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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.

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dgerard@awful.systems

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026 (awful.systems)

submitted 3 days ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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.

last week's edition

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[–] nfultz@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

who is this Dean Ball guy? new week, new guy, I guess.

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/19/pentagon-openai-dean-ball-trump-ai

Zoom in: "Every industry/ecosystem has its supreme village idiot. @deanwball is that for AI," Defense under secretary Emil Michael said Sunday on X.

"Dean Ball has perhaps the biggest gap between actual IQ and his own perceived IQ of anyone in the industry (about 40 points)." Michael was arguing against Ball's point that various government agencies, including the Pentagon, have blocked employees from using Chinese AI, which has already sent a message to regulated companies.

Russ Wilcox felt compelled to weigh in also

Dean Ball, days into his new job as Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, posted his assessment of Kimi K3, the new model from the Chinese lab Moonshot AI. Kimi is an open-weight model, which means its inner workings are published for anyone to download, run, and modify; the newest version’s weights ship later this month. It had just matched the best publicly available models of the first quarter. The post made three claims. Open-weight models are “inherently decelerationist.” A probable outcome of an open-weight-dominant world is “full AI communism,” a future of AI as public good and digital public infrastructure that strikes him as a “dystopian hellscape.” And the United States government will at some point realize that its best strategy is to create large amounts of “regulatory risk” around the use of open-weight Chinese models.

I have met Dean Ball. We have disagreed before. This time the disagreement is public, and so the response should be too.

oh no kimi3 got the neo marxist woke mind virus

[–] lurker@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Dean Ball’s name rings a bell to me. Emile Torres wrote an article on him its pretty standard OpenAI exec stuff (that is being a wacko high off his own tech)

[–] istewart@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

For that matter, who the hell is Emil Michael? Defense Undersecretary tells me nothing, they're handing those sorts of appointments to anyone who's ever scammed $5 in venture capital