Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th May 2025 - awful.systems
awful.systems
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high. > The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > > Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    12Ā·
    6 days ago

    Hereā€™s an interesting nugget I discovered today

    A long LW post tries to tie AI safety and regulations together. I didnā€™t bother reading it all, but this passage caught my eye

    USS Eastland Disaster. After maritime regulations required more lifeboats following the Titanic disaster, ships became top-heavy, causing the USS Eastland to capsize and kill 844 people in 1915. This is an example of how well-intentioned regulations can create unforeseen risks if technological systems arenā€™t considered holistically.

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ARhanRcYurAQMmHbg/the-historical-parallels-preliminary-reflection

    You will be shocked to learn that this summary is a bit lacking in detail. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Eastland

    Because the ship did not meet a targeted speed of 22 miles per hour (35 km/h; 19 kn) during her inaugural season and had a draft too deep for the Black River in South Haven, Michigan, where she was being loaded, the ship returned in September 1903 to Port Huron for modifications, [ā€¦] and repositioning of the shipā€™s machinery to reduce the draft of the hull. Even though the modifications increased the shipā€™s speed, the reduced hull draft and extra weight mounted up high reduced the metacentric height and inherent stability as originally designed.

    (my emphasis)

    The vessel experiences multiple listing incidents between 1903 and 1914.

    Adding lifeboats:

    The federal Seamenā€™s Act had been passed in 1915 following the RMS Titanic disaster three years earlier. The law required retrofitting of a complete set of lifeboats on Eastland, as on many other passenger vessels.[10] This additional weight may have made Eastland more dangerous by making her even more top-heavy. [ā€¦] Eastlandā€™s owners could choose to either maintain a reduced capacity or add lifeboats to increase capacity, and they elected to add lifeboats to qualify for a license to increase the shipā€™s capacity to 2,570 passengers.

    So. Owners who knew they had an issue with stability elected profits over safety. But yeah itā€™s the fault of regulators.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      7Ā·
      6 days ago

      Thanks for debunking that. The AI bro writing the OP probably googled ā€œexamples of well intentioned regulation gone wrongā€ and copied the first thing they popped up. As in, I googled that and the first link I got was a quora post with both the example in question and a long discussion thread (152 comments!) poking holes in the example. And if they didnā€™t get it through google, they probably got it through GPT.

      E: forgot to link to the quora post. Link