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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th September 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 5 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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[–] 10 points 1 day ago (1 child)

From the mirror universe news

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2026-09-10/campaign-slow-ai-was-ready-viral-warning

ZH's interpretation is Coxon is some kind of false flag thing to bait Dems into regulating AI

Parker Thayer argued that Coxon’s launch looked like a sophisticated public-relations operation. He traced the earliest amplification to people associated with Encode, the AI Policy Network, and the AI Futures Project.

Brian Chau’s later thread surfaced a direct political-technology link. Newspeak House’s own residency page lists Jacob Coxon among its residents and describes his work as “applying mathematics and data science to inefficient markets.” Newspeak calls itself the London College of Political Technology. Its current calendar advertises Campaign Lab sessions aimed at helping the progressive left “campaign more effectively.” The residency places Coxon inside that political-technology network.

Some of the underlying funding links are public. The Survival and Flourishing Fund’s 2025 grant table lists $2.035 million for the AI Futures Project, $516,000 for Encode AI, and $1.635 million for the AI Policy Institute. The fund attributes those grants to Jaan Tallinn. Anthropic says Tallinn led its Series A financing in 2021.

Encode identifies the Survival and Flourishing Fund as one of several foundations supporting its work. It also says it refuses funding from corporations, foreign governments, and executives at frontier AI companies. Its general counsel, Nathan Calvin, is one of the early amplifiers named in Thayer’s thread.

Some new pins for the conspiracy board I guess. They imagine a "political-technology network" quite the linguistic contortion to not use the word rationalist. No clue what LCPT is but looks like a hacker house type thing?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago

    It feels like that ZH piece is kinda trying to do the same critihype that the AI boosters are, but with the opposite conclusion. Instead of conflating all the actual criticism of the harms of the AI bubble and associated activities with sci-fi doom cult nonsense to try and get more funding for their team who are definitely going to do it right, they're conflating all the actual criticism of the harms of the AI bubble and associated activities with sci-fi doom cult nonsense in order to argue that either it should be shut down or else that any attempt at regulation is obviously a tyrannical attempt to induct the whole world into the sci-fi doom cult.

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