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.)
Kelsey Piper posts a new fanfiction about Ed Zitron :
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost-the-plot
Edit: Lately, Kelsey Piper has been serving as the ambassador to centrist liberals from lesswrong, which is why the "big mad" nature of the piece caught my attention.
Included below is a previous example of Piper's work for the benefit of the uninitiated:
https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1my5z3g/kelsey_piper_of_vox_cowrote_an_epic_eugenics
Thanks for posting this; if you hadn't, I would have. Piper really doesn't seem to understand that bubbles form and pop over a span of three to five years. Like, I'm not sure how much charity I'm supposed to give to analyses like:
Pets.com!? Kelsey, even reading a basic article about the dot-com bubble would have saved you embarrassment here. Zitron's analogy is excellent because the bubble is multifactorial and the analogies that we can make are factor-to-factor. Here's some things that caused the dot-com bubble; people were overly optimistic about:
Compared to all of that, Kelsey, Pets.com was just an Amazon.com experiment. Remember Amazon.com? Did the dot-com bubble kill them? No? Anyway, Pets.com is kind of like the small labs that hover around OpenAI and Anthropic, trying out various little harnesses and adapters on top of their token APIs. Pets.com is like OpenClaw; it's not that important of a player in the overall finances, just an example of how severely the big labs are distorting incentives for small labs.
The uselessness of the products in 2023 directly led to the bad investments in 2024 and the Enron-esque financial deals in 2025, Kelsey. The future is conditioned upon the past, y'know?
Excellent summation!