this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.

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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[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 20 points 1 day ago (6 children)

bow before the true champion of the working class, s e gyges:

a lot of opposition to AI is rent seeking, and the material incentives of being a rentier, even a small time one, lead you towards fascist conclusions from first principles

between him saying this, and other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious and being enslaved (and being actually fine with helping promulgating what they truly believe is slavery, because hey, you need to pay the rent), i am afraid something worse than usual entered the californian drinking water.

(not linking to the skeet on purpose).

I just remembered what his slopstack is called. My "Very Sane AI Newsletter" has people asking a lot of questions already answered by the name of my newsletter.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

other ai pushers declaring the ai conscious

Hey now, segyges has had his own whinging multithousand word blogpost on model consciousness out since early spring (tldr: currently not really conscious, but it's inevitable because I really want it to, so don't be on the wrong side of history when it happens).

He seems to be angling for the role of TPOT scott alexander, except instead of gradually cultivating a consensus in favor of eugenics and being ruled by high IQ overmen his long term thing is establishing any perceived anti-AI stance as an unforgivable moral failing.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

just yesterday that motherfucker posted allegation that "slop" is a word from nazi vocabulary. so that bitch says that any criticism of ai is far right signifier actually. as in, the product being sold on a promise of displacing all labour and redirecting all wealth to five sfba dipshits, and cooking brains of maga boomers worldwide as we speak

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Really hope the people outside of our little forum paid attention when warned Gyges was also an AI doomer.

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ah yes, Nazis, well known for speaking english

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ah yes, Nazis, well known for using slop jar to mean the vessel into which chamber pots are poured, in 1855

[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

"Slop" as we use it to describe AI outputs came into the discourse via left-wing twitter and podcasts using "slop" as a term for mass entertainment media (like Marvel movies — cape slop). Used negatively but also self deprecatingly: I can't wait for the new episode of "Stranger Things", because I need my slop. The explicit metaphor is pigs happily eating buckets of food waste from a trough. It's just slop. Nothing nefarious.

[–] Hypnosifl@awful.systems 4 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I think this may have been a case of the "dirtbag left" types using slang that originated on 4chan, I did a search with date restrictions on the 4plebs archive site and found posts using it for mindless entertainment going back to 2012 at least

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 19 hours ago

Here's an example from an 1897 book review I found in the google books corpus: "There never was anything in all this world quite so provincial as American literature. When we over here are not reading slop we read the books that bear the approval of London." Or this doggerel from the October 1920 issue of Farm Journal: "I read all kinds of printed junk / the good, the noble and the punk / the ancient and the new / and men who see me reading slop / predict that if I do not stop / my head will go askew."

These both seem like wiktionary's current sense 8 ("Content or entertainment which is worthless, or produced and consumed mindlessly"), so I don't see any need to credit 4chan or 21st-century anti-Semites in general.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73708#comment-1642217

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 2 points 19 hours ago

Sadly I think the popularization does owe a lot to the intermediate stage where 4chan started calling mass entertainment media "goyslop," but even the Protocols types switched to tacking on specific descriptors before it made it out into the mainstream and got picked up as a term for genAI output.

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

they're collectively spiraling.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago

TFG: Everything I don't like is rent seeking. Checkmate, anyone ideologically to the left of me

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Look he is right, if you redefine 'rent' to mean something totally else that includes people being paid for their labour.

In the same way that telling people they should pay their fair share of taxes is actually saying you want to murder them. (Sorry crazy libertarian logic is the only way I can make sense of this).

[–] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (4 children)

He points out that mathematicians are also rent-seekers (though only 20% rent-seeking). You know, those famously capital-extractive mathematicians.

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh my god he’s doing fandom gatekeeping discourse

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (3 children)

yeah it like. infuriates me that "fully automated luxury communism" was named in a way to specifically pay homage to the past. the word "communism" itself is some sort of vicious traditionalism that refuses to create new things

https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3my3letkpbc2b

Lol dorkus

It's "fully automated luxury gay space communism", and every adjective is a pithy critique of the past.

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 5 points 21 hours ago

what never having seen a left-wing person in real life does to a slopper

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

"Lol dorkus" is an idiomatic translation of Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur (more literally "What is freely asserted is freely denied"), and if you call that "Hitchens's razor" I will fucking cut you.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 4 points 22 hours ago

vicious traditionalism that refuses to create new things

The "vicious traditionalism" that develops among his fellow travelers, who insist that some form of autonomous, inscrutable AI has to be the next step in technological progress, will be something to see. Religious movements don't just stop when their central prophecy disappoints.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

I just wonder if he means 'they are looking to pay their rent' or 'they are holding on the 'capital of being able to do math' and want to be paid for it'.

Damn, I was raking in so much cash from my mathematical theorems. Pretty good source of passive income, came with nice tax benefits too. Too bad it's all gone now. Maybe I should put my money in REITs.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago
[–] istewart@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago

Yeah this is literally pants-on-head crazy. The explicit business model of the AI companies is rent-seeking on as much human activity as they can figure out how to intermediate. I suspect our friend is having a bit of a dark night of the soul, and trying to cope with it by turning his opposition's obviously correct argument back on them in slipshod fashion. Dare I say, a typical Republican tactic?

[–] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I tried coming up with a good interpretation of what he said and I came up empty handed. I'm sure he will write a very helpful 5 part 20000 word blog post explaining exactly what he means.

So far I've come up with this: the AI can supposedly do jobs faster and better than any human, so if we try to stop that, we are destroying economic value and "rent seeking". If a thief goes to my house, steals one of my own drawings, scribbles on it himself to make it "better", and sells it for 5 cents, I shouldn't stop him because I will be destroying the economic value that he is creating. Oh yeah and this leads to fascism for some reason.

And pro-AI people are not rent seeking at all. They just want to transfer the economic value of labor, knowledge, and expertise to whoever happens to own data centers.

[–] fnix@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yeah, I mean you could twist it to say labour unions do nothing but let workers rent-seek on their human capital instead of getting paid the only true god-given market rate. USian brainworms all the way.

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

another ai pusher recently generated a slop image, where she and the chairman xi are fighting the united forces of darkness, which include the ai companies, people opposing the LLM embrace and american conservatives. the thing they're fighting over? “open technology”.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

…and all of them are working for one or another californian ai company or a slopware house.

[–] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

q: is an image derivative of a slop image still a slop image if the process of creating the derivative did not involve Sloppy Babobots? Asking for a friend, who is me, also this question is not intended to be philosophical.

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

What do you have in mind specifically? Parody? It depends a little on intent but I would say not a problem at all, others might disagree.