this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th July 2025 (awful.systems)

submitted 2 weeks ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@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.)

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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Forgot to save who said it, but on bsky somebody said they or their friends had come up with a slur for people who use genAI for everything: sloppers.

More people should have read Zima Blue.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Zima Blue

Didn’t know it was something readable! I just know it as an episode of Love Death + Robots. It was a standout episode in an otherwise pretty boring first two seasons.

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

click here to take 10d8 psychic damage

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Well I suppose it can't be much worse than graphology or myers-briggs!

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[–] nfultz@awful.systems 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Not sure if this was already posted here but saw it on LI this morning - AI for Good [Appearance?] - sometimes we focus on the big companies and miss how awful the sycophantic ecosystem gets.

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[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 9 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

I feel called out for being familiar with all of these words.

The dread was building up right until I got jumpscared by

"priors"

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Picked up a sneer in the wild (through trawling David Gerard's Bluesky):

You want my take, Kathryn's on the money - future expectations on how people speak will actively shift away from anything that could be mistaken for sounding like an LLM, whether because you want to avoid being falsely accused of posting slop, or because the slop-nami has pushed your writing habits away from slop-like traits.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

kinda related but wouldn’t it be fun to believe that LLMs were invented by Big Em Dash as a conspiracy

[–] mlen@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I fucking hate them for ruining the em dash, I liked to use it from time to time

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago

today's least surprising news: substack's coterie of totally-not-nazis fucking love AI https://on.substack.com/p/the-substack-ai-report

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 2 weeks ago

Not a sneer, but still inexplicably funny: You Can Now Venmo the Government to Help Pay Off National Debt

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I try to talk to ChatGPT for 2 straight hours but go crazy and have to stop | Daniel Hentschel

I'm here to help in whatever way I can. Just let me know what you'd like to do next.

What I'd like to do next is fucking hang myself. Oh shit I shouldn't have said that. No, I'm joking. That was a joke. I was joking about that. Joking.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I'm sorry he feels that way. I'm here for him if he wants to talk about anything, just let me know.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Managed to stumble across two separate attempts to protect promptfondlers' feelings from getting hurt like they deserve, titled "Shame in the machine: affective accountability and the ethics of AI" and "AI Could Have Written This: Birth of a Classist Slur in Knowledge Work".

I found both of them whilst trawling Bluesky, and they're being universally mocked like they deserve on there.

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I really like how the second one appropriates pseudomarxist language to have a go at those snooty liberal elites again.

edit: The first paper might be making a perfectly valid point at a glance??

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago

New piece from Brian Merchant, and a new edition of AI Killed My Job just dropped

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Going through work email I saw a link o an article about Quantum-AI. It was behind paywall, and I am not paying for reading about how woo+woo=woo^2. What do you do when your bubble isn't inflating anymore? Couple it with another stale bubble!

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