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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
OT: does anyone else get David and David Gerrold confused all the time?
Also I’m in Viljandi!
Couple of days late but when your ideology is so pure, you can’t connect The Thing to The Consequences of The Thing. The solution? Monetize the rot!
Check quotes and replies for quality sneers (and more sneerable content)
I’m a Millenial (even if I think these labels are dumb) and I find these kinds of things fascinating. Esp when they describe things I do not recognize in any way in my peers, re them talking about the causes of people disliking capitalism. Sure I’m in a more progressive/leftwing bubble (of which I’m prob the most extreme nowadays in various ways), but I know a lot of people who are looking into buying houses/have bought houses who still are not fans of musk/tesla etc. Seems like they forget people can have principles, and just look at a simplistic view of ‘material conditions’ (I hope people paid attention to the recent bsky shit on what this actually means in historical context). Flashbacks to r/ssc talking about ‘leftwing polticians not thinking about X’ while the leftwing politicans I knew irl were actively talking about it. Feels very like im looking at an alternative world. (Prob also quite true as im Dutch, and this is about the US (with right wing fan fave Poland having a honorable mention)).
Do think it is amusing Millenials get blamed for everything still. The punching bag generation. Poor Gen Z, for which this is now starting up.
I will never forget a conversation in High School where our resident young conservative sneered about how “sure $Welfare_Program sound nice, but you’ll be paying for it with your taxes” and we all responded with some variant of “I mean, yeah? That’s how that works, isn’t it?”
A whole generation is leaning more socialist because homeownership is unattainable and student debt is crushing. The solution is whatever is the latest big tech fad.
Just like all of gen X’s problems would have been solved with more .com, right?
Gonna copy this in because there’s a lot to unpack, and I don’t want to do it alone.
Text of the Thielmail in that first tweet:
From: Peter Thiel
Date: Sunday, January 5, 2020 at 2:44 AM
To: Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg, Antonio Lucio
Cc: Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen
Subject: RE: Milennials
There are many themes that could be developed
more here; let me make a few quick points for now:
Nick -- I certainly would not suggest that our policy
should be to embrace Millennial attitudes
unreflectively. I would be the last person to
advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials
say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than
simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid
or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and
understand why. And, from the perspective of a
broken generational compact, there seems to be a
pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that
when one has too much student debt or if housing
is too unaffordable, then one will have negative
capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to
start accumulating capital in the form of real estate;
and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then
one may well turn against it.
- Part of me wishes that the font were just a little bigger. This way, the word wrap would come to 10 syllables a line, and we could pretend this was a lost Shakespeare monologue.
- I’m almost disappointed by this. Thiel, suggesting that it might not, in fact, be the children that are wrong? Where’s your ideological purity, Thiel? Didn’t know you started reading r/GenZedong.
- Also, it’s Peter fucking Thiel lecturing Nick fucking Clegg, former leader of the lib dems in the UK, on paying lip service to socialist policy in order to stymie any real societal progress???
Not gonna lie got a bit jump scared by woke Peter Thiel here. Of course I’m pretty sure his actual solution involves giving young people houses confiscated from those perfidious brown people of one stripe or another. The problem can’t be an inherent injustice in a system that allows for both Peters Thiel and (insert your favorite broke person here) to exist in the same market.
The replies are a long sequence of different stupid takes… someone recommending cryptocurrency to build wealth, blaming millennials for not investing in homes, a reply literally blaming too much spending on starbucks, blaming millennials overreacting to the 2008 crisis by not buying homes, blaming millennials being socialists, blaming millennials going to college, blaming millennials for not making the big bucks in tech. About 1 in 10 replies point out the real causes: wages have not grown with costs or with real productivity and capitalism in general favors people holding assets and offering loans over people that have to borrow and rent.
These people probably think Karl Marx is Satan, but my god at least he was able to understand and respect Adam Smith better than whoever’s trying to magick wealth out of this absolute idiot soup! Looks like capitalism the ideology is just as unsustainable as capitalism the economic system.
Stumbled across a piece from history YTer The Pharaoh Nerd publicly ripping into AI slop, specifically focusing on AI-generated pseudohistory found on YouTube Shorts.
The insistence on blipping out anything even vaguely sexual (like the word orgasm) to appease the kami of the algorithm is really off putting after a while.
I thought he might be doing a bit but it doesn’t feel like it. Also he speaks like old comic word balloons where they would randomly bold every third noun to show intensity.
Less a standard piece and more “Ed Zitron goes completely fucking apeshit for 26 minutes” this time around
Said revenue estimates, as of 2026, include billions of dollars of “new products” that include “free user monetization.”
If you are wondering what that means, I have no idea. The Information does not explain.
Probably something to do with their recent ramblings about getting an openai social network off the ground.
From: The Sentry Team <noreply@sentry.io>
Subject: Update to Sentry’s List of Subprocessors
...
- Google LLC (Google Cloud Services) and OpenAI, L.L.C. are now reflected as subprocessors for all Sentry products, instead of select features only; and
- Anthropic, PBC is now added as a subprocessor.
sigh
they do still have user-specified controls (and appear to respect them), but… sigh
