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 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.)
from here:
OpenAI, which has tapped the world’s second-largest insurance broker Aon for help, has secured cover of up to $300mn for emerging AI risks,
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nice to see that at least someone dealing with these loons still has their shit grounded in reality
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I wonder what is quantified as “emerging risks” under that policy structure - I’d bet it’s not the same stuff the cultists are worried about
either way, more please!
Lol that the “AI risks” in question aren’t DOOM for mankind but “OpenAI gets their pants sued off”.
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An linkedin fesses up:
Claude Code has made me a dumber engineer.
https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:osg2vzhifd2tjfsvfwua7scy/post/3m2nhmlv3fk2r
I am jack’s completely and utterly unsurprised face
Bluesky’s found another set of rakes to step on - after a user complained of ableism from the mods, Trust and Safety head Aaron Rodericks used the automated systems as an accountability sink, then let slip that users’ work was being uploaded to AI slop service thehive.ai, seemingly contradicting Bluesky’s promise to not dump artists’ work into the slop machine.
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chaser:
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phgn posts: Nice!! The Vercel CEO recently posed for pictures with Netanyahu, so I’m looking for an alternative actually!
aziaziazi replies: I’d be glad if you can share a source of that.
ardren replies: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vercel-ceo-takes-selfie-israe…
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phgn’s comment is flagged and removed
an additional reply by baobun with the links https://www.middleeasteye.net/trending/developers-drop-vercel-call-boycott-after-ceo-posts-selfie-netanyahu, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45416353, and https://old.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/1nueacb/vercel_controversy_ethics_backlash_and_a/
Is there a general term for the type of experimental or vaporware tech whose main function is creating FUD and FOMO which slows down the adoption and development of more mature conventional solutions? In the case of public transit these are collectively known as gadgetbahns. Examples from other fields include SMRs, direct air carbon capture, various embrace-extend-extinguish schemes in the software world, extraterrestrial colonies and a host of consumer IoT gadgets.
if there isn’t, I’m calling it muskware, its conceptually close enough to vaporware.
If there isn’t a term, maybe you get to invent one! Just exploring the concept a bit here to try to generate leads, in case you wanted them.
To rephrase your concept, you have A) things that are collective attention thieves/time sinks for a particular field or industry, and B) this vaporware appears to have a good profit-to-opportunity cost ratio, but in reality, it does not.
You could focus on just A), with a direct naming of “collective attention thief”. You can substitute “collective” with “industry” and “attention thief” with “time sink”, etc. Or something like “kleptoware” or “sinkware”, “holetech”, etc.
Focusing on just B), you might come up with something like “bubbleware”, “bubble” indicating that the vaporware has inflated value.
Combining the two, you might name it after a scam. Maybe “pigeonware” after the pigeon drop scam, or “fawneyware” or “fiddleware” etc., there are many scams you could use.
I’d describe it as parasitic disruption. The scam analogies are on point and fine for rhetorical purposes, but they imply a degree of intentionality which is not necessary for some tech to be parasitic.
Say you invent a new type of electical power line that’s more durable and power efficient than the existing type. The materials are also ten times more expensive than for the same length of normal power line and the only factory making this type of power line can only make enough to fill the needs of a few small customers with special needs. Meanwhile local government in Eriador is planning the electrification of the Shire community when the well-meaning councilor Brandybuck mentions this new type of power line he read about in a magazine. Perhaps the council should wait and see how that develops before committing to building power lines that might be obsolete the moment they’re put up.
Neither you nor the councilor are deliberately using your invention as a tool to stall electrification of the Shire, but the same effect happens anyway.
You point about property B is a pretty good one. My hunch is that tech follies like these are related to economic bubbles and share similarities with them. I’ll postulate that most parasitic disruptions go hand in hand with economic bubbles, but not necessarily all of them.
Fair! Since you’re coming in with lotr references, maybe pumpkinware. Named after the pumpkin in one of the endings of PJ’s RotK where the hobbits are in a pub and everyone else is impressed with the large pumpkin, oblivious to what the present could have been.
Also, in order to grow a large pumpkin, you probably gotta ignore/prune all other pumpkins and just feed the one growing. So there’s that too.
I think pumpkinware is catchy but that a more saleable story for the term is cinderella’s stagecoach turning out to be a pumpkin
Another, a little more snide name I came up with while writing that: “free drinks tomorrow” tech, after a popular sign seen on the walls of bars around the world.
hmm I’m not aware of one beyond general “obstructionism” but that probably is a thing that needs a word
a lobsters is mad that a middling Perl project gets upvotes just because it’s “braincoded”
https://lobste.rs/s/bu1a84/i_brain_coded_static_image_gallery_few#c_um9usd
Apparently the red site couldn’t handle this one. Tags were changed from the descriptive perl to “vibecoding” and “satire”!
Bluesky going to bad for that poor, downtrodden, victimised and underrepresented demographic, uh, ai slop posters?
https://bsky.app/profile/carrion.bsky.social/post/3m2kf3rottc2h
alt text
A screenshot of an email sent to a bluesky user, reading
Hi there, Your Bluesky account (@carrion.bsky.social) has created a list called “Al Slop Posters” that may violate our Community Guidelines. We’ve temporarily hidden this list from other users because it contains one or more of these issues.
- Harmful language such as insults or slurs
- Unverified claims
- Appears intended to shame or abuse users
There are ‘user uses AI/has AI profile’ lists to they really are objecting to the word ‘slop’.
‘slop is a slur’ discourse incoming in T minus -100.
A new psychology preprint argues that “contemporary AI is research misconduct”.
While I like it, I wish there were more people pushing back and it not just being people involved with van Rooij. Makes it to easy to dismiss the concerns as just her being a crank. (Which I don’t think she is obviously, just wish there were more people in academia pushing harder back).
Also, reading up on the recent nix community mess (more fun interpersonal steering committee member conflict!), I’ve come to one conclusion:
One day someone will make a stage play out of this whole thing and the play will suck.
What if the stage play is a more tightly-scripted pro-wrestling show? Whether consciously or not, that would probably accurately capture the mindset of most of the original participants
On the one hand, it would capture their mindset quite well, on the other hand, I’m not sure how you’d adapt the “sports entertainment” mold of wrestling to Internet arguments
I think you could only really faithfully adapt the really dramatic arguments. Like ones with real world consequences. Closest thing I can think of is probably the saga of Nicole Shanahan, Musk, and Brin. RFK Jr also shows up in this story.
Otherwise you’d just make gimmicks based off of internet archetypes. Keyboard Warrior, White Knight, etc.
The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year. And some analysts believe that estimate doesn’t fully capture the AI spend, so the real share could be even higher.
AI companies have accounted for 80 per cent of the gains in US stocks so far in 2025. That is helping to fund and drive US growth, as the AI-driven stock market draws in money from all over the world, and feeds a boom in consumer spending by the rich.
Since the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population own 85 per cent of US stocks, they enjoy the largest wealth effect when they go up. Little wonder then that the latest data shows America’s consumer economy rests largely on spending by the wealthy. The top 10 per cent of earners account for half of consumer spending, the highest share on record since the data begins.
Is it just me or does it feel there’s a concerted effort to boost the AT protocol in tech venues? Maybe I’m paranoid but it does feel like a bit of openwashing going on.
I’m not really concerned about it. The overlap between people who give a shit about AT and people who don’t already use some kind of ActivityPub platform is microscopic. I’m happy to let Bluesky shoot itself in the foot by adopting the number one main thing people complain about Mastodon, namely the existence of multiple instances and having to choose from among them.
AIUI the AT protocol is in fact a bona fide open protocol with a Free (MIT/Apache-2.0) reference implementation available. If this is openwashing, I welcome this new style of openwashing where you actually publish open source software instead of just implying your proprietary software is not really proprietary.
By “openwashing” I mean the posts about AT protocol are running cover for Bluesky, the company. It’s basically reinforcing their narrative that if you don’t like what they’re doing, “just” start your own PDS. By focussing on the technical nitty-gritty, these posts ignore the structures in place keeping Bluesky in the dominant position.
An analogy, Bitcoin code is also open, but 1% of coin owners own like 90% of the coins. I’m not making any excuses for BTC here, but I seem to remember a bunch of similar articles breathlessly explaining how BTC “solves the Byzantine generals problem” while totally ignoring the ownership profile.
I agree that Bluesky’s attempts to not look monolithic have a certain flavor of opendetergent to them. However, I think their situation is a little more complex and quite a bit funnier. When the Bluesky people claim that their main thing is the protocol and the app was meant to be just a proof of concept, I’m inclined to believe them.
Bluesky is extremely popular among leftists and queer people and the company hates that. The right wingers seem content to stay on X the everything app and have little reason to switch even if Bluesky were to smoke the woke out and decimate its core userbase. The app needs to be popular for the protocol to stay even a little bit relevant.
Meanwhile Mastodon exists. It’s much more decentralized and a lot of people hate that. Bluesky users like having a single website with a single moderation authority, even if that moderation authority resents the demographics of that website.
If another twitter clone on AT Protocol somehow manages to gain enough of a critical mass to make Bluesky meaningfully not a monolith, that might well spell quick doom for the entire site. If AT makes migrating your account as easy as the developers are making it sound, I expect a big chunk of the users to jump ship as soon as an instance run by someone less transphobic gains enough traction.
I’ve mentioned before that I believe that Elon turning Twitter into a Nazi bar cut Bluesky’s business model off at its knees. They’re founded by Dorsey, weirdly (or cunningly) absent from the current techfash scene. I’ve always felt the vibe to be coiners and libertarians and “they can’t cancel you here”. Then they got a totally unearned user base because of X, and they’re simply not ready to handle it.
AFAIK there’s no revenue model, Jack or another VC is still footing the bill, and if there’s too much trans stuff on there the funding will dry up.
Good observation. I’d like to add that it’s not very straightforward to monetize a social networking site. The usual method would be ads, but the profit margins on those are thin, competition is rough and the audience does not like them. Otherwise you could probably derive monetary value from the soft power that comes with controlling a large communications platform of any kind, but it’s a lot harder to put a firm price tag on something like that and not everyone has the finesse and strategy to tap into that power.
Both of those monetization strategies work a hell of a lot better with a highly centralized and walled platform. Desperately trying to get people to pay more attention to the protocol that’s supposed to let them build competing sites with a low friction of migrating between them is the exact opposite of what you would do if you wanted your business model to be running a social networking site.
I would need someone with a big business brain to explain to me why a company focused on building the tools for competition against it and giving them away for free would ever seem like a sound investment. If I could give people VC money to publish telecommunications protocol specifications, I’d probably just sponsor IETF instead.
Just here to note that @dgerard had a clippy pfp before it was cool
Think I’ve taken psychic damage reading this about moldbug contemplating leaving the country https://fxbsky.app/profile/helldude.bsky.social/post/3m2hltni4422n
No, it will not harm the anarchist—it will make his day, his year, and maybe his life. All the money and power in the world will be at his defense. He will not even need to lift a finger to organize his own lawyers, much less pay them. In the end, as with many of the BLM rioters, he will probably be well compensated, with taxpayer funds, for his trouble. Not to mention all the pussy and/or dick s/he will, as a martyr, be entitled to! For the Islamist, this reward is only in heaven. But for the leftist it comes on earth.
ah dammit, anarchist HQ did an anarchy to my martyr’s genital preference form again. now I’m getting dicked down harder than I’ve ever been - straight thru the mantle to the core of the earth. It’s like a porn parody of The Core over here, and I’m not even anywhere near Portland
Im reporting live from the Portland war front, brothers. We are running dangerously low on our femboy furry rations. I fear we will not sustain our goon sesh through the Winter months 😔
Amusing just how basic his insults and ideas about the left are. This is generic drunken bar patron shit. Lot of projection there. You lost it Moldy, you need to add more obscure references so you don’t come off so reactionary/reactive mid.
I think he’s imagining cool Antifa street fighters as a replacement for the popular kids he was jealous of in childhood. Netd-Jock [sic] seething, but ideological.
It is not just us.
this is big talk coming from beginner cult founder funded by thiel, a failed lawyer
