this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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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.

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

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Want to wade into the snowy 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.

(2026 is off to a great start, isn't it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Anyway, I can recommend skipping this episode and only bothering with the technical or more business oriented ones, which are often pretty good.

AI puffery is easy for anyone to see through. If they're regularly mistaking for something of actual substance, their technical/business sense is likely worthless, too.

[–] rook@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There’s room for some nuance there. They make some reasonable predictions, like chatbot use seems likely to enter the dsm as a contributing factor for psychosis, and they’re all experience systems programmers who immediately shot down Willison when he said that an llm-generated device driver would be fine, because device drivers either obviously work or obviously don’t, but then fall foul of the old gell-mann amnesia problem.

Certainly, their past episodes have been good, and the back catalogue stretches back quite some time, but I'm not particularly interested in that sort of discussion here.

[–] Seminar2250@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

old gell-mann amnesia problem

I didn't know this had a name. Thank you!

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

@self they're doing it again, where's the link to your rant

[–] Seminar2250@awful.systems 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

cleaning the egg off my face (but egg prices are pretty high rn so i may just keep it)

thanks @swlabr@awful.systems for the link and @blakestacey@awful.systems for the skeptical post, my dumbass dropped the ball there