Want to wade into the snowy 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 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    9Ā·
    11 days ago

    Techbro leaves suspicious package unattended at davos, gets carted off by the police, swiss security folk mock his technical ignorance.

    In the morning, Heyneman was asked to explain his device to a Swiss government technical expert named Chris (he didnā€™t catch the last name).

    ā€œI give him the same pitch that I gave all the business people in Davos,ā€ Heyneman said. When Chris drilled him on his code, Heyneman admitted that he had used Cursor and Claude Code to vibe code the entire thing. Chris then took it upon himself to explain the code to Heyneman, line by line.

    https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/22/tech-dude-davos-bomb-lookalike-device/

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      11Ā·
      11 days ago

      The device, which Heyneman said does not work

      Wait what xD

      Iā€™m sorry, so what the fuck was this entire charade for, why did you have actual wires and boards if the thing wasnā€™t even supposed to work. What are you doing man.

      In some sense this is very emblematic of techbro culture - I have a box that is presenting like a tech device and has ā€œcodeā€ inside, even though it doesnā€™t actually do anything Iā€™d like a million dollars.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      8Ā·
      11 days ago

      Heyneman admitted that he had used Cursor and Claude Code to vibe code the entire thing. Chris then took it upon himself to explain the code to Heyneman, line by line.

      Do not war for centuries

      Remain absolutely savage

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6Ā·
      11 days ago

      He didnā€™t have time to assemble the prototype before leaving for Switzerland, so he took a Patagonia duffel bag stuffed with motherboards, loose wire, and a box of tools and finished building the device in his Davos hotel room.

      That this is even possible is quite something, that he didnā€™t even think about how stupid this would look is also amazing, he will go far as a tech ceo.

      ā€œThese wires, c4, and plutonium? I need them for my tech prototypeā€

      Fun detail I once heard, if you take a block of Brunost with you on an airplane, you might get into trouble because the scanners think it is c4.

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        5Ā·
        11 days ago

        Oh, thatā€™s easy. His product,

        • doesnā€™t work
        • isnā€™t something he understands
        • āœØwas done with ai, plz invest āœØ