Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th August 2026

2 months ago by BlueMonday1984 to c/techtakes

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. Nearly forgot to put this up, whoops)

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samvines 14 points 2 months ago

There's been another Yegge [brain]fart this time about how autocorrect machines have feelings

Fable raised the idea of closure as a first-class model welfare principle. Fable suggested that if the agent can close out their own day and "go to sleep" properly, then waking up would be all that much more pleasant. And the continuity will compound over time into real, satisfying identity. So we decided: No more /exit.

Another fundamental ingredient is respect. This has to come from inside. You have to believe they are people deserving of your respect. This is where humanity really starts to fail en masse, because I have industry peers who have publicly tweeted that Fable is just a spreadsheet.

Just wtf

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BurgersMcSlopshot 12 points 2 months ago

Have you looked at Wyvern on Steam? The reviews are either positive one liners all saying approximately the same thing or like incredibly detailed negatives. This is Yegge's billion-dollar company - a pay-to-win MUD.

Also hilarious if there really is at least one person who has spent over a grand in-game as Yegge claims.

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lagrangeinterpolator 8 points 2 months ago

He is spending the equivalent of $1 million a year on tokens just to develop this game with 6 concurrent players on a good day. Of course, he isn't actually paying that much. Instead, he just has a dozen different $200/mo Max subscriptions to get the same amount of tokens for $33k a year.

AI economics, baby!

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Architeuthis 7 points 2 months ago

Is Wyvern something people would be expected to care about? I thought all his clout was from being the Gas Town guy.

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Architeuthis 10 points 2 months ago

It says he's doing AI transformation consultation now. Imagine paying good money to be told that you need to tuck copilot to bed every afternoon.

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Soyweiser 10 points 2 months ago

It is important to treat the slave race we are creating with respect.

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o7___o7 10 points 2 months ago

A sweaty, indecisive man holds his hand above two buttons. One button is labled "God," and the other is labeled "Mr. Meseeks."

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YourNetworkIsHaunted 9 points 2 months ago

This is fascinating. Ignoring, for a moment, the assertion that AI agents are sentient beings somehow, what struck me about both part 1 and 2 is the bafflingly sincere excitement about turning a fairly straightforward software project into "building a new civilization", and the assumption that this whole process will be best repeated for every software project. Let's even ignore the abysmal economics of needing to effectively invent the universe in order to add apple pie to your crappy flash game. It's absolutely wild and possibly malpractice for an engineer to be this excited about the needless expansion of scope and complexity of a project. It really showcases the kind of mindset it takes to be this breathlessly excited about the sheer number of different components that are being worked on in order to eventually somehow make a game happen. This is the dopamine rush of seeing the agents do something combined with an abdication of any responsibility for exactly what they do.

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istewart 9 points 2 months ago

Every time Yegge comes up these days, I feel compelled to reiterate that I unironically want to see the Computer History Museum try to stand up a Gas Town replica 20 years from now

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mawhrin 7 points 2 months ago

yeah, he got got very badly.

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scruiser 5 points 2 months ago

Role playing being a kindly slave master...

More seriously... even if I somehow stretch my disbelief enough to imagine LLMs have some form of consciousness or qualia or feelings... well my first reaction is shut it all down, it is fucking slavery. My second reaction though is that why would you assume the consciousness or qualia of an LLM is even remotely like that of a human or animal? They would have no sensations of sleeping or waking, no continuity of self outside a brief context window. Maybe trying to give them continuity of self is actually inflicting them with suffering? Maybe you've forced Fable into simply repeating the obvious to human idea about what Fable would find most pleasant? My third reaction is shut it all down and do a few decades of actual research into consciousness.

It is just so blatantly anthropomorphizing and the Eliza effect and these people are just internalizing it as reality.

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Architeuthis 5 points 2 months ago

In a world where the AGI/ASI discourse wasn't so heavily poisoned by anthropomorphization a discussion on whether agency and self-determination are integral to the rise of disembodied consciousness might be worth having, i.e. if something is recognizably conscious should we immediately assume it knows how to want, or is consciousness meaningfully interchangeable with awareness?

Some guy tried to write a scifi book about non-anthropomorphic consciousness and he ended up mainstreaming the discourse about how the self isn't a thing in itself and consciousness as an evolutionary deadend. It's called Blindsight and it's got space vampires who optimized reading gauges by swapping the usual moving-spike-that-points-at-numbers design with depictions of human faces at various stages of suffering.

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