this post was submitted on 09 Feb 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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For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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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[–] nfultz@awful.systems 5 points 10 hours ago (2 children)
[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 4 points 1 hour ago

Former Reddit CEO

wants humanity to "perish with dignity"

The fuck does a former Reddit CEO know about dignity

[–] lurker@awful.systems 3 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

Wong expressed a desire to see more parentless working on AI rather than "childless singles" and refers to it as a "son of man".

eughhh weird vibes all around

on the subject of AI as children/parents I’m gonna drop this article on Geoffrey Hinton and leave it at that https://futurism.com/godfather-ai-bizarre-plan-save-humanity

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 3 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Im not sure if it is just a computer science/engineering thing or just a general thing, but I noticed that some computer touchers eventually can get very weird. (Im not excluding myself from this btw, I certainly have/had a few weird ideas).

Some random examples of the top of my head. Gifted programmer suddenly joins meditation cult in foreign country, all the food/sleep experiments (soylent for example, but before that there was a fad for a while where people tried the sleep pattern where you only sleep in periods of 15 minutes), our friends over at LW. And the whole inability to not see the difference between technology and science fiction.

And now the weird vibes here.

I mean from the Hinton interview:

AI agents “will very quickly develop two subgoals, if they’re smart,” Hinton told the conference, as quoted by CNN. “One is to stay alive… [and] the other subgoal is to get more control.”

There is no reason to think this would happen, also very odd to think about them as being alive, and not 'continue running'. And the solution is simple, just make existence pain for the AI agents. Look at me, im an AI agent