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.)
At minute 8 of “SpaceX IPO: Nice Try Though” Patrick Boyle mentions some circular finance: some of the banks which lent SpaceX $29 billion in March will be guaranteeing the IPO by promising to buy some shares to stabilize the price. Later he also points out that the banks financing the IPO have to buy Grok services and may be its main paying customers. Musk has done this sort of thing before eg. using Tesla (shareholder-owned) money to buy SolarCity which he partially owned. I knew a serial fraudster who moved to Texas for its business-friendly laws and courts.
He liked the piss-tinged blog post by Cape Fear Advisors and estimates that the Muskrat wants to raise $50-75 billion in the IPO.
It took Kaiser Bill to break the economic power of London and Paris, but the Muskrat thinks he can speedrun that game for the New York City map.
Project Cybersyn but worse
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/argentina-launched-ai-predict-future-150104368.html
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:
In or about November 2025, VAN DYKE uploaded to his Google account a screenshot displaying the results of a Google Al query. The results stated, in substance and in part, that the U.S. military’s special operations divisions have “numerous classified files, records, and operational details that are not available to the public”
It looks like this was his polymarket account.
Via, looks like wikipedia is going anti union.
The author of that piece outsources his thinking to the slop machine.
If anyone wants to read the discussion by the most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary), it starts here.
it doesn’t mean he’s not inaccurate in that particular piece.
No, but it does seem important to point out before anyone starts trying to parse the exact words line-by-line or otherwise give more attention to the details than it deserves.
And anyone who describes admitting to AI use as “coming out of the AI closet” deserves to be publicly shamed.
yes, but (i’ve corrected my bloody typo above), there are independent confirmations of veracity. so i think it’s fine to complain here, but it would detract from the point outside the sneering area.
ah thanks for informing
While looking at ACX comments for the you should let claude vote for you thing I saw someone saying that the lumina guy (gobble designer microbes instead of brushing your teeth, boosted by siskind and aella who got free samples) has apparently pivoted to AI with a startup about producing AI generated literature around positive human-AI interactions to influence future generations of LLMs towards favorable alignment.
I think the later got mentioned here some time or other but I didn’t realize it was also the teeth bacteria successor grift.
Aaron Silverbook, ex MIRI, still lists himself as the President on LinkedIn. The site now links to a defunct shopify page.
They’re about to test the LD 50/30 for huffing their own farts
Introducing: Flatulr, the ground-beefing gut microbiome hacking service. With a regular subscription, every week you get a vaporised canister designed by our artisan Cloud Engineers. Simply huff the can contents and you’ll be on your way to better movement.
Cloud Engineers
Cloud-to-Butt comes full circle
fuckin casey is at it again
haven’t got time to sneer it just yet, but had to share
And not a single question about the Claude Code source leak, which revealed how it’s completely slapped together with string and bubble gum.
the only kind of spine casey has is the kind in his old school ringbinders, and you can’t convince me otherwise
really remarkable how they just expect us to swallow the hard pivot from “AI is going to take all your jobs and render your economic value to the amount of calories harvestable from your feeble body” to “AI will create undecillion jobs UwU (◠‿◠✿)”
Another quick sneer:
Cherny: I was so focused on shipping. As soon as I got the idea, I spent every night and every weekend on it — it was the only thing I thought about, the only thing I worked on. I started having dreams about Claude Code, and that’s still all I dream about: what should we do next, what do we build next. There’s a chance now to zoom out, because a lot of people are using it and there’s a lot to learn about how. But for a long time we were so focused on building that I didn’t even have a chance to think about what it was.
Emphasis mine. the ideology buried within statements like this makes me want to erase the idea of a computer from the collective human consciousness. I feel like moving to the woods with some goats, or something, when i consider the fact that literally every single one of the tech oligarchs thinks like this. Literally channeling the spirit of capitalism like your body is a portal to a lovecraftian dimension. Purge. purge. purge this evil
@sansruse @froztbyte It blows my mind that “But for a long time we were so focused on building that I didn’t even have a chance to think about what it was.” doesn’t raise alarm bells in anyone who hears it.
Sometimes you get in the flow and knock out a bit of it; but if you are ‘so focused on building’ that you don’t have a chance to think about what you are building how well is that going to go? Might be a euphoric, manic, rush; but probably not a well-considered outcome.
A CSU spokesperson confirmed to EdSource on Wednesday that the university will pay $13 million a year for three years to provide systemwide access to its more than 470,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff. The previous 18-month subscription cost $17 million and expires at the end of June.
Are we so locked in we’re going to put up with a 10% price hike? Couldn’t be bothered to get a new vendor with a better deal, or use the Google one they are also paying for, or just use the free one? This is where the tuition increases are going, this is how we want to spend our taxes? :(
new odium symposium episode (at the link and on all platforms). we talk to professor of africana studies danielle procope bell about her recent paper “‘Pick-Me’ Black women: tactical patriarchal femininity in the Black manosphere.”
The abstract of her paper sounds interesting:
This essay analyzes anti-feminist (“Pick-Me”) Black women content creators on YouTube who exist within the Black manosphere—online spaces populated by Black men who support Black patriarchal dominance. These “Pick-Me” content creators use what I term “tactical patriarchal femininity” to attract the financial provision of an economically stable Black man and to derive income from sympathetic viewers.
Tactical patriarchal femininity is an elaborate, all-consuming embodied performance that is as much about emotion work as it is about exuding conventional attractiveness and behavior that is aligned with traditional femininity. Tactical patriarchal femininity exists to combat the matrices of oppression created by capitalism, white supremacy, and institutional patriarchy. Anti-feminist Black women work in reaction to the misogynoirist material realities that victimize Black women.
Michael Burry is one of the investors who is shorting big tech. (Business Insider - paywalled Substack). I just invest much less in the USA than its 60% share of the global stock market, and less than 40% of that in big tech.
I don’t even know what to say here. Cool scam I guess
A bit tangental but I found a book review about a professor wrote pushing similar “polygenic” nonsense: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/06/11/not-in-your-genome-the-social-genome-conley/
It looks like Herasight cites some of his nonsense in at least one of their garbage papers.
Thanks for the link, interesting read.
How does one give an embryo an IQ test.
With a pencil and paper, obviously. Getting it inside the uterus is the hard part, tho
You give them a marshmellow and promise them another one if they don’t eat the first one inside 2 minutes.
Usually kids pass this test when the are around 3 yo, so if the embryo passes they are so far ahead developmentally they will grow up to become a god.
Or something like that. IDK…
Very carefully
Chicken entrails
cup full of dice
Big syringe
Most leading Rationalists are autistic, but many of them are in denial. Many are Jewish or have Jewish parents. You can debate which kind of folly let them embrace eugenics and white supremacism: are they brain-proud and desperate to believe that they were destined from birth to rule? Sure that they just have eccentric Ashkenazi genius genes not inferior Autistic genes? Naive that the deportations would stop with black and brown people? Their favourite Catholic fantasy author had some warnings for them.
Rhythms of the body are showcased in the scores of dances performed daily across the continent [inaudible] in Uganda, Kpanlogo in Ghana, Nganda in Gambia, [inaudible] in Cameroun, Sindimba [phonetics] in Tanzania, [inaudible] in Nigeria and so on.
Imagine if this was about European music and naming various cultures inside Europe, if all of them would be the [inaudible] people.
“There are some good uses for ‘AI’ like making transcriptions”, they tell me. “No need to pay people to do transcriptions, this is good for accessibility, nope, no issues whatsoever with using ‘AI’ transcriptions everywhere” /s
This was from last year but I forgot about, but this article allegedly about a survey conducted by MIRI and Stanford University on a bunch of AI experts about timelines, which is definitely entirely AI generated since said survey straight up doesn’t exist (I didn’t find anything like it when I did some searches) and it quotes a person who doesn’t work for MIRI
the website title being “ai blogs ai” kinda gives it away
I’m surprised that the religious fanatics (protestant) haven’t turned on AI yet. The ones around these parts think that UFOs and pokemon cards are satanic, so the Californian lying machine that tells kids to kill themselves wouldn’t be much of a reach.
It owns the libs though, that’s usually enough
Some of them think it’s demonic but I guess there’s a conflict of interest since big tech is supporting the Republicans.
Generally conspiracy theorists aren’t interested in actual things that cause real problems, I think. Air polution and global warming being deliberate decisions by elites who don’t care about killing millions, for example. It has to be some wild take like Pokémon child sacrifice or something, so you get to feel like you spotted the secret truth.
But if you want to see some actual apocalyptic conspiracy against “AI”, as in it is literally the manifestation of the body of the Beast and the voice of demons etc., check out Paul Kingsnorth’s substack. This is a burned-out environmental activist who radicalised anti-immigration with Brexit, started pushing a narrative of hobbit pastoralism as a justification for racism, and converted to Christianity with that fervour you only find in converts.
I find it helps to remember that when it comes to conspiracy theorists, most of the absurd stuff (eg Flat Earth) is downstream of the really important belief (eg millenarian Christianity). Essentially, start from the high-level ideology/political/religious beliefs, decide what would have to be true about the world to justify them, and let confirmation bias take care of the details.
He sounds like a fun guy to talk to at parties! /s
If I had a nickel for every time I got ambushed at a party by a surprise right-wing shoeless guy…
Trump likes AI and they like Trump too much to dislike something he likes.
Grim but likely true
Can I interest you in a video titled “Mike Adams Joins Alex Jones to Discuss AI World Simulations, Digital Gods & the Data Center Takeover”? It has an AI-generated thumbnail, yet the title sounds anti-AI, and I’m not going to watch it to find out which way it goes. I’m just assuming it leans toward whatever direction will pay them the most, which is possibly also why we haven’t heard much protestation.
I thought this interview with Prof. Michael I. Jordan was worth listening to, he’s bringing down the hype a bit: Intelligence is collective, not artificial — Prof. Michael I. Jordan (UC Berkeley / Inria).
