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 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.)
Look I know Doctorow fails the gen-AI purity test but I think he's making sense here
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/
It's not so much he fails the purity test than it is he thinks all gen-ai works like whisper on a laptop and open source LLMs grow on trees.
edit: and also that big company engineers are encouraged to be discreet in using them, like what?
It's not just that he fails a purity test it's that he basically only cares about his pet issues like right to repair and hating copyright and positions himself as a social activist while twisting real social issues to fit into his framework of 'copyright bad, hackers fix this.'
Too narrow of a scope to be useful I think.
When he talks about LLCs, the real thing he's referring to has to be capitalism. The "unaligned AI is already here, it's corporations" trope has been around for a while, and I don't think it convinced a lot of people to become socialists.
I think you can't usefully tackle just the capitalism of the tech industry, if you don't understand the wider system around it. I mean the VC that sloshes around in tech to raise up one bullshitteer after another comes from somewhere. Real estate, mining, fossil fuels, etc.
Yeah. I mean, I'm going to assume that he's not specifically referring to LLCs and that, say General Partnerships and Sole Proprietorship aren't actually better, mostly because they absolutely share the same problems. But that's a whole lot of digital ink spilled about how important it is to create "digital public goods" - and one assumes public goods more generally, given our ongoing inability to subsist on digital food - without any real thought put to how such systems should be organized, controlled, protected, etc. Like, if he stopped trying to wave "digital innovation" around like a magic wand he'd basically have to be a communist or anarchist of some flavor. But he's still sufficiently in the Silicon Valley Milieu where lefty politics are too cringe to admit, so he's stuc having identified some real problems and having no realistic starting point for solving them
Nah, this is the threat as he describes it:
He's not saying that "corporations are a parasitic species we created that will devour our precious planet and ability to survive and turn it into shareholder value for our corpses to enjoy" no sir he's saying we need to switch to open source replacements for Office 360 and get Right To Repair for our tractors.
Yeah, but he's been saying this for a while, and I don't think this is a new way of saying it that is particularly useful.
Agreed