Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th August 2026 - awful.systems
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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.)
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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.)
Start your week with a bsky thread of Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans discovering rationalist funded data center apologist and friend of the instance Andy Masley.
Bonus: the poll that is meant to show how much americans love tech companies conveniently leaves Meta out and is sourced from The Argument.
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Start your week with a bsky thread of Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans discovering rationalist funded data center apologist and friend of the instance Andy Masley.
Bonus: the poll that is meant to show how much americans love tech companies conveniently leaves Meta out and is sourced from The Argument.
Evans is not having any of his bullshit lol
PS: the new Ill Conceived podcast about Aellacon is out today. I'm half-way in and it's a certified banger. I have enjoyed watching June and Josh's war on it (and Dana F.) with great pleasure.
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Start your week with a bsky thread of Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans discovering rationalist funded data center apologist and friend of the instance Andy Masley.
Bonus: the poll that is meant to show how much americans love tech companies conveniently leaves Meta out and is sourced from The Argument.
where's the rationalist smoking gun? or is that just The Argument?
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where's the rationalist smoking gun? or is that just The Argument?
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bup-pow!
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Evans is not having any of his bullshit lol
PS: the new Ill Conceived podcast about Aellacon is out today. I'm half-way in and it's a certified banger. I have enjoyed watching June and Josh's war on it (and Dana F.) with great pleasure.
::: spoiler transcript
Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans)
"Americans like two-day delivery but dislike being promised that a Robot God will render them Paupers Forever. The fickle whims of the median voter continue to perplex me."
::: -
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.)
Here's someone who really does not know what they're talking about, because both alternatives sound absolutely horrible:
(it's how to build opinion against AI)
Basically the idea is to take nuclear vs. renewables as a model. Build a public movement that says one kind of tech (AI) is bad, and another kind of tech (what I'd call "human-potential technologies" - economically complementing humans rather than substituting for them - so stuff like genetic engineering, thought interfaces, pharmaceuticals, prosthetics etc) is good. So that researchers and investors get pushed away from the former and into the latter.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=n7uEsxcRzMhfJKcBW
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Here's someone who really does not know what they're talking about, because both alternatives sound absolutely horrible:
(it's how to build opinion against AI)
Basically the idea is to take nuclear vs. renewables as a model. Build a public movement that says one kind of tech (AI) is bad, and another kind of tech (what I'd call "human-potential technologies" - economically complementing humans rather than substituting for them - so stuff like genetic engineering, thought interfaces, pharmaceuticals, prosthetics etc) is good. So that researchers and investors get pushed away from the former and into the latter.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=n7uEsxcRzMhfJKcBW
last time rationalists tried to touch medical field we got metamed
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Here's someone who really does not know what they're talking about, because both alternatives sound absolutely horrible:
(it's how to build opinion against AI)
Basically the idea is to take nuclear vs. renewables as a model. Build a public movement that says one kind of tech (AI) is bad, and another kind of tech (what I'd call "human-potential technologies" - economically complementing humans rather than substituting for them - so stuff like genetic engineering, thought interfaces, pharmaceuticals, prosthetics etc) is good. So that researchers and investors get pushed away from the former and into the latter.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=n7uEsxcRzMhfJKcBW
The movement against nuclear power was significantly helped along by the movement against nuclear weapons, which was particularly potent at the height of the cold war. AI freaks seem to hold a certain amount of contempt for the left? Which gets in the way of spreading their message. And in any event their message is "eugenics" which isn't likely to be received well on the left these days
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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.)
Hadn't seen this discussed previously and/or I missed it, but I guess this is one way they'll juice metrics for their IPO.
yolo mode for all will certainly get that avg token burn up.
Anthropic announced earlier in the week that they were going to set the default mode on Claude Code to auto, that same week, not wasting any time. What that means is, as you build the thing you’re building with Claude Code, instead of stopping at various points (many, many, many points) and asking your permission to do things, it’ll just do them and maybe tell you about them later.
links back to https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/09/anthropic-is-turning-claude-codes-auto-mode-on-by-default/
Anthropic also said that in testing, auto mode proved safer than manual review — in a study with 1,053 paid testers, auto mode caught 89% of harmful actions, while human review only caught 13.6%. (Perhaps that’s because “manual review can become habitual: users approve 97% of permission prompts in Claude Code.”)
Which links back to https://claude.com/blog/auto-mode-default-in-claude-code
Auto mode is designed to balance users’ desire not to be interrupted with a system that helps avoid harmful actions: instead of prompts, it routes each tool call through a classifier targeted at blocking actions that are irreversible, destructive, or aimed outside your environment. When the classifier blocks something, Claude usually finds a safer way to proceed on its own or asks you directly for the go-ahead; if it can't make progress—three blocks in a row, or twenty across a session—Claude Code falls back to manual approvals.
Fucking just use the classifier with manual mode then instead of flooding people in cursed skinner loops with garbage permission popups. This isn't anything special to yolo or anthropic. It's like all the tech industry learned from Windows Vista or the EU cookie law was the dark patterns.
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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.)
On today's episode of AI Slop's Endless Fuckups: "Mastering Tf2 Custom War Paint: A Step-By-Step Creative Guide", an ostensible guide to creating custom War Paints (think something like weapon skins in Counter Strike: Global Offensive/Counter Strike 2, or character skins in Minecraft) for Team Fortress 2.
The opening has no obvious faults I can see, but the bulk of this slop article is about painting a real-life weapon, not creating a texture to be applied to an in-game weapon. Its the kind of mistake a human would never make.
EDIT: That slop guide's existence is getting on my nerves, so here's a basic War Paint guide I found on Steam
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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.)
-
Here's someone who really does not know what they're talking about, because both alternatives sound absolutely horrible:
(it's how to build opinion against AI)
Basically the idea is to take nuclear vs. renewables as a model. Build a public movement that says one kind of tech (AI) is bad, and another kind of tech (what I'd call "human-potential technologies" - economically complementing humans rather than substituting for them - so stuff like genetic engineering, thought interfaces, pharmaceuticals, prosthetics etc) is good. So that researchers and investors get pushed away from the former and into the latter.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ht4JZtxngKwuQ7cDC/tsvibt-s-shortform?commentId=n7uEsxcRzMhfJKcBW
I mean there already is a thriving public movement which despises AI, don’t think you’ll be getting to those people if you start supporting eugenics
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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.)
Buddhist Rationalist cult MAPLE wants the Internet to know that contrary to "a recent social media post" their guru Soryu Forall is authorized to teach by "by well-known teachers of the Vipassana and Zen traditions." They mention a few whoopsies.
At another time, while Soryu was away traveling, the leadership team tried to convert the entire organization away from Buddhism. When Soryu returned, he saw this and told the leaders that if they wanted to go in this direction, they could, and that he would go do something else. They were unwilling to take on the financial responsibility of the organization and refused the offer.
They could be responding to The High Control Dynamics at MAPLE (2026) or perhaps Emerging: Making Sense of Soryu Forall (2026) or even My experience inside Soryu Forall's AI-Centered Monastic Academy (2025)
Aella does her boundary-setting thing (those Zizians/MAPLE/Leverage/Brent Dill are bad and not us) https://xcancel.com/Aella_Girl/status/2091015022042595743#m I don't think Ozy covered MAPLE although IIRC they had a Bay Area offshoot with offices nextdoor to Leverage. I would like to know who is funding Soryu.
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Buddhist Rationalist cult MAPLE wants the Internet to know that contrary to "a recent social media post" their guru Soryu Forall is authorized to teach by "by well-known teachers of the Vipassana and Zen traditions." They mention a few whoopsies.
At another time, while Soryu was away traveling, the leadership team tried to convert the entire organization away from Buddhism. When Soryu returned, he saw this and told the leaders that if they wanted to go in this direction, they could, and that he would go do something else. They were unwilling to take on the financial responsibility of the organization and refused the offer.
They could be responding to The High Control Dynamics at MAPLE (2026) or perhaps Emerging: Making Sense of Soryu Forall (2026) or even My experience inside Soryu Forall's AI-Centered Monastic Academy (2025)
Aella does her boundary-setting thing (those Zizians/MAPLE/Leverage/Brent Dill are bad and not us) https://xcancel.com/Aella_Girl/status/2091015022042595743#m I don't think Ozy covered MAPLE although IIRC they had a Bay Area offshoot with offices nextdoor to Leverage. I would like to know who is funding Soryu.
I think the only cult type that Yud hasn't spun off yet is fundamentalist Christian.
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Buddhist Rationalist cult MAPLE wants the Internet to know that contrary to "a recent social media post" their guru Soryu Forall is authorized to teach by "by well-known teachers of the Vipassana and Zen traditions." They mention a few whoopsies.
At another time, while Soryu was away traveling, the leadership team tried to convert the entire organization away from Buddhism. When Soryu returned, he saw this and told the leaders that if they wanted to go in this direction, they could, and that he would go do something else. They were unwilling to take on the financial responsibility of the organization and refused the offer.
They could be responding to The High Control Dynamics at MAPLE (2026) or perhaps Emerging: Making Sense of Soryu Forall (2026) or even My experience inside Soryu Forall's AI-Centered Monastic Academy (2025)
Aella does her boundary-setting thing (those Zizians/MAPLE/Leverage/Brent Dill are bad and not us) https://xcancel.com/Aella_Girl/status/2091015022042595743#m I don't think Ozy covered MAPLE although IIRC they had a Bay Area offshoot with offices nextdoor to Leverage. I would like to know who is funding Soryu.
Has anyone researched exactly how MAPLE split off from Bay Area rationalism? Most of the writeups focus on what happened after they built a giant compound in Vermont, not why so many rats travel there.
They seem to have launched in one small Vermont township in 2014 ("3 Years of Training Awakened Leaders
" as of 2017). They moved from Johnson, VT to Lowell, VT at some point.Edit / Some history here but nothing on the LessWrong connection except something called the 1440 Foundation in California https://www.centerformindfullearning.org/history/
Edit / Local journalism delivers
The people making these machines are listening. According to a 2023 profile of Forall in The Atlantic, he provides spiritual advice to A.I. thinkers, hosting talks and retreats for researchers and developers at leading artificial intelligence engineering hubs like OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Apple.
MAPLE has also grown, with expansion efforts under similar acronyms formed under the umbrella of Community for the Experience and Development of Awakening and Responsibility, or CEDAR, like its OAK offshoot in Berkeley, Calif., and Willow intensive in Canada.
The Center for Mindful Learning, the parent corporation of MAPLE and its affiliates, controls $3.65 million in assets, according to 2023 tax filings, and brought in nearly a million in revenue each year between 2020 and 2023 thanks to donations from individuals in the West Coast tech industry.
Their Form 990 is here but does not have details of the donors. So it sounds like they have a single guru with wealthy patrons.
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I think the only cult type that Yud hasn't spun off yet is fundamentalist Christian.
There were some breadcrumbs in that Wes streeting article about https://www.eaforchristians.org/ but I couldn't get a sense of how fundie they may be.
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I would prefer they turn them off
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There were some breadcrumbs in that Wes streeting article about https://www.eaforchristians.org/ but I couldn't get a sense of how fundie they may be.
tim taylor voice Oh no...
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