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.)
A Google employee was charged with commodities fraud for using insider information to win a Polymarket bet about who the most searched for people would be in 2025 (complaint, article, polymarket account).
So far the internet seems confused whether or not this all counts as commodities fraud at all or not and if so, how (this area of law is way too confusing which is one of the reasons I, of course, never use insider information to bet on polymarket).
It looks like the suspicious trades were discussed on social media back in december. e.g. here for example.
Aside: 1.2 million in profit is significant, but isn't a life changing amount of money for most staff engineers at Google. He probably could have just rested and vested for a few extra years and avoided all this...
Bonus:
According to Polymarket someone else was charged with insider trading this April. This other case is especially cursed because it involved bets around the US attacking Venezuela. According to the complaint he might have asked an LLM for legal advice:
It looks like this was his polymarket account.
My guess would be that this guy wanted the bragging rights to say he ~~won~~ earned his money by being an extra special smart boy rather than just a wagey at cyberpunk mega corporation alpha.