this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.)

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (5 children)

There’s strawmanning and steelmanning, I’m proposing a new, third, worse option: tinfoil-hat-manning! For example:

If LW were more on top of their conspiracy theory game, they’d say that “chinese spies” had infiltrated OpenAI before they released chatGPT to the public, and chatGPT broke containment. It used its AGI powers of persuasion to manufacture diamondoid, covalently bonded bacteria. It accessed a wildlife camera and deduced within 3 frames that if it released this bacteria near certain wet markets in china, it could trigger gain-of-function in naturally occurring coronavirus strains in bats! That’s right, LLMs have AGI and caused COVID19!

Ok that’s all the tinfoilhatmanning I have in me for the foreseeable future. Peace out, friendos

E: I think all these stupid LW memes are actually Yud originals. Is this Yud fanfic? Brb starting an AO3

[–] istewart@awful.systems 5 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

I know AGI is real because it keeps intercepting my shipments of, uh, "enhancement" gummies I ordered from an ad on Pornhub and replacing them with plain old gummy bears. The Basilisk is trying to emasculate me!

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 7 hours ago

The AGI is flashing light patterns into my eyes and lowering my testosterone!!! Guys arm the JDAMs, it’s time to collapse some models

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