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 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. A lot of people didn’t survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account’s cake day, too, so that’s cool.)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    1 day ago

    Ryan Mac:

    Epstein had many known connections to Silicon Valley CEOs, but less known was how he made money from those relationships.

    We did a deep dive into how he got dealflow in Silicon Valley, giving him shots to invest in Coinbase, Palantir, SpaceX and other companies.

    For example, here is Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam in 2014 emailing w/ people around Epstein, including crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, asking to meet Epstein before the financier invested $3m in Coinbase.

    Coinbase was a two year old startup. Epstein netted multimillion dollar returns from this.

    Here is Epstein asking Peter Thiel if he should invest in Spotify or Palantir. Thiel was (and still is) Palantir’s chairman and tells Epstein there is “no need to rush.” This is one of several emails where Thiel gives Epstein advice.

    Epstein later invested $40m into one of Thiel’s VC funds.

    One of @ering.bsky.social’s great file finds: Epstein tried to help create an tech fund shortly before he was arrested in 2019 with two tech types. One of his partners, however, was worried about the “optics” of telling founders that Epstein was involved.

    So they suggested Epstein conceal himself.

    At the end of his life, Epstein had assets of around $600m. A large part of that was due to his ability to get in early to hot tech deals. The returns he made off those deals helped fund his lifestyle.

    […]

    While reporting this, I had something happen that’s never happened. A comms rep for one of the co’s disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI’s chatbot.

    I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

    https://bsky.app/profile/rmac.bsky.social/post/3me4wmrgic226

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      18 hours ago

      I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

      These are the people who come next election will be voting strictly according to an AI’s say so.