Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd 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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
The Dangerous Economics of Walk-Away Wealth in the AI Talent War
Watch now | How firms are accidentally paying their best employees to become their biggest competitors.
(softcurrency.substack.com)
- Anthropic (Medium Risk) Until mid-February of 2026, Anthropic appeared to be happy, talent-retaining. When an AI Safety Leader publicly resigns with a dramatic letter stating “the world is in peril,” the facade of stability cracks. Anthropic is a delayed fuse, just earlier on the vesting curve than OpenAI. The equity is massive ($300B+ valuation) but largely illiquid. As soon as a liquidity event occurs, the safety researchers will have the capital to fund their own, even safer labs.
WTF is “even safer” ??? how bout we like just don’t create the torment nexus.
Wonder if the 50% attrition prediction comes to pass though…
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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!)
Claudio Nastruzzi of The Reg chimes in on the inherent shittiness of AI writing, coining the term “semantic ablation” to describe its capacity to destroy whatever unique voice a text has.
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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!)
A little exchange on the EA forums I thought was notable: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EDBQPT65XJsgszwmL/long-term-risks-from-ideological-fanaticism?commentId=b5pZi5JjoMixQtRgh
tldr; a super long essay lumping together Nazism, Communism and religious fundamentalism (I didn’t read it, just the comments). The comment I linked notes how liberal democracies have also killed a huge number of people (in the commenter’s home country, in the name of purging communism):
The United States presented liberal democracy as a universal emancipatory framework while materially supporting anti-communist purges in my country during what is often called the “Jakarta Method". Between 500,000 and 1 million people were killed in 1965–66, with encouragement and intelligence support from Western powers. Variations of this model were later replicated in parts of Latin America.
The OP’s response is to try to explain how that wasn’t real “liberal democracy” and to try to reframe the discussion. Another commenter is even more direct, they complain half the sources listed are Marxist.
A bit bold to unqualifiedly recommend a list of thinkers of which ~half were Marxists, on the topic of ideological fanaticism causing great harms.
I think it’s a bit bold of this commenter to ignore the empirical facts cited in how many people ‘liberal democracies’ had killed and to exclude sources simply for challenging your ideology.
Just another reminder of how the EA movement is full of right wing thinking and how most of it hasn’t considered even the most basic of leftist thought.
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@o7___o7 @techtakes It was Arduino who emitted the llm generated circuit but I was tired and conflated two companies with similar names (whose products I don't use) before going to bed. Now they're trying to throw a flame war. Pay no attention.
You handled that whole unhinged situation like a champ.
Seeing once respectable folks get trapped in this bullshit feels like watching my college pal smoke his first clove cigarette.
It seems like, for certain kind of geek, code LLMs sit somewhere between “The One Ring but rubbish” and “mechanical meth.” The users certainly feel powerful and productive, and god help anyone who hints otherwise.
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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!)
who up continvoucly morging they branches
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J Jürgen Hubert shared this topic
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AI bros are seizing the means of computation: RAM, GPUs, SSDs and now HDDs…
I don’t think there’s an actual conspiracy, just lots of MBAs following their noses towards the $$$.
That said, time to buy a new lipo battery for that 10 year old laptop in the loft and stick Linux on it - before the lithium miners announce they’ve sold the next 12 months global supply of Lithium to Altman because he needs it to sleep at night…
Unfortunately, my job has recently expanded to include writing offers for servers with our proprietary (non-AI) software.
And let me tell you, this fucking _sucks_ right now.
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who up continvoucly morging they branches
It’s morgin’ time
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It’s morgin’ time
*morgin’ timn
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who up continvoucly morging they branches
Microsoft is really putting the “git” in GitHub thanks to copilot.
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P Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary shared this topic
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who up continvoucly morging they branches
You have to wonder about that Tim traveler; Merlin?
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The Dangerous Economics of Walk-Away Wealth in the AI Talent War
Watch now | How firms are accidentally paying their best employees to become their biggest competitors.
(softcurrency.substack.com)
- Anthropic (Medium Risk) Until mid-February of 2026, Anthropic appeared to be happy, talent-retaining. When an AI Safety Leader publicly resigns with a dramatic letter stating “the world is in peril,” the facade of stability cracks. Anthropic is a delayed fuse, just earlier on the vesting curve than OpenAI. The equity is massive ($300B+ valuation) but largely illiquid. As soon as a liquidity event occurs, the safety researchers will have the capital to fund their own, even safer labs.
WTF is “even safer” ??? how bout we like just don’t create the torment nexus.
Wonder if the 50% attrition prediction comes to pass though…
“even safer” in this case means some combination of two things:
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The new organization is more ideologically aligned with the transhumanist doom cult that apparently managed to eat the brains of the people with money to burn.
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The new organization, largely as a result of this, is capable of sinking an unending amount of capital into buying compute time and Nvidia chips but due to their commitments to safety is even less inclined to actually deliver anything.
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You have to wonder about that Tim traveler; Merlin?
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who up continvoucly morging they branches
Mighty Morgin’ Power-Sloppers
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You have to wonder about that Tim traveler; Merlin?
Tim traveller? The YouTube channel?
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who up continvoucly morging they branches
Two thoughts:
That this is not just some random AI generated graphic, but from official Microsoft tutorial is unpleasantly unsurprising.
I think the tinm (timn ?) axis goes the wrong way.
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who up continvoucly morging they branches
wait, was this brain-rotting cognitive hazard posted at the linked page on microsoft dot com documentation? if so they have already removed it
edit: archive caught it
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Last megathread I posted about some LWer writing about “demographic collapse” in Japan (indistinguishable from anyone with any ambition leaving for greener pastures). I’ve read the comments to see if there’s any pushback, and found this absolute doozy
Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse — LessWrong
This is a cross-post from: https://www.250bpm.com/p/life-at-the-frontlines-of-demographic • • …
(www.lesswrong.com)
yawn, i diagnose that LWer with weeb. this is something happening across entire industrialized world, causes being high performance mechanization of agriculture, old people being stubborn in regards to moving, lack of specialized work in countryside and couple of other factors. germany has patched their hospice staff shortage (not sure how effectively) with migrants, but japanese are way too racist for that. same thing happens in moldova, but you never hear sob stories about retired moldovans because they’re broke and nobody cares, while moldovan govt can’t really do much about it (because broke) to degree that it has not just economic and demographic, but even strategic effects. whole lotta drs strangelove in there
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wait, was this brain-rotting cognitive hazard posted at the linked page on microsoft dot com documentation? if so they have already removed it
edit: archive caught it
what I’m thinking about is for how many years now they have been promising that just one more datacenter will fix the “hallucinations”, yet this mess is indistinguishable from nonsense output from three years ago. I see “AI” is going well
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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 bros do new experiments in making themselves even stupider. Going from ‘explain what you did but dumb it down for me and my degraded attention span’ into ‘just make a simplified cartoon out of it’.
Proud of not understanding what is going on. None of these people could hack the Gibson.
E: If they all hate programming so much, perhaps a change of job is in question, sure might not pay as much, but it might make them happier.
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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!)
Somebody on bsky talking about various Ben Goertzel Epstein file emails.
