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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

  • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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    8 hours ago

    trump just dumped half trillion dollars into openai-softbank-oracle thing https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/01/21/trump-stargate-ai-openai-oracle-softbank/77861568007/

    you’d think it’s a perfect bait for saudi sovereign wealth fund, and perhaps it is

    for comparison, assuming current levels of spending, this will be something around 1/10 of defense spending in the same timeframe. which goes to, among other things, payrolls of millions of people and maintenance, procurement and development of rather pricey weapons like stealth planes (B-21 is $700M each) and nuclear-armed nuclear-powered submarines ($3.5B per Ohio-class, with $31M missiles, up to 24). this all to burn medium-sized country worth of energy to get more “impressive” c-suite fooling machine

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsOP
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      26 minutes ago

      Let them fight.gif

      Elon Musk is already casting doubt on OpenAI’s new, up to $500 billion investment deal with SoftBank (SFTBY+10.51%) and Oracle (ORCL+7.19%), despite backing from his allies — including President Donald Trump. […] “They don’t actually have the money,” the Tesla (TSLA-1.13%) CEO and close Trump ally said shortly before midnight on Tuesday, in a post on his social media site X. “SoftBank has well under $10 [billion] secured. I have that on good authority,” Musk added just before 1 a.m. ET.

      One word: Foxconn

      I was mad about this, but then it hit me: this is the kind of thing that happens at the top of a bubble. The nice round numbers, the stolen sci-fi name, the needless intertwining with politics, the lack of any clear purpose for it.

      Ed Zitron:

      [mr plinkett voice] hey wait a minute wasn’t that meant to be a Microsoft project?

      Hey wasn’t that project contingent on “meaningfully improving the capabilities of OpenAI’s AI”?

      (Referring to this newsletter of his from last April.)