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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

last weekā€™s edition

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    13Ā·
    5 days ago

    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: ā€œEvery industry/ecosystem has its supreme village idiot. @deanwball is that for AI,ā€ Defense under secretary Emil Michael said Sunday on X.

    ā€œDean Ball has perhaps the biggest gap between actual IQ and his own perceived IQ of anyone in the industry (about 40 points).ā€ Michael was arguing against Ballā€™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 versionā€™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 ā€œinherently decelerationist.ā€ A probable outcome of an open-weight-dominant world is ā€œfull AI communism,ā€ a future of AI as public good and digital public infrastructure that strikes him as a ā€œdystopian hellscape.ā€ And the United States government will at some point realize that its best strategy is to create large amounts of ā€œregulatory riskā€ 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