Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th September 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid ā€” 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 so 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.)

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 so 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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    17Ā·
    1 month ago

    Bethany Brookshire (whoā€™s an old pal of mine from our ScienceOnline days) reports:

    People are using AI to impersonate real science journalists.

    And one even got PUBLISHED.

    In Science.

    Caroline Williams writes on LinkedIn:

    The person who was impersonating me managed to get an article published in Science, under my by-line. And they got paid for it!

    Iā€™ve seen the pitches (bad), and the email chain between editors who werenā€™t all that impressed, but googled me and decide to take a punt. When the article came in it was dry, clunky and badly written, but after several rounds of editing they managed to get it into a publishable state. It went online in June and was up until yesterday when it became clear they (and I) had been scammed. [ā€¦] The whole thing makes me feel sick. I know from my work as an editor that the reputational damage is real. Had I pitched a story to them afterwards they would very understandably have said ā€œHell no!ā€. Who has the time to do someone elseā€™s job? They tried ā€œmeā€, ā€œIā€ didnā€™t deliver, so no thank you.

    I have no idea how many more editors out there have me on their ā€˜do not commissionā€™ list because of this personā€™s actions. There may also be several scientists who will not want to talk to me because theyā€™ve had a bad experience with the fake one.

    More broadly, if this is a wider scam (and based on what others have told me, I think it is), it is potentially a serious issue for science journalism and journalism in general. And Iā€™m not sure what we can do about that.

    Science has retracted the fraudulent story.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      12Ā·
      1 month ago

      Although no specific errors in this story have so far been identified

      Well hereā€™s the very start of the retracted article:

      On the screen, two side-by-side squares of color flicker rapidly

      Except oops it was referring to a study that used groups of moving dots rather than ā€œsquaresā€. This can be seen in that studies first figure. Bam. A specific error in the first sentenceā€¦

      (Am I being too pedantic?)

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      4Ā·
      1 month ago

      Iā€™m curious about this one, legal repercussions against the perpetrator seem pretty clearly viable (it would seem to me that Science has a viable fraud case, and Williams for probably a few too). why wouldnā€™t anyone do that? is that not the done thing in academia?

      the network effects of reputational damage are pretty oof though :|

      this shit should be regulated into the dustbin of history. relatedly, the recent release of unredacted docs from the NYT vs OpenAI case showing the clear knowledge of theft and substitutionā€¦ itā€™s all willingly done