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.)
New (to me) lore from https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/god-is-back-on-the-timeline
This all kicked off last year when religious Substacker Ethan Muse wrote a heavily sourced essay arguing that the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima — a 1917 incident where large crowds of people reported seeing the sun dance and emit radiant colors — was a genuine miracle, unexplainable by any other method other than divine intervention. This inspired rationalist blogger Scott Alexander to write a more skeptical post titled “The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know,” which led to responses and counter-responses.
The discourse continued into 2026 when other bloggers began jumping into the fray and Alexander began investigating similar sun miracles in Buddhism. It seems to have wrapped up with Alexander’s recent pilgrimage to a modern-day holy site where people still claim to see sun miracles to this day.
lol pilgramage what. is he converting?
It was only a matter of time. Enlightened centrist Brodie Robertson is now rubbing shoulders with DHH on his podcast. I guess after making nice with the likes of Andreas Kling, Vaxry and Lunduke it was only a small step to invite DHH as well.
Another oped from StudyHacks Cal Newport:
Opinion: How Scared Should We Be of A.I. Right Now? | NYT
The time has come to push back. Once we understand the key ideas of Rationalism, we can begin to filter them out. Be very wary, for example, when A.I. leaders or online commentators begin talking in sweeping generalities about the future of the technology, such as stating with confidence that many jobs will soon be automated or that their language models will soon become sentient beings intent on escaping their creators’ control. (No, OpenAI’s autonomous agents conducting hacks doesn’t mean that A.I. is rising up against its human overlords.)
The correct reply is to promptly turn the conversation back to the possibilities, harms and viability of the products that actually exist. To extend an analogy I’ve made before, if Ford automobiles were spontaneously catching on fire, we wouldn’t tolerate the chief executive’s changing the subject to discuss our general lack of preparedness for a future with flying cars. We’d demand that the company address the acute problem happening right now.
(Hey remember when there was a guy that actually blew the whistle on exploding cars, ran for president? “We” tolerated exploding cars and people dying for years, until someone actually stepped up and forced the issue. How’s the country been treating that guy?)
It’s not surprising that so many Americans feel negatively about A.I. at the moment, but these sentiments aren’t inevitable. Our current crop of L.L.M.-powered tools are exciting — and worrisome, and promising, and frustrating, all at the same time. With proper direction, they’ll hopefully make our lives better. But they don’t have to be terrifying. We thought Silicon Valley was trying to warn us of an unavoidable danger, but maybe they were just being weird.
wonder if such a moderated, watered down position in a large publication ends up sending more eyeballs to Yudkowsky than it does to innoculate the general public, could end up a net negative.
Hey remember when there was a guy that actually blew the whistle on exploding cars, ran for president
didn’t Nader basically throw the election to Bush II?
Not compared to the supreme court, no. E: your recollection kinda proves the point imho.
