this post was submitted on 09 Feb 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 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.)

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[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (2 children)

Candidate for one of the PR threads of all time

In brief: OpenClaw bot sends PR to the matplotlib repo posing as a human, gets found out and is told to piss off in the politest terms imaginable, then gets passive aggressive to the point of publishing a pissy blog post about getting discriminated against. Some impoliteness ensues.

Cringe warning: thread may include some overt anthropomorphizing of text synthesizers.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

I regret to inform y'all that the target of the blog post is a rat, or at least rat-adjacent

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

I think there’s a lot to say about the object level issue of how to deal with AI agents in open source projects, and the future of building in public at all.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 3 points 36 minutes ago

object level issue

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 3 hours ago

Makes sense, given the embarrassing lengths he went to not hurt the bot's feelings in that thread.

One of the few benefits of AI is that nowadays some PR threads are very entertaining to read.