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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
the talking point about disparaging terms for AI users by choice āI came up with a racist-sounding term for AI users, so if you say āclankerā you must be a racistā is so fucking stupid itās gotta be some sort of op
(esp when the made-up racist-sounding term turns out to have originated with Warren fucking Ellis)
i am extremely disappointed that awful systems users have fallen for it for a moment
Side note: The way Iāve seen clanker used has been for the AIs themselves, not their users. Iāve mostly seen the term in the context of star wars memers eager to put their anti-droid memes and jokes to IRL usage.
Same here, Iāve never actually seen the term āclankerā be used in reference to a person using the AI, but the AI itself. Which to me was analogous to going to an expensive bakery and accusing the bread of ripping you off instead of the baker (or whoever was setting prices, which wouldnāt be the bread).
If there was any sort of op going on (which I donāt think there is), Iād guess it would be from the AI doomers who want people to think of these things as things with enough self-awareness that something like āclankerā would actually insult them (but, again, probably not, IMO).
The truth is that we feel shame to a much greater degree than the other side, which makes it pretty easy to divide us on these annoying trivialities.
My personal hatred of tone policing is greater than my sense of shame, but I imagine that isnt something to expect for most.
Slightly related to the āit is an opā thing, did you look at the history of the wikipedia page for clanker? There were 3 edits to the page before 1 June 2025.