Want to wade into the snowy 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.)
Armin Ronacher, who is an experienced software dev with a fair amount of open and less open source projects under his belt, was up until fairly recently a keen user of llm coding tools. (he’s also the founder of “earendil”, a pro-ai software pbc, and any company with a name from tolkien’s legendarium deserves suspicion these days)
His faith in ai seems to have taken bit of a knock lately: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/
He’s not using psychosis in the sense of people who have actually developed serious mental health issues as a result of chatbot use, but software developers who seem to have lost touch with what they were originally trying to and just kind a roll around in the slop, mistaking it for productivity.
He’s still pro-ai, and seems to be vaguely hoping that improvements in tooling and dev culture will help stem the tide of worthless slop prs that are drowning every large open source project out there, but he has no actual idea if any of that can or will happen (which it won’t, of course, but faith takes a while to fade).
As always though, the first step is to realise you have a problem.
Is there a public benefit corporation in existence that isn't angling to be a kinder, gentler form of a VC grift?
Given that openai is now a precedent for removing the pb figleaf from a pbc, I’m assuming everyone will be doing it now and it’ll just become another part of the regular grift.
Like that classic Žižek bit about fair trade organic coffee in Starbucks being a way of offering temptation, sin, penance and absolution all in one convenient package, you pay to absolve the guilt.
Invest in benefit corporations to wash the guilt/bad PR from social and environmental damage, and as a bonus if any of them randomly strike a vein in the hype mines, you can let go of the pbc frame and milk some profits. (they think. it remains to see how much profit can be made out of this bloated, costly software.)
and on the side of the ~entepreneur~, start your grift as a pbc and you get some investment even if you never reach a point where profits may be made.