BlueMonday1984Mar 2

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th March 2026

https://awful.systems/post/7459754

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th March 2026 - awful.systems

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 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.)

Show threadlurkerMar 3
This piece on how doomers and rationalists have made everything worse with their “AGI is nigh” shtick and ended up giving AI companies way more power than they should.
How AGI-is-nigh doomers own-goaled humanity

The road to where we are now was (mostly) paved with good intentions — but mixed with too much uncritical acceptance of hype.

Marcus on AI
Show threadgeriksonMar 3

it’s amusing to me that these nerds thought they could in any way affect policy even with a sane administration, not to mention this bugshit crazy one

like I’ve said before, I’d be perversely happy if we managed to off ourselves by building the robot god. beats drowning in our own filth or blowing ourselves up

Show threadlurkerMar 3
I mean yeah I guess in a competition between getting a bullet directly through my brain, getting all my limbs chainsawed off with my head last and being drowned in boiling water, the bullet would win every time. Though the real funniest outcome is if superintelligence turns out to be completely impossible and we fuck ourselves over with garbage to mediocre AI embedded in all our critical infrastructure
Show threadgeriksonMar 4

Obviously I don’t want the human race to go extinct, but if there was a choice of inevitable outcomes where we do, building an inimmical superintelligence at least implies agency, not carelessness.

Anyway Big Yud’s fantasy of a precisely timed diamondoid-bacteria delivered killshot to every human being at the same time might sound terrible, but from a sensory perspective of the victims, it’s basically suffering-free. You go about your day, BAM nothingness. Maybe there’s a difference in timing so you see your partner keel over a split second before you die - again, you might not even realize what is happening.

I am not sure from where this idea of a global instantaneous simultanous genocide comes from, maybe a tit-for-tat escalation to counter every argument against shutting down the robot god, but from a storytelling perspective it’s pretty useless. There’s no drama where the survivors lament their loss or brood over what might have been. It’s just a plug being pulled on the simulation.

(weirdly it’s also the logical outcome of asking a computer to “end human suffering”, a bit like the Robobrain logic in Fallout 4’s Automatron expansion, but I doubt it’s meant that way)

Show threadlurker
That’s precisely what I was thinking. Obviously I don’t want everyone to die but if you forced me to choose between apocalypse scenarios, I’m picking something painless and instantaneous- like a super-virus that activates immediately or a bullet in the head-over being slowly tortured to death via something like nuclear radiation
Mar 4 at 9:02amWeb
Show threadgeriksonMar 4
A real evil robot god would keep a sample of humanity alive forever in order to torture them as reprisal for them being really really mean to it back in the day.