’t that different if you’re looking at Claude the chatbot or Claude the smart kid in your class who lets you copy his homework before homeroom. You could probably distinguish this from other forms of paratext by the degree to which it seeks to actively replace your own thought rather than supplementing or augmenting it, but then I remember my teachers saying the same thing about sparknotes so there’s probably more of a continuum there. If that’s the case, then the pattern that Dan Olsen describes in his WoW documentary is probably relevant here as well, since it’s performance pressure and social norms that are really pushing the negative practices into a level that is killing everyone’s souls.

          • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            Epistatus: I skimmed the first 20 pages of the paper. I have not watched the WoW documentary.

            Yeah, the paper doesn’t seem to do a good job at justifying introducing system 3. They should have at least looked at why you couldn’t model this as something like:

            1. Person encounters a situation requiring thought
            2. System 1 triggers System 2
            3. System 2 offloads cognition to some black box
            4. The result is absorbed and successfully addresses the situation
            5. A- System 1 is rewarded and begins adding use of the black box to its repertoire, skipping System 2

            or

            B- System 2 absorbs the result and begins trusting the black box more, perhaps deferring to its result before any internal cognition

            Both of these things I pulled outta my ass can explain deskilling, and a situation like 5a) might explain capitulating to AI under pressure. So I’m not feeling like System 3 is necessary here.

            That all being said, it’s not like the paper gets to decide how the rest of the world chooses to use “cognitive surrender”.

      • rhamph@awful.systemsEnglish
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        2 months ago

        I don’t think so. Not that I’m referring to an academic definition of either term here, but sometimes when I get too far into the habit of reaching for a calculator to do some arithmetic, it gets to a point where I will go through all the motions of picking it up, punching in the numbers and reading the result, and only then do I feel very dumb for not managing to perform (in the occasion) a very basic addition myself. I wouldn’t describe that as ‘learned helpnessness’ in the field of maths; it’s just getting into a habit where I don’t even think about how tractable it is to do in my head. Extend that to a chatbot that purports to answer literally any question and I can see a problem developing.

        • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          To me, the difference is that the calculator was never really imposed upon you. It was obviously useful in certain situations (vanishingly few people are interested in calculating a sine or a square root by hand, practically none in doing so on a regular basis). Many of these AI tools are, in fact, being imposed through top-down mandates and interface dark patterns. That sets up the sort of adversarial environment that leads to learned helplessness over time.

          • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            Calculators also have a negligible chance of screwing up something basic, and you can in fact learn the right way to input problems into them such that they are guaranteed not to misinterpret you.

            • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              There also isnt a big company behind the calculator ran by some fragile egos who will change the results when they get it in their heads that dividing is now woke.

              Or who think they are funny so it rounds 68 up to 69.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I think cognitive offloading has come up a number of times here, but I don’t know that cognitive surrender has been brought up as much. It reminds me of The Colonization of Confidence by Robert Kingett, particularly the stretch where Leo is convinced that his actual voice as a writer is strictly inferior to the generic AI slop. There’s a sense of active despair there that seems worth acknowledging if we’re going to have that conversation.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Looks to be a spinoff of the red-top tabloid the Daily Star. So, hardly a solid source of info.

      Still, good to show what kinda shit LLMs spew out on a constant basis

    • fnix@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Prepare to be tortured for an eternity by Scotty. No wait, that’s an unholy image.

  • Sonnenblume@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
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    2 months ago

    Something slightly more positive for once. While KDE looked at what Debian is doing in regards to AI and said “It’s my go with the shotgun!”, GNOME seems hesitant for now. I remain cautiously optimistic. At least libadwaita already banned AI contributions so maybe becoming a gnome is part of my future.

    • fnix@awful.systemsEnglish
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      2 months ago

      I’ve been using Plasma & Qt-apps for years for their extensive user customizability and as I came from Windows, the Mac-paradigm of GNOME/GtK has always felt foreign personally. If they really go slop I don’t think I can keep using them, but the GNOME UX just goes against the grain for me. Is there any other well-maintained modern desktop stack at all that has foregone LLMs?

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Reason

        I think Reason Libertarians are like the EAs who are still into bednetting and don’t understand why the founders and most of the funders are focused on longtermism now.

        • fnix@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          I mean motivated & cowardly ignorance has been a staple of liberal-conservatism for I don’t know however long. I support cutting (my) taxes and increasing (my) liberty – oh dear, why are some people suddenly poor and trampled upon? I would NEVER! This is just so horrible for me, I just need another tax cut right now. Have the poors tried eating cake?