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.)
46 Comments
sc_griffith@awful.systems · 13 pts · 21h
nice of the rationalists to remind me that no matter how ugly the ai situation gets they will never ever be capable of making a good point
lurker@awful.systems · 9 pts · 20h
ohhh this is what that gary marcus post was about god its worse than i thought. 'AI civilisations' gimme a break
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 7 pts · 20h
Dwarkesh Patel seems to be one of their media operations like Vox Future Perfect and the Collinses.
fnix@awful.systems · 6 pts · 19h
Yeah OpenAI, this is what happens when you think you can trust Gandhi.
YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems · 13 pts · 16h
This may be a little bit off topic, but since it sits at the intersection of academic freedom, race science, and plagiarism I honestly can't imagine our very good friends staying quiet on the matter for long.
Jason Arday, youngest black professor in Cambridge history, dead at 41 after plagiarism debacle
It looks like the initial accusations here came from Nathan Cofnas, a notorious racist shitheel. I am not qualified to speak on the actual validity of the plagiarism accusations, but suffice to say that my priors are very low. Cofnas' current employer seems to agree at least that the optics are pretty fucking bad, and he's been given a teaching ban and presumably a private request to stay out of the spotlight for a while.
It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle, but I think the more salient criticism is that it's get another example of academic culture being unable and/or unwilling to handle people acting in bad faith. Like, even if the plagiarism accusations were completely substantiated (Ed: they're quite the opposite), I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that Cofnas was looking to harass a prominent black professor at a well-regarded university and that the low-effort "the AI app says this is plagiarized" attack was simply an expedient means to do so. Race "science" is still a political project masquerading as academic inquiry. Or rather, the line between "impartial" academic inquiry and political activity is far less coherent than advertised and failing to acknowledge this will only empower assholes like Cofnas to continue their bullshit.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 13 pts · 14h
Part of the accusations were also that he faked running a lot of marathons in a short period. Which he actually did. I even heard that some news outlets who accused him of faking it actually had reported themselves on him running the marathons.
It is a kiwifarms style witch hunt but started by a racist academic, and perpetuated with help from the media.
jonasty@awful.systems · 12 pts · 12h
Here in Belgium some investigative journalists have been reporting on Cofnas since his appointment in March. They recently translated one of their pieces to English and made it available for non-subscribers (click on 'Lees alleen dit artikel gratis' to close the pop-up):
https://apache.be/2026/03/05/self-declared-race-realist-nathan-cofnas-receives-appointment-ugent
The UGent philosophy department is also not without controversy. Maarten Boudry, a former employee there, is one of the main people in this country pushing 'climate realism', 'concerns about Islam' and 'cultural marxism was a Nazi conspiracy theory but right now we itnis actually happening in our institutions'. He's very buddy buddy with Steven Pinker and likely trying to get more international reach.
Apart from that, plagiarism issues never make news headlines because they happen very often at universities. The only cases I'm aware of are Arday and Claudine Gay. Probably because they have a political skin color.
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 11h
Without having read that specific article
From what I heard Cofnas research is quite bad (it has cases of him seemingly not having read the sources he cites as those say the opposite of what he claims they do, and that is above the normal badness of race science shit. Some of his tweets (I think it was tweets, could also have been facebook posts or something) certainly read as 'intended for internal racist fights' and not intended for academics). And the guy who appointed him is also being looked at with suspicion. So hope they also take a good look at the guy who hired him (without using the normal process for it apparently).
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 1 pts · 6h
Also a German Minister of Defense. My impression is that Arday was a fabulist, but so are many academics at wealthy research institutions, and the global campaign against him was clearly motivated by racism. Not sure about the plagiarism because I am not on Cambridge's academic integrity committee.
Architeuthis@awful.systems · 11 pts · 14h
The university actually cleared him of the plagiarism charges early on, they had hearings and landed on it being within accepted limits for this sort of thing.
It's insane how the whole thing went from the initial coverage implying he's a complete and total fraud that Cambridge didn't do due diligence on because of woke to actually, even his more far fetched claims about endurance running seem to check out.
It would be hilarious if it wasn't murder.
NextElephant9@awful.systems · 8 pts · 10h
Relevant: Open letter on the suspension of Nathan Cofnas at Ghent University.
schnoopy@awful.systems · 8 pts · 14h
I was pretty disgusted by that. It seems like the guy's crimes were some poor citation (he did cite the academic he alledgedly plagiarised so obviously it's not plagiarism lol) and maybe exaggerating some of his life?
Seeing the media go from uncritically regurgitating a racist's allegation, to reporting about the allegation controversy, to uncritically reporting what people claim to have or have not remembered about his life from 30 years ago, to digging through his entire life. For, I'll reiterate, maybe citing something badly and doing some sloppy scholarship.
You know, the thing that gets someone a disciplinary chat and maybe a bump down if anything.
nfultz@awful.systems · 4 pts · 7h
The thing that bothers me the most is that while this happens in Cambridge but over at Data Colada, Ariely is just like "whoopsie" and gets to keep his job. https://datacolada.org/138 - personally I consider fabricating your entire study to be worse than sloppy quotes, but it is insane how these two people are treated so differently.
I also think it's really lazy that BBC couldn't even mention Claudine Gay (AND Martin Luther King) since it was the exact same thing. Different country I guess.
fnix@awful.systems · 3 pts · 3h
It should be said here again that these people don't even know what academic freedom means and are abusing the term. They mean it essentially as a synonym for free speech, but academic freedom has specifically do to with freedom from state interference in the affairs of the university born from the struggles over its sovereignty between the two in European history; it has nothing to do with academia itself having the means to proscribe the conduct of individual academics. If a geology department suspends a flat-earther, that is academic freedom (among other things) operating as intended. Ironically, the US ambassador directly intervening in the proceedings at Ghent is the actual violation of academic freedom here and these idiots are completely clueless about it.
o7___o7@awful.systems · 2 pts · 9h
I have to take this story in small doses, it's fuckin terrible.
nfultz@awful.systems · 12 pts · 19h
over on linked in
as a statistician, I'm so tired of hearing they're "updating their priors." No you didn't. gwern at least posts his R code, but you are just an idiot regurgitating something you half heard, probably on Lex.
No it isn't. It's your glorified dotfiles. too bad Lex can't tell the difference. I feel bad that Lex is exposing literally a million people to your crap. /s
these guys.
EFreethought@awful.systems · 9 pts · 17h
How did Lex Fridman's podcast become so popular? He has no affect, always seems like he is about to fall asleep, and most of his guests are horrible people. He is a less intense Joe Rogan.
istewart@awful.systems · 7 pts · 16h
I feel like his initial momentum came from picking interview subjects who were technical leaders but not well-known outside their niches and rarely were subjects of long-form interviews. Jim Keller and Chris Lattner were two who stood out for me early on, although I couldn’t finish their interviews because Lex himself was such a drag to listen to. He’s put some work into public speaking skills, but not nearly enough.
I refuse to knock him for his accent; a strong accent could even be an asset for standing out in the hugely overcrowded podcast industry. But the guy just doesn’t seem to cultivate any charisma or any real curiosity. The only time I’ve seen him show a smidge of passion was when I saw a clip of him ranting about “anti-woke” bullshit, which should tell you what his (and his backers’) real objective is.
nfultz@awful.systems · 5 pts · 6h
Being on YT is a big driver here, and Lex is smart enough to work the algo. Have John Carmack on, get views when people search for Quake. Have Elon on, get subs when people search for Tesla. Have Mr Beast on and get some kids in the funnel. He's very good at piercing through filter bubbles to get extra reach and pull numbers, unlike an Alex Jones. (EDIT: For this, the bland persona is a feature not a bug)
I'd ballpark that he made $20k off this DHH interview and picked up some rails devs along the way.
Whenever new coworkers bring up Lex, I always feel like it's a test, like are they oblivious, or are they secret closet magas trying to test the water. Slate Star has a similar thing. And YT is bad enough but now I have to see it pop up on LinkedIn too.
istewart@awful.systems · 7 pts · 16h
Oh yeah, transfer my enthusiasm, mister high-stepping HH man. Update my priors till they're so bleeding-edge that they've become subsequents. This is masterfully persuasive marketing rhetoric that will convince everyone and leave no holdouts. Scott Adams would be smearing his hands with Vaseline to prep for your appearance on his podcast, if he was still around.
maol@awful.systems · 9 pts · 23h
Watching this online economic lecture thing for college and it just got mentioned that repeated bouts of malaria in children can cause mental disability (wikipedia says "brain damage" and "increased risk of neurological and cognitive deficits"). I have to admit I did not know this.
...is the only reason EAs were ever into "malaria nets" because of their obsession with g and their conviction that increasing it is a panacea?
schnoopy@awful.systems · 15 pts · 20h
In my brief foray into it, actually I met singer once lol at a lunch about it, no. Really just that it's a cheap way to save people that were otherwise ignored because of racism.
You still encounter disgusting narratives about overpopulation and people living in Africa, despite most of these people's resource consumption and thus strain on the world being completely negligible compared to the sort of people that love making those arguments.
Malaria is suuuuper upsetting and preventable.
There were always racists in the movement and its ideological foundations are shakey but they didn't have hegemony at the start.
maol@awful.systems · 3 pts · 11h
Thank you, that's very interesting. To be clear I am not pro-malaria, but sometimes groups are against bad things for weird reasons. Like Scientologists campaigning against abusive psychiatric practices because L. Ron Hubbard was mad at psychologists for not taking him seriously.
schnoopy@awful.systems · 4 pts · 11h
The defensiveness that people have learned to write online with is truly a tragic marker of our times. It didn't even cross my mind you would be pro-malaria.
maol@awful.systems · 3 pts · 6h
I'm sure there's someone out there!
I will admit I was imagining a grumbling LessWronger reading this and going "oh, so it's wrong to care about malaria?!?!" I probably need to take some time off social media.
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 8 pts · 1d
Another slop article from a slop farm has hit my fucking eyeballs. This time, its "Must-Have .410 Revolver Shotguns You Didn’t Know You Needed", written by "Nagarantha, who holds a master's degree in Biotechnology", and published by "Game Devolution", a "Gaming Website proving gaming news, leaks, guides, game play and the reviews."
Here's a bunch of guns this fucking article claims to be ".410 Revolver Shotguns":
Thompson/Center G2 Contender (a break-action single-shot pistol)
Bond Arms Snake Slayer (a derringer, from a company known near-exclusively for making derringers)
Standard Manufacturing DP-12 (a double-barrel pump-action shotgun)
Remington 870 (the world's most famous pump-action shotgun)
Milsport 410 (an AR-pattern rifle)
No human could have fucked up this badly. No human could have created this kind of fucking slop farm.
(As a minor bonus, I discovered a full-length video dissecting the shittiness of YouTube Playables recently - should help wash out the shittiness of the godawful listicle shit)
o7___o7@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1d
How it started:
How it's going:
froztbyte@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1d
I don’t get the second one
BlueMonday1984@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1d
The second one's a pic of King Dedede from the Kirby series. I'm not 100% sure where o7's going with this either, but its probably related to the one two punch of fascism and slop hitting Linux as a whole.
EDIT: Giving it a bit more thought, the choice of Dedede works as a nod to Debian deciding to destroy its codebase with slop, so I'm gonna go with that and assume the subtle pun was intentional
istewart@awful.systems · 5 pts · 22h
I mainly know him from Smash Bros where his big attack is sucking you in close and beating you with his comically large mallet, and that seems like a reasonable metaphor for what being bombarded with slop commits feels like
lurker@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1d
Ported over from previous thread
Recently made the discovery of a website called AI 2027 tracker which grades the predictions of AI 2027 independent of the authors.
The way they grade these predictions is odd, 80% accuracy is for some reason "confirmed accurate" and "partially accurate" which is bizarre.
The website also shows a consistent degradation of accuracy over time which is funny
EDIT:ok so they do have a grading criteria, 100% is "highly accurate/confirmed accurate" and 80% is supposed to be "largely accurate". For some reason they don't include this on the timeline grading? it's either confirmed or partially accurate, so it's still weird
Soyweiser@awful.systems · 5 pts · 1d
If it is created by Rationalists part of the oddness could be explained (apart from them just being Rationalists), that they want to be superpredictors, their magic math skills and prediction experience give them better prediction powers. Which will also lead to them subconsciously grading things better than they are because they are invested in it.
froztbyte@awful.systems · 7 pts · 1d
“muskin’ the truth” ≈ “kirkin’ the kobayashi maru”
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 7 pts · 18h
Sarah R. Constantin, who noticed that EA has a lying problem, now has a Substack. She reminds me of Julia Galef, because she does not advocate the most dangerous aspects of TESCREAL, but never says "my TESCREAL buddies are creeps pushing crank ideas funded by fascists." https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/getting-back-to-it
nfultz@awful.systems · 6 pts · 17h
I looked her up, she was at MetaMed/Palantir/Longevity Research Inst, so definitely in the thick of things and in that world. That lying problem piece hits a lot harder post-sbf.
gerikson@awful.systems · 4 pts · 13h
she shares Roam links regularly on LW.
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 2 pts · 7h
Roam Research seems like a generic note-taking app endorsed by Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative and Sarah R. Constantin. Anything else notable about it?
Roam is also endorsed by an OpenAI staffer who thinks Scott Aaronson was one of her best professors.
gerikson@awful.systems · 3 pts · 6h
I'm just going by memory here but I seem to recall Roam being either weirdly EA-adjacent or culty or both. Don't quote me.
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 3 pts · 17h
Did not know those parts of her CV! At least two of the four CFAR founders have said things like "The actual drive in the background was a lot more like "Keep running workshops that wow people" with an additional (usually consciously (!) hidden) thread about luring people into being scared about AI risk in a very particular way .... Even from the very beginning CFAR simply COULD NOT be honest about what it was doing or bring anything like a collaborative tone to its participants."
MetaMed was founded by Michael Vassar, and Palantir is Alex Karp's creature, and both of those are bad dudes.
istewart@awful.systems · 3 pts · 16h
Was she floating around the David Chapman/post-rationalist corner of TPOT? That seems to ring a bell for me
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 4 pts · 6h
Her twitter https://x.com/s_r_constantin says she is married to Andrew Rettek. Rufflejax accused Rettek and Vassar of emotional abuse while they were all in a polyamorous relationship and says he liked his women barely legal ("I deserve a hot nubile college girl every year until I turn 40"). https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1009625312844550146.html So Constantin is close to a lot of bad people.
CinnasVerses@awful.systems · 3 pts · 16h
All I really know is her old Wordpress blog. She is the kind of person who keeps launching new sites without leaving a forwarding address on the last, not the kind who still runs her blogspot blog from 2004 so links won't break. I never really explored these people's history on livejournal or tumblr and just mine their Twitter history when needed.
She does not seem woo-friendly.
TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems · 6 pts · 1d
Saw this on Lobsters. Hilarious.
VibeCoded AI-Slop License v1.0
nfultz@awful.systems · 5 pts · 7h
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/09/ai-off-balance-sheet-obligations-hit-a-subprime-like-reset-wall-in-2027-and-2028.html by Yves / naked capitalism
=> https://www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser-period-why-the-ai-boom
Going to take me a while to digest this one
gerikson@awful.systems · 4 pts · 3h
my feeds are full of news of the death of Wendell Berry who I have absolutely no relationship to but this quote is relevant to our interests
sc_griffith@awful.systems · 2 pts · 7h
new odium symposium episode. we look at the evolution of keyboard warrior and self described most censored man on the internet jk sheindlin
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/23-gobsmacking-168259713