Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025
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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.)
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th September 2025 - awful.systems
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.)
(awful.systems)
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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.)
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th September 2025 - awful.systems
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.)
(awful.systems)
Was reading some science fiction from the 90’s and the AI/AGI said ‘im an analog computer, just like you, im actually really bad at math.’ And I wonder how much damage these one of these ideas (the other being there are computer types that can do more/different things. Not sure if analog turing machines provide any new capabilities that digital TMs do, but I leave that question for the smarter people in the subject of theorethical computer science) did.
The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write), which now leads people who read enough science fiction to see the machine that can’t count nor run doom and go ‘this is what they predicted!’.
Not a sneer just a random thought.
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Was reading some science fiction from the 90’s and the AI/AGI said ‘im an analog computer, just like you, im actually really bad at math.’ And I wonder how much damage these one of these ideas (the other being there are computer types that can do more/different things. Not sure if analog turing machines provide any new capabilities that digital TMs do, but I leave that question for the smarter people in the subject of theorethical computer science) did.
The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write), which now leads people who read enough science fiction to see the machine that can’t count nor run doom and go ‘this is what they predicted!’.
Not a sneer just a random thought.
this is one of those things that’s, in a narrative sense, a great way to tell a story, while being completely untethered from fact/reality. and that’s fine! stories have no obligation to be based in fact!
to put a very mild armchair analysis about it forward: it’s playing on the definition of the conceptual “smart” computer, as it relates to human experience. there’s been a couple of other things in recent history that I can think of that hit similar or related notes (M3GAN, the whole “omg the AI tricked us (and then the different species with a different neurotype and capability noticed it!)” arc in ST:DIS, the last few Mission Impossible films, etc). it’s one of those ways in which art and stories tend to express “grappling with $x to make sense of it”
The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write)
personally speaking, one of the ways about it that I find most jarring is when the fantastical vastly outweighs anything else purely for narrative reasons - so much so that it’s a 4th-wallbreak for me ito what the story means to convey. I reflect on this somewhat regularly, as it’s a rather cursed rabbithole that instances repeatedly: “is it my knowledge of this domain that’s spoiling my enjoyment of this thing, or is the story simply badly written?” is the question that comes up, and it’s surprisingly varied and complicated in its answering
on the whole I think it’s often good/best to keep in mind that scifi is often an exploration and a pressure valve, but that it’s also worth keeping an eye on how much it’s a pressure valve. too much of the latter, and something
is up -
this is one of those things that’s, in a narrative sense, a great way to tell a story, while being completely untethered from fact/reality. and that’s fine! stories have no obligation to be based in fact!
to put a very mild armchair analysis about it forward: it’s playing on the definition of the conceptual “smart” computer, as it relates to human experience. there’s been a couple of other things in recent history that I can think of that hit similar or related notes (M3GAN, the whole “omg the AI tricked us (and then the different species with a different neurotype and capability noticed it!)” arc in ST:DIS, the last few Mission Impossible films, etc). it’s one of those ways in which art and stories tend to express “grappling with $x to make sense of it”
The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write)
personally speaking, one of the ways about it that I find most jarring is when the fantastical vastly outweighs anything else purely for narrative reasons - so much so that it’s a 4th-wallbreak for me ito what the story means to convey. I reflect on this somewhat regularly, as it’s a rather cursed rabbithole that instances repeatedly: “is it my knowledge of this domain that’s spoiling my enjoyment of this thing, or is the story simply badly written?” is the question that comes up, and it’s surprisingly varied and complicated in its answering
on the whole I think it’s often good/best to keep in mind that scifi is often an exploration and a pressure valve, but that it’s also worth keeping an eye on how much it’s a pressure valve. too much of the latter, and something
is upOw yeah the way it used in this story also made sense but not in a computer science way. Just felt a bit how Gibson famously had never used a modem before he wrote his cyberpunk series.
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Ow yeah the way it used in this story also made sense but not in a computer science way. Just felt a bit how Gibson famously had never used a modem before he wrote his cyberpunk series.
@Soyweiser @techtakes You misremembered: Gibson wrote his early stories and Neuromancer on a typewriter, he didn't own a computer until he bought one with the royalties (an Apple IIc, which then freaked him out by making graunching noises at first—he had no idea it needed a floopy disk inserting).
