this post was submitted on 09 Feb 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 so 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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[–] lurker@awful.systems 6 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

also completely leaving out important context on the Iran/stuxnet example, in that it was a joint effort between two countries believed to have been in development for five years. The idea that AIs will engage in lightspeed wars and disable all critical infrastructure in a single day while speaking in alien languages and creating alliances is unreasonable extrapolation of the capabilities. Also completely ignored the segment where the Anthropic team implemented safeguards and communicated with the teams behind the software to patch out the bugs. It's the most blatant fearmongering ever. Thank god the comments contain reasonable responses and breakdowns of the post. That channel's way of highlighting papers just pisses me off

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 5 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

also ignoring that natanz was actually effectively airgapped, and was knowingly infected by another country's contractor's usb stick, working on behalf of dutch intelligence service