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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th August 2026 - awful.systems (awful.systems)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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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.)

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[–] 20 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Article on businessinsider with the nauseating title “The modern parenting throuple: Parents are at a breaking point — AI companies see an opportunity” because the age-old silicon valley product design technique of asking what your mother used to do for you, and how it could be sold back to you via a subscription is still very much in use.

https://www.businessinsider.com/parents-breaking-point-ai-companies-opportunity-2026-8

I confess I haven’t read the full article (which is why I haven’t given it a proper post) but hypervisible.blacksky.app has kindly pulled the highlights:

https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.blacksky.app/post/3mtupdpfcjs2p

One of the best bits:

The most tech-savvy parents have built their own tools. Sarah Baldeo, a cognitive neuroscientist, spent the past year traveling for work, so she built a custom GPT of herself to chat with her 15-year-old son when she's unavailable. Baldeo tells me she programmed the chatbot with her personality, uploading screenshots of texts between her and her son, along with documents about her values, the family rules, and challenges she felt in parenting.

Baldeo wanted her son to ask the chatbot advice, and he did prompt it with questions he may have fielded to her, like, How do I diplomatically tell my teacher I'm overloaded with assignments? But he also asked the mombot how to convince his human mom to let him hang out at a coffee shop in Chicago in the evening — something Baldeo had been hesitant to allow.

The bot told him, as Baldeo recounts, "Your mom very much values new experiences, being around people from different cultures, different socioeconomic backgrounds, and this is how you should frame it to her: that you're exploring a part of Chicago that is more diverse." Her son took this tact to Baldeo, and she said yes. It was only later that she saw the chat history that let her know he had gamed the bot to manipulate her.

🤮

Why the fuck do these people have children. Why the fuck does any functional human being think it is a good idea to outsource raising their children to sam altman and his chatbot.

Who on earth thinks that training a chatbot to wear their personality like a rubber mask and manipulate people is going to end well? Honestly, I think this is perhaps the bit that triggers the most revulsion in me. I cannot comprehend wanting to be complicit in my own replacement by this thing, but so many people seem excited by the prospect of doing this to themselves.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    How hard is it to talk to your own damn kids

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  • [–] 6 points 21 hours ago (1 child)

    Whether consciously or not, a lot of these people probably implicitly think of their kids as cost centers. I feel like this is widespread across finance-focused American households, not just in the executive strata.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 hours ago

    This is probably an effect of the middle-class trope of having to save to send your kids to a (good) college.

    It's even a joke in an old "Friends", Chandler wants many kids, Monica is "can we afford it" and he says "we pick the one we like the most, and that kid goes to college".

    Kids are cost centers, it's just more overt in the US (and the UK for school catchment areas), at least if you want to give the outcomes society or your peers judges are the best.

    In countries where the cost of higher ed is not born by the individual family, the cost is of the opportunity kind.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 day ago

    @rook @BlueMonday1984
    I'm reminded of the Stewart Lee routine:
    "It's called Digital Parenting, this book, Digital Parenting. Thank God for that. If there's one thing I can't stand it's analogue parenting. The tears, the mucus, the vomit. The endless declarations of love and the duty of care. The sheer fucking interminable human joy of it."

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