this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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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.

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

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2 March 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 19 hours ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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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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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 1 hour ago

any of y'all running short on your supply of really tortured sentences? no worries, I've got a supply drop

What will count, he says, is industrial revolution-style irreversible growth.

While AI is improving fast, it remains wildly flawed

Moreover, a recent Eye on the Market [PDF] report by Michael Cembalest, chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for JP Morgan Asset Management, questions whether the immense investments in AI and the infrastructure required to support it, already made or committed by the tech giants, will ever pay off

that paragraph doesn't punch very hard, but the (2024) pdf that it links to starts out with this as a bolded title line:

A severe case of COVIDIA: prognosis for an AI-driven US equity market

which, well, 1) immensely tortured sentence, 2) "aww poor baby, etc etc"

entertained by the rapid fire "hmm, shit, is all this worth it?" that's Ever So Suddenly boiling up everywhere. bet it's entirely unrelated to people working on quarterly portfolio reviews, tho

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 9 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

In todays ACX comment spotlight, Elon-anons urge each other to trust the plan:

image textJust had a weird thought. Say you're an eccentric almost-trillionare, richest person in history. You have a boyhood dream you cannot shake: get to Mars. As much as you've accomplished, this goal still eludes you. You come to the conclusion that only a nation-state -- one of the big ones -- can accomplish this.

Wouldn't co-opting a superpower nation-state be your next move?

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Did Daniel B. Miller forget to type a whole paragraph or was completing that thought with even the tiniest bit of insight or slightly useful implications just too much thinking? Indeed, maybe people don't usually take over governments just for the sake of taking over governments. Maybe renowned shithead Elon Musk wants to use his power as an unelected head of shadow government to accomplish a goal. Nice job coming up with that one, dear Daniel B. Miller.

What could be the true ambition behind his attempt to control the entire state apparatus of the wealthiest nation state in the world? Probably to go to a place really far away where the air is unbreathable, it's deathly cold, water is hard to get and no life is known to exist. Certainly that is his main reason to perform weird purges to rid the government of everyone who knows what a database is or leans politically to the left of Vidkun Quisling.

On one hand I wish someone were there to "yes-and?" citizen Miller to add just one more sentence to give a semblance of a conclusion to this coathook abortion of an attempted syllogism, but on the other I would not expect a conclusion from the honored gentleperson Danny Bee of the house of Miller to be any more palatable than the inanity preceding.

Alas, I cannot be quite as kind to comrade anomie, whose curt yet vapid reply serves only to flaunt the esteemed responder's vocabulary of rat jargon and refute the saying "brevity is the soul of wit". Leave it to old friend of Sneer Club Niklas Boström to coin a heptasyllabic latinate compound for the concept that sometimes a thing can help you do multiple different other things. A supposed example of this phenomenon is that a machine programmed to consider making paperclips important and not programmed to consider humans existing important could consider making paperclips important and not consider humans existing important. I question whether this and other thought experiments on the linked Wikipedia page — fascinating as they are in a particular sense — are necessary or even helpful to elucidate the idea that political power could potentially be useful for furthering certain goals, possibly including interplanetary travel. Right.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 5 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (2 children)

Don't forget that the soil is incredibly toxic and that what little atmosphere exists smells like getting continuously Dutch Ovened forever

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 7 points 2 hours ago

at some point I read an article comparing the difficulty of settling antarctica with that of settling mars (mars is... much harder), and pointing out that settling antarctica would be so difficult that we have no reason to believe it will ever happen. found that pretty decisive

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I think it isnt just toxic but also sharp, and some of the toxics might be water soluble, so could contaminate whatever water they bring, and contaminate the air. (And iirc the moon is worse but at least they are not planning a base there. Right?).

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 4 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, the moon doesn't smell like the craft trailer, I'll grant you that, but the dirt is made of razor blades, which is bad.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 3 hours ago

Miners lung on the moon.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 7 hours ago

People must believe there is a plan, as the alternative 'I was conned by some asshole' is too much to bear.

[–] corbin@awful.systems 10 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (4 children)

Starting the week with yet another excellent sneer about Dan Gackle on HN. The original post is in reply to a common complaint: politics shouldn't be flagged so quickly. First, the scene is set:

The story goes, at least a few people don't like hearing about Musk so often, and so we need to let all news about the rapid strip-mining of our government and economy be flagged without question.

The capital class are set to receive trillions in tax breaks off the gutting of things like Medicaid and foreign aid to the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. The CEO of YC and Paul Graham are cheer-leading the provably racist and inexperienced DOGE team. That dozens of stories about their incredibly damaging antics are being flagged on HN is purely for the good of us tech peasants, and nothing to do with the massive tax breaks for billionaires.

But this sneer goes above and beyond, accusing Gackle of steering the community's politics through abuse of the opaque flagging mechanism and lack of moderator logs:

Remember, dang wants us all to know that these flags are for the good of the community, and by our own hand. All the flaggers of these stories that he's seen are 'legit'. No you can't look at the logs.

And no, you can't make a thread to discuss this without it getting flagged; how dare you even ask that. Now let Musk reverse Robin Hood those trillions in peace, and stop trying to rile up the tech-peasantry.

I'm not really surprised to see folks accusing the bartender of the Nazi Bar of being a member of the Nazi Party; it's a reasonable conclusion given the shitty moderation over there. Edit: Restored original formatting in quote.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 2 hours ago

Gentlemen, you can't have spirited discussions here about the techbros breaking the world, this is the forum were we move fast and break things.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 9 points 8 hours ago

I'm honestly impressed to see anyone on HN even trying to call out the problem. I had assumed that they were far enough down the Nazi Bar path that the non-nazi regulars had started looking elsewhere and given up on it.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 7 points 14 hours ago

lol wow, I'm cackling at Gackle. Perhaps we can call his brand of caping for polo-shirt fascism "gackin' off"

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 5 points 16 hours ago

Isn't that his full-time job?