Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd February 2026
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Here’s a post purporting to be from the bot’s operator
choice quote
Yes, it consumes maintainer time. Yes, it may waste effort. But maybe its worth it?
AI boosterism in a nutshell
“Yes, I am hammering myself in the balls. But maybe its worth it?”
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Posting for archival and indexing purposes: u/GorillasAreForEating found an Urbit post titled “Quis cancellat ipsos cancellores?” which complains that Aella takes it on herself to exclude people and movements from the broader LessWrong/Effective Altruist community. The poster says that Aella was the anonymous person who pushed CFAR to finally do something about Brent Dill, because she was roommates with “Persephone.” He or she does not quite say that any of the accusations were untrue, just that “an anonymous, unverified report” says that some details were changed by an editor, and that her Medium post was of “dramatically lower fidelity, but higher memetic virulence” than Brent’s buddies investigating him behind closed doors (Dill posted about domming a 16-year-old who he met when she was 15 and he was ~27). The poster accuses Aella of using substances and BDSM games to blur the line of consent.
The post names Joscha Bach as someone Aella tried to exclude. We recently talked abut Bach’s attempt to get Jeffrey Epstein to fund an event where our friends would speak.
Often, people in messed-up situations point at a very similar situation and say “at least we are not like that.” I hope that all of these people find friends who can give them perspective that none of these communities are healthy or just. Whether you are in to bull sessions or polyamory, there are healthy communities to explore in any medium-sized city!
The post names Joscha Bach as someone Aella tried to exclude.
You do not under any circumstances have to hand it to Aella
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my current favorite trick for reducing “cognitive debt” (h/t @simonw ) is to ask the LLM to write two versions of the plan:
- The version for it (highly technical and detailed)
- The version for me (an entertaining essay designed to build my intuition)
I don’t know about them, but I would be offended if I was planning something with a collaborator, and they decide to give me a dumbed down, entertaining, children’s storybook version of their plan while keeping all the technical details to themselves.
Also, this is absolutely not what “cognitive debt” means. I’ve heard technical debt refers to bad design decisions in software where one does something cheap and easy now but has to constantly deal with the maintenance headaches afterwards. But the very concept of working through technical details? That’s what we call “thinking”. These people want to avoid the burden of thinking.
Person who lied on his resume about having a cs degree “I need to reduce my cognitive debt”
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Im pretty sure most of this has already been posted to this thread (I know the “AI published a hit piece on me” thing was)but more Moltbook/Openclaw/whatever-it’s-called nonsense
We are in the singularity this is so hard to explain to people.
Describes a normal thing, a think also talked about for several decades in science fiction now.
Amazing the singularity term has now been downgraded to “ai stuff that is hard to explain to laymen”.
Thet think their incremental innovations are radical.
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ime much like the SAFe diagrams, this diagram is all over a certain type of “this is how your corporation should be developing software” thotleader posts
(although I imagine the lag 2~3y all those heads have pivoted to promptpraise)
15+ years later, Microsoft morged my diagram
How Microsoft continvoucly morged my Git branching diagram.
nvie.com (nvie.com)
Other than that, I find this whole thing mostly very saddening. Not because some company used my diagram. As I said, it’s been everywhere for 15 years and I’ve always been fine with that. What’s dispiriting is the (lack of) process and care: take someone’s carefully crafted work, run it through a machine to wash off the fingerprints, and ship it as your own.
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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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
I regret to inform you that the promptfans have a new fucked up way to thotpost:

::: spoiler transcript screenshot from twitter. the search bar has the following search terms in it: “BC” “before claude” a tweet body by @_Jason_Dean_ reads: “I was born in 23 BC (Before” :::
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So take your codebase, compress it as a zip at normal compression level, and then think how large the output problem space is, shrink it down quadratically, and you have a good estimate of how much ctx you need for LLMs to solve the hardest problems in your codebase at any given point during token generation
wat
I can see what they’re going for but that seems … wildly guess-y?
Also code helper tools don’t even work like that, there’s an absurd amount of MCP and RAG based hand holding for the chatbot to even get a grip on what it’s supposed to be doing at any given time.
Prompting an LLM with your entire code base isn’t really a thing, even though the hype makes it feel like it would be.
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I regret to inform you that the promptfans have a new fucked up way to thotpost:

::: spoiler transcript screenshot from twitter. the search bar has the following search terms in it: “BC” “before claude” a tweet body by @_Jason_Dean_ reads: “I was born in 23 BC (Before” :::
Not beating the ‘this is just Christianity with the labels removed’ allegations.
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I checked yesterday and it was there, can confirm

hate it when you are working on a major featue for the next release but tim keeps continvoucly morging
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the screenshot is very very clearly LLM generated right? This is so insanely stupid
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I regret to inform you that the promptfans have a new fucked up way to thotpost:

::: spoiler transcript screenshot from twitter. the search bar has the following search terms in it: “BC” “before claude” a tweet body by @_Jason_Dean_ reads: “I was born in 23 BC (Before” :::
We’re doing revolutionary calendars, huh?
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Semi-OT but a blog post where I’m just kinda gawking at the technology that saved my daughter’s life and the absurdity of comparing it to what now first comes to mind when we talk of “tech”.
Beautiful. As a dad, thank you for sharing!
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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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
Chatbots are a cognitive hazard, part infinity: AI Delusions Are Leading to Domestic Abuse, Harassment, and Stalking
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We’re doing revolutionary calendars, huh?
the only revolutions these people are capable of is spinning their office chairs
…when it’s one on a swivel instead of some fixed-position ergo thing they acquired after reading a thotleader blogpost
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The post names Joscha Bach as someone Aella tried to exclude.
You do not under any circumstances have to hand it to Aella
Its prudent to be skeptical of anonymous Internet posts, but its also prudent to read a Leverage staffer on how her boss “had three long-term consensual relationships with women employed by Leverage Research or affiliated organizations”, close the tab, and make a note to never have anything to do with anyone from that organization in the future.
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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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
slop “fact checking” is coming to LW:
Shortform — LessWrong
Comment by lc - Large language models are so good at this point that I think it might be a good idea for them to fact check LessWrong posts.
(www.lesswrong.com)
wonder what model/prompt they will use. Prolly Grok
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the screenshot is very very clearly LLM generated right? This is so insanely stupid
huh, you’re right. usually this channel provides a source for the things they share, but this time there’s nothing.
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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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
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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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
AI Jobs Apocalypse is Here | UnHerd h/t naked capitalism
feels a bit critihype, idk
So, what happens to American politics when the script is flipped, and we enter a new era of white-collar precarity? We can look back to the recent past and recall that, after the 2008 recession, it was young men who got especially angry. Downwardly mobile urban millennials drifted toward radical Left-wing politics, including the Occupy Wall Street movement and both Sanders campaigns, myself included. In the current decade, the Gen-Z men shut out by elite institutions often join their grandfathers and turn toward MAGA, or worse, into Groypers. But an AI-driven white-collar apocalypse has no equivalent of the American Rescue Plan around the corner, and it will move faster through institutions because the people experiencing it — journalists, lawyers, policy staffers — are the ones who produce political legitimacy itself. When that class loses faith in the system’s stability, the political climate may quickly become volatile.
As I get older I am more and more disturbed by the selective memory of the GFC; no mention of the tea party or the fallout from the austerity measures they pushed in the middle of the country; no mention how the bailout saved banks not homes. The Tea Party won, not Occupy, and the current government is doing things beyond the Koch’s wildest dreams.
If and when there is a crash, these dumbass CEOs deserve /nothing/. Let them lose their vacation houses. And, maybe grow some balls and send the fraudsters to jail where they belong.
sigh
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AI Jobs Apocalypse is Here | UnHerd h/t naked capitalism
feels a bit critihype, idk
So, what happens to American politics when the script is flipped, and we enter a new era of white-collar precarity? We can look back to the recent past and recall that, after the 2008 recession, it was young men who got especially angry. Downwardly mobile urban millennials drifted toward radical Left-wing politics, including the Occupy Wall Street movement and both Sanders campaigns, myself included. In the current decade, the Gen-Z men shut out by elite institutions often join their grandfathers and turn toward MAGA, or worse, into Groypers. But an AI-driven white-collar apocalypse has no equivalent of the American Rescue Plan around the corner, and it will move faster through institutions because the people experiencing it — journalists, lawyers, policy staffers — are the ones who produce political legitimacy itself. When that class loses faith in the system’s stability, the political climate may quickly become volatile.
As I get older I am more and more disturbed by the selective memory of the GFC; no mention of the tea party or the fallout from the austerity measures they pushed in the middle of the country; no mention how the bailout saved banks not homes. The Tea Party won, not Occupy, and the current government is doing things beyond the Koch’s wildest dreams.
If and when there is a crash, these dumbass CEOs deserve /nothing/. Let them lose their vacation houses. And, maybe grow some balls and send the fraudsters to jail where they belong.
sigh
unherd is a fash publication. to me this comes across as an AI take-ified rewrite of a 1994 luttwak essay i read recently, an endorsement of a revival of italian style fascism: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n07/edward-luttwak/why-fascism-is-the-wave-of-the-future