Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026
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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. What a year, huh?)
“AI blunder in Aurskog-Høland [Norway] – children received water bills”
The sources linked are all in norwegian, so you’ll have to translate them yourself if you’re interested, but Patricia’s summary seems reasonable. The government authority in question had to hire extra people to undo the mess that the ai system caused. There’s a commercial vendor involved somewhere, but if they were named I didn’t spot it.
Patricia Aas 🐢🏳️🌈 (@patigallardo.bsky.social)
«AI blunder in Aurskog-Høland [Norway] – children received water bills»
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
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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. What a year, huh?)
Amazon’s latest round of 16k layoffs for AWS was called “Project Dawn” internally, and the public line is that the layoffs are because of increased AI use. AI has become useful, but as a way to conceal business failure. They’re not cutting jobs because their financials are in the shitter, oh no, it’s because they’re just too amazing at being efficient. So efficient they sent the corporate fake condolences email before informing the people they’re firing, referencing a blog post they hadn’t yet published.
It’s Schrodinger’s Success. You can neither prove nor disprove the effects of AI on the decision, or if the layoffs are an indication of good management or fundamental mismanagement. And the media buys into it with headlines like “Amazon axes 16,000 jobs as it pushes AI and efficiency” that are distinctly ambivalent on how 16k people could possibly have been redundant in a tech company that’s supposed to be a beacon of automation.
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The sad thing is I have some idea of what it’s trying to say. One of the many weird habits of the Rationalists is that they fixate on a few obscure mathematical theorems and then come up with their own ideas of what these theorems really mean. Their interpretations may be only loosely inspired by the actual statements of the theorems, but it does feel real good when your ideas feel as solid as math.
One of these theorems is Aumann’s agreement theorem. I don’t know what the actual theorem says, but the LW interpretation is that any two “rational” people must eventually agree on every issue after enough discussion, whatever rational means. So if you disagree with any LW principles, you just haven’t read enough 20k word blog posts. Unfortunately, most people with “bounded levels of compute” ain’t got the time, so they can’t necessarily converge on the meta level of, never mind, screw this, I’m not explaining this shit. I don’t want to figure this out anymore.
I know what it says and it’s commonly misused. Aumann’s Agreement says that if two people disagree on a conclusion then either they disagree on the reasoning or the premises. It’s trivial in formal logic, but hard to prove in Bayesian game theory, so of course the Bayesians treat it as some grand insight rather than a basic fact. That said, I don’t know what that LW post is talking about and I don’t want to think about it, which means that I might disagree with people about the conclusion of that post~
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Chris Lintott (@chrislintott.bsky.social):
We’re getting so many journal submissions from people who think ‘it kinda works’ is the standard to aim for.
Research Notes of the AAS in particular, which was set up to handle short, moderated contributions especially from students, is getting swamped. Often the authors clearly haven’t read what they’ve submitting, (Descriptions of figures that don’t exist or don’t show what they purport to)
I’m also getting wild swings in topic. A rejection of one paper will instantly generate a submission of another, usually on something quite different.
Many of these submissions are dense with equations and pseudo-technological language which makes it hard to give rapid, useful feedback. And when I do give feedback, often I get back whatever their LLM says.
Including the very LLM responses like ‘Oh yes, I see that <thing that was fundamental to the argument> is wrong, I’ve removed it. Here’s something else’
Research Notes is free to publish in and I think provides a very valuable service to the community. But I think we’re a month or two from being completely swamped.
that kinda tracks the type of replies @corbin@awful.systems is seeing to his lobsters challenge, doesn’t it?
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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. What a year, huh?)
Excellent BSky sneer about the preposterous “free AI training” the Brits came up with. 10/10, quality sneer.
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The Wikipedia article is cursed
I’d say even the part where the article tries to formally state the theorem is not written well. Even then, it’s very clear how narrow the formal statement is. You can say that two agents agree on any statement that is common knowledge, but you have to be careful on exactly how you’re defining “agent”, “statement”, and “common knowledge”. If I actually wanted to prove a point with Aumann’s agreement theorem, I’d have to make sure my scenario fits in the mathematical framework. What is my state space? What are the events partitioning the state space that form an agent? Etc.
The rats never seem to do the legwork that’s necessary to apply a mathematical theorem. I doubt most of them even understand the formal statement of Aumann’s theorem. Yud is all about “shut up and multiply,” but has anyone ever see him apply Bayes’s theorem and multiply two actual probabilities? All they seem to do is pull numbers out of their ass and fit superexponential curves to 6 data points because the superintelligent AI is definitely coming in 2027.
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I know what it says and it’s commonly misused. Aumann’s Agreement says that if two people disagree on a conclusion then either they disagree on the reasoning or the premises. It’s trivial in formal logic, but hard to prove in Bayesian game theory, so of course the Bayesians treat it as some grand insight rather than a basic fact. That said, I don’t know what that LW post is talking about and I don’t want to think about it, which means that I might disagree with people about the conclusion of that post~
I think Aumann’s theorem is even narrower than that, after reading the Wikipedia article. The theorem doesn’t even reference “reasoning”, unless you count observing that a certain event happened as reasoning.
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The Wikipedia article is cursed
“you should watch [Steven Pinker’s] podcast with Richard Hanania” cool suggestion scott
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“you should watch [Steven Pinker’s] podcast with Richard Hanania” cool suggestion scott
Surely this is a suitable reference for a math article!
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Tbh, this is pretty convincing, I agree a lot more with parts of the LW space now. (Just look at the title, the content isn’t that interesting).
i actually find the content pretty amusing, since it amounts to “have you guys tried using words correctly every once in a while?”
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people who think ‘it kinda works’ is the standard to aim for
I swear that this is a form of AI psychosis or something because the attitude is suddenly ubiquitous among the AI obsessed.
they prompted so hard and that’s all they get, so obviously there’s nothing better and they stop st that
they’ll do anything except actually learn shit or put in effort
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I’d say even the part where the article tries to formally state the theorem is not written well. Even then, it’s very clear how narrow the formal statement is. You can say that two agents agree on any statement that is common knowledge, but you have to be careful on exactly how you’re defining “agent”, “statement”, and “common knowledge”. If I actually wanted to prove a point with Aumann’s agreement theorem, I’d have to make sure my scenario fits in the mathematical framework. What is my state space? What are the events partitioning the state space that form an agent? Etc.
The rats never seem to do the legwork that’s necessary to apply a mathematical theorem. I doubt most of them even understand the formal statement of Aumann’s theorem. Yud is all about “shut up and multiply,” but has anyone ever see him apply Bayes’s theorem and multiply two actual probabilities? All they seem to do is pull numbers out of their ass and fit superexponential curves to 6 data points because the superintelligent AI is definitely coming in 2027.
the get smart quick scheme in its full glory
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I know what it says and it’s commonly misused. Aumann’s Agreement says that if two people disagree on a conclusion then either they disagree on the reasoning or the premises. It’s trivial in formal logic, but hard to prove in Bayesian game theory, so of course the Bayesians treat it as some grand insight rather than a basic fact. That said, I don’t know what that LW post is talking about and I don’t want to think about it, which means that I might disagree with people about the conclusion of that post~
if two people disagree on a conclusion then either they disagree on the reasoning or the premises.
I don’t think that’s an accurate summary. In Aumann’s agreement theorem, the different agents share a common prior distribution but are given access to different sources of information about the random quantity under examination. The surprising part is that they agree on the posterior probability provided that their conclusions (not their sources) are common knowledge.
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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. What a year, huh?)
LWer: Heritage Foundation has some good ideas but they’re not enough into eugenics for my taste
This is completely opposed to the Nietzschean worldview, which looks toward the next stage in human evolution, the Overman. The conservative demands the freezing of evolution and progress, the sacralization of the peasant in his state of nature, pregnancy, nursing, throwing up. “Perfection” the conservative puts in scare quotes, he wants the whole concept to disappear, replaced by a universal equality that won’t deem anyone inferior. Perhaps it’s because he fears a society looking toward the future will leave him behind. Or perhaps it’s because he had been taught his Christian morality requires him to identify with the weak, for, as Jesus said, “blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” In his glorification of the “natural ecology of the family,” the conservative fails even by his own logic, as in the state of nature, parents allow sick offspring to die to save resources for the healthy. This was the case in the animal kingdom and among our peasant ancestors.
Some young, BASED Rightists like eugenics, and think the only reason conservatives don’t is that liberals brainwashed them that it’s evil. As more and more taboos erode, yet the one against eugenics remains, it becomes clear that dysgenics is not incidental to conservatism, but driven by the ideology itself, its neuroticism about the human body and hatred of the superior.
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they prompted so hard and that’s all they get, so obviously there’s nothing better and they stop st that
they’ll do anything except actually learn shit or put in effort
All roads lead down from the local maximum
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i actually find the content pretty amusing, since it amounts to “have you guys tried using words correctly every once in a while?”
the comments also do not get it at all. The guy going “don’t say you have 99% percent credence in something¹, for most people saying that it’s a virtual certainty is the same thing” these people cannot speak as a non-cultmember for even a second
¹yeah don’t, nobody says that
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LWer: Heritage Foundation has some good ideas but they’re not enough into eugenics for my taste
This is completely opposed to the Nietzschean worldview, which looks toward the next stage in human evolution, the Overman. The conservative demands the freezing of evolution and progress, the sacralization of the peasant in his state of nature, pregnancy, nursing, throwing up. “Perfection” the conservative puts in scare quotes, he wants the whole concept to disappear, replaced by a universal equality that won’t deem anyone inferior. Perhaps it’s because he fears a society looking toward the future will leave him behind. Or perhaps it’s because he had been taught his Christian morality requires him to identify with the weak, for, as Jesus said, “blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” In his glorification of the “natural ecology of the family,” the conservative fails even by his own logic, as in the state of nature, parents allow sick offspring to die to save resources for the healthy. This was the case in the animal kingdom and among our peasant ancestors.
Some young, BASED Rightists like eugenics, and think the only reason conservatives don’t is that liberals brainwashed them that it’s evil. As more and more taboos erode, yet the one against eugenics remains, it becomes clear that dysgenics is not incidental to conservatism, but driven by the ideology itself, its neuroticism about the human body and hatred of the superior.
the overman¹
¹better known by it’s german name
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LWer: Heritage Foundation has some good ideas but they’re not enough into eugenics for my taste
This is completely opposed to the Nietzschean worldview, which looks toward the next stage in human evolution, the Overman. The conservative demands the freezing of evolution and progress, the sacralization of the peasant in his state of nature, pregnancy, nursing, throwing up. “Perfection” the conservative puts in scare quotes, he wants the whole concept to disappear, replaced by a universal equality that won’t deem anyone inferior. Perhaps it’s because he fears a society looking toward the future will leave him behind. Or perhaps it’s because he had been taught his Christian morality requires him to identify with the weak, for, as Jesus said, “blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” In his glorification of the “natural ecology of the family,” the conservative fails even by his own logic, as in the state of nature, parents allow sick offspring to die to save resources for the healthy. This was the case in the animal kingdom and among our peasant ancestors.
Some young, BASED Rightists like eugenics, and think the only reason conservatives don’t is that liberals brainwashed them that it’s evil. As more and more taboos erode, yet the one against eugenics remains, it becomes clear that dysgenics is not incidental to conservatism, but driven by the ideology itself, its neuroticism about the human body and hatred of the superior.
the conservative… wants… a universal equality that won’t deem anyone inferior.
perhaps it’s because he had been taught his Christian morality requires him to identify with the weak
Which conservatives are these. This is just a libertarian fantasy, isn’t it.
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the overman¹
¹better known by it’s german name
Technically superman is a more correct translation for that word (similarly to how superscript is the thing beyond the script)
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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. What a year, huh?)
Signaling in the Age of AI: Evidence from Cover Letters
Abstract We study the impact of generative AI on labor market signaling using the introduction of an AI-powered cover letter writing tool on a large online labor platform. Our data track both access to the tool and usage at the application level. Difference-in-differences estimates show that access to the tool increased textual alignment between cover letters and job posts and raised callback rates. Time spent editing AI-generated cover letter drafts is positively correlated with hiring success. After the tool’s introduction, the correlation between cover letters’ textual alignment and callbacks fell by 51%, consistent with what theory predicts if the AI technology reduces the signal content of cover letters. In response, employers shifted toward alternative signals, including workers’ prior work histories.
![Jack Riddle[Any/All]](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/ca54ea94-6df3-4a0f-b75a-f11c4f6a8e32.webp "Jack Riddle[Any/All]"){kind=avatar}
