this post was submitted on 26 Apr 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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Want to wade into the sandy 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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[–] corbin@awful.systems 19 points 4 days ago (32 children)

A Twitterer tweets a challenging game-theory question:

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

The Twitter poll came out 58% blue and right-wing folks are screeching. Here is a bad take. The orange site has a thread where people are rephrasing the prompt in order to make it sound way worse, like giving everybody a gun and then magically making the guns not discharge.

I find it remarkable that not a single dipshit has correctly analyzed the problem. Suppose you are one of Arrow's dictators: your vote tips the scales regardless of which way you go. So, everybody else already voted and they are precisely 50% blue. Either you can vote blue and save everybody or vote red and kill 50% of voters. From that perspective, the pro-red folks are homicidally selfish.

Bonus sneer: since HN couldn't rephrase the problem without magic, let me have a chance. Consider: everybody has some seed food and some rainwater in a barrel. If 50% of people elect to plant their seeds and pool their rainwater in a reservoir then everybody survives; otherwise, only those who selfishly eat their own seed and drink their rainwater will survive. This is a basic referendum on whether we can work together to reduce economic costs and the supposedly-economically-minded conservatives are demonstrating that they would rather be hateful than thrifty.

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 13 points 3 days ago (6 children)

I love the way people who go “yeah but IN REAL LIFE with real stakes you would totally chose the red button”

  1. are entirely missing the point of thought experiments,
  2. why the fuck would you comply with such a fucked up scenario in real life lmao you worm
[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 11 points 3 days ago (4 children)

i feel like people in real life would be far less likely to press the red button, because twitter is almost wall to wall nazis and real life is not

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Sounds like the winning move in that scenario is to purge the button enthusiasts before they cause any damage lol

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

like i said, the actual value of that little exercise is finding people who are fine with killing up to 50% of the population for no reason whatsoever.

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

@mawhrin Sadly, they exist. And there are too many of them! I guess this means we should kill people who are fine with killing up to 50% of the—

HEY WAIT

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 3 points 3 days ago

:-)

there's this. (though i find it useful to know who not to rely on if/when things get worse: for example i already know our neighbour from the apartment a floor below did write many missives to our cooperative's administration, without having a single reason.)

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