this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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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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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.)

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Michael Hiltzik in LATimes: "Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash"

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-20/say-farewell-to-the-ai-bubble-and-get-ready-for-the-crash

https://archive.ph/2025.08.20-113134/https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-20/say-farewell-to-the-ai-bubble-and-get-ready-for-the-crash

Fun quote:

The rest of [AI 2027], mapping a course to late 2027 when an AI agent “finally understands its own cognition,” is so loopily over the top that I wondered whether it wasn’t meant as a parody of excessive AI hype. I asked its creators if that was so, but haven’t received a reply.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago

And because it's the LA Times, there's a chatbot slop section at the bottom to provide false balance.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I'm enjoying the mood today. We're all looking for what the next Big Dumb Thing will be that we'll be dunking on next year, like we're browsing the dessert menu at a fancy restaurant.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago

On top of that, there's clear signs that we've grown quite an audience from dunking on AI. Ed Zitron reached 70k subscribers just a couple weeks ago, and Pivot to AI is at nearly 9k on YouTube.

If and when the next Big Dumb Thing comes along, chances are we're gonna have a headstart against the hucksters.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (5 children)
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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

altman is the waluigi to musk’s wario

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Xe Iaso's chimed in on the GPT-5 fallout, giving her thoughts on chatbots' use as assistants/therapists.

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[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The Palladium/Bismarck Analysis e-magazine guys who push space colonization used to known as Phalanx back in the day, just an fyi in case you guys didn't know.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

So state-owned power company Vattenfall here in Sweden are gonna investigate building "small modular reactors" as a response to government's planned buildout of nuclear.

Either Rolls-Royce or GE Vernova are in the running.

Note that this is entirely dependent on the government guaranteeing a certain level of revenue ("risk sharing"), and of course that that level survives an eventual new government.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Interesting wondering if they manage to come further in the process than our gov, which seems to restart the process every few years, and then either discovers nobody wants to do it (it being building bigger reactors, not the smaller ones, which iirc from a post here are not likely two work out) for a reasonable price, or the gov falls again over their lies about foreigners and we restart the whole voting cycle again. (It is getting really crazy, our fused green/labour party is now being called the dumbest stuff by the big rightwing liberal party (who are not openly far right, just courting it a lot)).

29 okt are our new elections. Lets see what the ratio between formation and actually ruling is going to be this time. (Last time it took 223 days for a cabinet to form, and from my calculations they ruled for only 336 days).

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

Nuclear has been a running sore in Swedish politics since the late 70s. Opposition to it represented the reaction to the classic employer-employee class detente in place since the 1930s where both the dominant Social Democrats and the opposition on the right were broadly in agreement that economic growth == good, and nuclear was a part of that. There was a referendum in the early 80s where the alternatives were classical Swedish: Yes, No, and "No, but we wait a few years".

Decades have passed, and now being pro-nuclear is very right-coded, and while secretly the current Social Democrats are probably happy that we're supposed to get more electrical power, there's political hay to make opposing the racist shitheads. Add to that that financing this shit actually would mean more expensive electricity I doubt it will remain popular.

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