TechTakes

2494 readers

49 users here now

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.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

dgerard@awful.systems

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd March 2026 (awful.systems)

submitted 22 hours ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.)

top 10 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 6 points 2 hours ago

An Aella-curious blogger in SoCal has noticed something:

But what I find more interesting than broadly “weird sex” is the specific interest in BDSM, kink and particularly full-contact CNC; a relatively common fantasy in individuals, but one I’ve never seen such widespread community interest in outside the Bay Area.

Kink and power-play are practices of manufactured risk, with CNC clocking at a more intense point on the same spectrum. The idea that many of these people are devoting their 9-5s and beyond to eliminating the ultimate consequence (death), only to go home and collectively play-pretend violence (scaffolded with extensive rules and consent forms) is fascinating, and- to me- makes complete sense.

The rationalist interest in manufacturing risk is the direct byproduct of their commitment to flushing it out.

The blogger attended Aella's SlutCon. I don't know if she knows that many of our friends have problems with consent as most of us understand it (their understanding is more "if they are old enough to sign the contract, and they sign, that is on them").

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 10 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

supremely rational gamblers want to rewrite reality by threatening a journalist, because reporting got in the way of them getting money from polymarket. all while completely unaware that they're giving him better story than the actual missile impact thing https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-on-polymarket-are-vowing-to-kill-me-if-i-dont-rewrite-an-iran-missile-story/ also https://awful.systems/post/7617781

[–] FredFig@awful.systems 7 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Polymarket when faced with the oracle problem: "What if we threaten to shoot the oracle?"

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 5 points 7 hours ago

the rationalist counterpart to rubber hose cryptanalysis

[–] pikesley@mastodon.me.uk 5 points 7 hours ago

@fullsquare @BlueMonday1984

"So I put an accumulator on Gaelic Warrior to win the Gold Cup, Arsenal to beat Leverkusen in the Champions League, and all-out nuclear conflict by the end of March"

[–] aninjury2all@awful.systems 6 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Palmer Lucky Wants YOU 🫵 To Die For His Waifus

Bonus Sneer from Adam Johnson

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 6 hours ago

isn't Luckey the dude mostly known for awkwardly and overweightly jumping wearing a VR headset on the cover of Time or something

[–] fiat_lux@lemmy.world 13 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

WTF is this garbage in the Graurdain? "Let's assume!" is a terrible premise for even an opinion column to begin with, but "let's assume Musk is right and AI could allow us all to not work" is... bananas for the Guardian to publish. Even before considering that the author's bio says he's a business owner of a technology and financial management services company.

[–] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 14 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

The article's entire premise is Musk saying some random shit. Remember how Musk said that he would land a man on Mars in 10 years 13 years ago? Honestly, I am incensed that people like Musk and Trump can just say shit and many people will just accept it. I can no longer tolerate it.

Putting aside the very real human ability to screw up such a concept and turn any fair system into an unfair one, ...

He says this after mentioning UBI. He really doesn't want to confront the unfortunate fact that UBI is entirely a political issue. Whatever magical beliefs one may have about how AI can create wealth, the question of how to distribute it is a social arrangement. What exactly stops the wealthy from consolidating all that wealth for themselves? The goodness of their hearts? Or is it political pushback (and violence in the bad old days), as demonstrated in every single example we have in history?

I'd say the problem is even worse now. In previous eras, some wealthy people funded libraries and parks. Nowadays we see them donate to weirdo rationalist nonsense that is completely disconnected from reality.

No getting up early and commuting on public transit. ...

This is followed by four whole paragraphs about how the office sucks and wouldn't it be wonderful if AI got rid of all that. Guess what, we have remote work already! Remember how, during COVID, many software engineering jobs went fully remote, and it turned out that the work was perfectly doable and the workers' lives improved? But then there were so many puff pieces by managers about the wonderful environment of the office, and back to the office they went. Don't worry, when the magical AI is here, they'll change their minds.

Yes, there are "mindless, stupid, inane things" like chores that are unavoidable. There are also other mindless, stupid, inane things that are entirely avoidable but exist anyway because some people base their entire lives around number go up.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 5 points 14 hours ago

This was my thought the whole time: if the political will existed, we could probably already do everything that AI is supposed to "enable" here. Some of the work people would choose not to do would end up being actually important, and the market in its infinite power would need to find a way to get that work done, whether that's paying more to invent new types of automation or compensating people enough that they choose to do it without the threat of starvation and homelessness (or finding new ways to exploit people to do it, but I believe there's a floor on that at which the other two options become more economically viable), but that's the whole pitch for having a labor market in the first place. At the same time, absent that political will there's no reason to expect any change in productivity to change the current arrangement. At best the people working any jobs that get eliminated are discarded as obsolete, lose their ability to participate in the market, and are eventually handled by the criminal justice system or otherwise removed from consideration.