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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th May 2025 - awful.systems

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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126 comments

  • Seeing a lot of talk about OpenAI acquiring a company with Jony Ive and he's supposedly going to design them some AI gadget.

    Calling it now: it will be a huge flop. Just like the Humane Pin and that Rabbit thing. Only the size of the marketing campaign, and maybe its endurance due to greater funding, will make it last a little longer.

    It appears that many people think that Jony Ive can perform some kind of magic that will make a product successful, I wonder if Sam Altman believes that too, or maybe he just wants the big name for marketing purposes.

    Personally, I've not been impressed with Ive's design work in the past many years. Well, I'm sure the thing is going to look very nice, probably a really pleasingly shaped chunk of aluminium. (Will they do a video with Ive in a featureless white room where he can talk about how "unapologetically honest" the design is?) But IMO Ive has long ago lost touch with designing things to be actually useful, at some point he went all in on heavily prioritizing form over function (or maybe he always did, I'm not so sure anymore). Combine that with the overall loss of connection to reality from the AI true believers and I think the resulting product could turn to be actually hilarious.

    The open question is: will the tech press react with ridicule, like it did for the Humane Pin? Or will we have to endure excruciating months of critihype?

    I guess Apple can breathe a sigh of relief though. One day there will be listicles for "the biggest gadget flops of the 2020s", and that upcoming OpenAI device might push Vision Pro to second place.

126 comments