I'm mentally filing this next to that clip of a black guy telling someone to just call him the N-word.
That opens you up to getting accused of click fraud, as AdNauseam found out the hard way but its worth it if you can squeeze some cash out of them before that happens.
Sentiment analysis surrounding AI suggests sneers are gonna moon pretty soon. Good news for us, since we've been stacking sneers for a while.
Recently stumbled upon an anti-AI mutual aid/activism group that's being set up, I suspect some of you will be interested.
xAI has applied for permits for the first set of turbines. But it won’t install pollution controls unless and until its permits are approved. At that point, xAI will be “the lowest-emitting facility in the country,” allegedly.
Musk probably sees gassing black people as a free bonus for installing the turbines, I strongly doubt he's installing pollution controls.
As a famous swindler once said, there's a sucker born every minute.
New article from Jared White: Sorry, You Don’t Get to Die on That “Vibe Coding” Hill, aimed at sneering the shit out of one of Simon Willson's latest blogposts. Here's a personal highlight of mine:
Generative AI is tied at the hip to fascism (do the research if you don’t believe me), and it pains me to see pointless arguments over what constitutes “vibe coding” overshadow the reality that all genAI usage is anti-craft and anti-humanist and in fact represents an extreme position.
Baldur Bjarnason's given his thoughts on Bluesky:
My current theory is that the main difference between open source and closed source when it comes to the adoption of “AI” tools is that open source projects generally have to ship working code, whereas closed source only needs to ship code that runs.
I’ve heard so many examples of closed source projects that get shipped but don’t actually work for the business. And too many examples of broken closed source projects that are replacing legacy code that was both working just fine and genuinely secure. Pure novelty-seeking
Personal rule of thumb: all autoplag is serious until proven satire.
Fuuuuuuuuuck. I used to watch that guy.
The Repubs more-or-less renamed themselves Team Skynet with this open attempt to maximise AI's harms, I absolutely think they're McFucking Losing It™ right now.
Breaking news from 404 Media: the Repubs introduced a new bill in an attempt to ban AI from being regulated:
“...no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10 year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act,” says the text of the bill introduced Sunday night by Congressman Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The text of the bill will be considered by the House at the budget reconciliation markup on May 13.
If this goes through, its full speed ahead on slop.
Its definitely petty, but making Altman's all-consuming incompetence known to the world is something I strongly approve of.
Definitely goes a long way to show why he's an AI bro.
Also minus any mention of johnny depp.
Depp v. Heard was my generation's equivalent to the OJ Simpson trial, so chances are he'll end up conspicuous in his absence.
🎶 Certified Keeper guy? Certified pedophile
(the joke presented itself, I had to :P)
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.)
Okay, complete shot-in-the-dark prediction here - I expect Newgrounds is gonna see an influx of musicians from this.
I am admittedly biased on this (I'm heavily active on there), but I do have precedent to point to - Tumblr's NSFW ban in late 2018 led to a minor influx of artists in November, followed by a site-crashing influx in December, after the ban was officially announced.
the constant adoration of LLMs is driving me mad.
Aaaah I want out
Hopefully, the AI bubble's spectacular implosion will wipe out your fellow programmers' adoration of these plagiarising lie boxes and we can hopefully move on from these godforsaken blights on humanity. (At the cost of another 2008-style global economic meltdown. And America imploding in on itself. And maybe the end of the world, if our luck's sufficiently shit.)
(ah, who am I kidding, most programmers are fucking idiots (no offence), they'll probably still be enamored with autoplag even if all that happens)
New piece from Brian Merchant: Four bad AI futures arrived this week, taking a listicle-ish approach to some of the horrific things AI has unleashed upon us.
🎶 Guess who's back, back again
🎶 Holmes is back, tell a friend
E: ow god im really in a ‘take science fiction too seriously’ period.
People taking sci-fi too seriously was how LessWrong and the AI bubble happened, I'd say you're pretty far from taking it too seriously :P
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 awf...
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.)
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 awf...
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.)
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 awf...
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.)
That ain't clickbait, Xe Iaso's personally-made anti-scraping measure (originally made to deal with Amazon overloading their git server) has ended up being used by the literal United Nations.
I recommend reading the full blogpost, its a wild ride.
Before we go any further: I hate to ask you to do this, but I need your help — I'm up for this year's Webbys for the best business podcast award. I know it's a pain in the ass, but can you sign up and vote for Better Offline? I have

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...)
Meta’s Llama 4 model is worried about left leaning bias in the data, and wants to be more like Elon Musk’s Grok.

For anyone not in the know, EasyRPG is a free and open-source reimplementation of the RPG Maker 2000/2003 engine. Its a pretty cool little community project, I recommend checking it out.
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..)
Effective accelerationists didn’t just accidentally shoot themselves in the foot. They methodically blew off each of their toes with a .50 caliber sniper rifle.

A nice and solid mockery of just how badly e/accs derailed their own plans by getting Trump elected. I'll let the subtitle(?) speak for itself:
> Effective accelerationists didn’t just accidentally shoot themselves in the foot. They methodically blew off each of their toes with a .50 caliber sniper rifle.
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. Also, happy April Fool's in advance.)
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.)
To that which a chatbot cannot speak, it should pass over in silence.

A solid piece on AI and ethics (and the general lack of them), featuring a nice sideswipe at our very good friends.
YouTube Video
Click to view this content.
Fun fact: somebody managed to pull off deferred rendering on the Nintendo 64. And its let them show off impressively high-res textures at pretty solid framerates.
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.)
XCancel: https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1900247885142434220
Context: https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115
If I had a nickel for every "metafictional" "short" "story" a promptbro shat into existence on Twitter, I'd have two nickels. That's not much, but its two nickels too fucking many.
It's been a good minute since I took a shot at predicting how the AI bubble (and its burst) is gonna play out. This is less a dedicated post and more a compilation of the bajillion thoughts I've had about this.
- Throwing the Humanities a Bone
Right off the bat, I suspect the arts/humanities will gain a degree of begrudging respect at the direct expense of tech's public image taking a nosedive. My primary reason for this is due to the slop-nami and its wide-spread impact on the Internet at large.
On one end, you have an utter tidal wave of AI-generated slop flooding basically every corner of daily life, giving us a nonstop torrent of misinformation (political or otherwise) and inhumanly shit "artwork" which clogs the Internet with garbage and drowns out human voices wherever it can, acting as an omnipresent annoyance at best and a direct threat to people's livelihoods at worst.
On the other end, you have the AI bros responsible for/complicit in this slop-nami, who uncritically praise whatever garbage gen-AI creates, relentlessly hype up its "creative" qualities and relentlessly doomsay about the incoming Artificial General Intelligence that will wipe out humanity/solve all of humanity's problems/God-Knows-Fucking-What.
Combined, these two aspects of the bubble paint a picture of tech as an utterly insipid and artless field, full of soulless dilletantes who are incapable of making or understanding art at best and actively hostile to it at worst.
If that new image of tech takes root in the public consciousness, its gonna make the arts/humanities look a fair bit better by comparison. Sure, the fields are still gonna have to deal with the stigma of being a "useless degree" but its better than your degree being taken as an indictment of you as a person.
Confidence: Low. This is pure gut instinct (and probably hope) talking from watching the slop-nami first-hand - whilst it could force people to appreciate the arts a bit more, nothing's stopping the slop-nami from devaluing the arts even fucking more.
- Smells Like Fash Spirit
On another front entirely, I expect this bubble will leave the tech industry with a reputation as a Nazi bar - a reputation that will linger even after Trump and his cronies are thrown out of office.
Silicon Valley's sucking up to Trump and DOGE's AI-Poweredtm annihilation of the state is doing wonders on this particular front, but fascists' fascination with slop and TESCREAL being fash to its core are likely helping build this image as well.
Referencing an earlier comment of mine, AI as a concept will likely get hit with the stench of fash as well - considering the TESCREAL movement partially powering this bubble is fascist as hell, that seems likely.
Confidence: High. Unlike Prediction 1, I've got some solid evidence to suggest tech's picking up a reputation for fascism. Mainly Silicon Valley's jackbooted goose-stepping to Trump's tune.
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.)