this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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TechTakes

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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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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 soo 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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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

network state

Great, a new stupid thing to know about. How likely is it that a bunch of people that believe they are citizens of an online state will become yet another player in the Stochastic Terrorism as a Service industry?

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (2 children)

I'm using the term a bit loosely to mean "libertarian citadel except with techies". Though I think the phrase is technically supposed to mean a nation that starts out as an online community.

Anyway for some reason these weirdos all have this idea that if it wasn't for all those pesky regulations and people they could usher in a glorious new sci-fi and/or cryptocurrency society. Like look at this example: this B-list CEO in the apartment rental business thinks he'll be the ruler of a fiefdom that brings about AGI, Quantum Computing, a nuclear energy revolution, bladerunner style flying cars, and sci-fi materials. It's delusional; or at best grift.

The canonical example of network state is Balaji Srinivasan's Network School. He owns(?) a building in Forest City, Malaysia (or as he calls it: an island in an undisclosed location off the coast of Singapore). But in a broad sense it's useful to consider everything from Sidewalk Labs to California Forever to the M.S. Satoshi as thematically in the same sort of ballpark.

[–] pikesley@mastodon.me.uk 4 points 3 hours ago

@sailor_sega_saturn @swlabr

Bears. This always leads to some of them being eaten by bears.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 3 points 3 hours ago

it's funny to me that these futurist/thought leader/tech genius utterly fail to build their cult compounds where a goofy ass cult like Scientology has blown past them completely