8h ago

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th August 2025

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.

Previous week

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New article from the New York Times reporting on an influx of compsci graduates struggling to find jobs (ostensibly caused by AI automation). Found a real money shot about a quarter of the way through:
Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent.
You want my take, I expect this article's gonna blow a major hole in STEM's public image - being a path to a high-paying job was one of STEM's major selling points (especially compared to the "useless" art/humanities degrees), and this new article not only undermines that selling point, but argues for flipping it on its head.
- Quick update: I've checked the response on Bluesky, and it seems the general response is of schadenfreude at STEM's expense. From the replies, I've found:
  Humanities graduates directly mocking STEM (Fig. 1,Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4, Fig. 5)
  Mockery of the long-running "learn to code" mantra (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4 Fig. 5, Fig. 6)
  Claims that STEM automated themselves out of a job by creating AI (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3)
  Plus one user mocking STEM in general as "[choosing] fascism and “billions must die”" out of greed, and another approving of others' dunks on STEM over past degree-related grievances.
  You want my take on this dunkfest, this suggests STEM's been hit with a double-whammy here - not only has STEM lost the status their "high-paying" reputation gave them, but that reputation (plus a lotta built-up grievances from mockery of the humanities) has crippled STEM's ability to garner sympathy for their current predicament.
  
  On one hand, this is another case of capitalism working as intended. You have the ruling class dangling the carrot of the promise of social mobility via job. Just gotta turn the crank of the orphan grinder for 4 years or so, until there's enough orphan paste to grease the next grinding machine. But it's ok, because your experience in crank will let you climb the ladder to the next, higher paying, higher prestige crank of the machine. Then one day, they decide to turn on the motor.
  On the other hand? There is no other hand, they chopped it off because you didn't turn the crank fast enough when you had the chance.
continuing from the last weeks thread https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/the-high-costs-and-thin-margins-threatening-ai-coding-startups/
- You know stuff is bad if the margins aren't "low" or "razor-thin" but "very negative".
  The entire business idea is dumb. Yes we will pay retail for access to models run by companies also offering the same products that we do, but we'll make up for it in volume?
Forwarding this discussion to here:
News from r/philosophy: OOP, Richard Y Chappell, posted an article containing image slop, landing them a 3-day ban. OOP writes a new article that DESTROYS the r/philosophy moderation policy on AI generated content with FACTS and LOGIC. For added flavour, OOP is an EA. OP is an SSCer. Both are participants in the thread.
- Guess either term hasn't started, or his gig as phil prof is some sort of right-wing sinecure. Dude has a lot of time on his hands.
  FWIW I'd say banning a poster for including slop image in a 3rd party article is a bit harsh, but what would Reddit be without arbitrary draconian rules? A normal person would note this, accept the 3 day ban, and maybe avoid the sub in future or avoid including slop. The fact he flew off his handle this much is very very funny though.
  
  Forget being exposed to the elements to build character. People should be randomly temp banned and use that to build/judge character. (Also a good judge of the power balance in a community, if the mod team can temp ban a power poster that predates the mod team, say lesswrong giving Yud a timeout).

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