David Gerard
the guy who got Elon and Grimes to hook up, destroying Twitter and proceeding to blow up the United States
- 161 Posts
- 157 Comments
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Companies go full AI — then the bill comes dueEnglish
0·7 days agoyesterdays’ news just in, no we won’t
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX to trash stock market IPOs for 2026English
0·7 days agoCovered one attempt already!
https://awful.systems/post/7387786
Trouble is the sort of investment that’s uncorrelated right up to the moment you need it to be, at which point it crashes in lockstep
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd March 2026English
0·11 days agoif you use Rust enough it just grows like that
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd March 2026English
0·11 days agofig. 1: @self hard at work keeping awful systems up and running

from Unix World 1985. enterprise computing was so much more fun in those days
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd March 2026English
0·12 days agoBut along the way, he found a way to take estrogen wrong
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th March 2026English
0·17 days agoThey are indeed all run by the same people.
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Duolingo is dying celebratory threadEnglish
0·24 days agoI did the Spanish-from-English course, which I understand was the best course on Duolingo, from start to finish over 2 years. I also skimmed the English-from-Spanish course.
I got good enough to pick my way slowly through Salvadoran newspaper articles, which is basically what I wanted. (This also teaches me more words.) I need to ping my Spanish-speaking friends to teach me how to fucking speak it though, Duolingo didn’t teach me shit.
(The tabloid newspapers are easy. The pompous newspapers write in a fancy tone which ~nobody in .sv uses. I really wanna read El Faro in Spanish, but it writes in high-level sarcastic and pissed-off. Still a subscriber tho. Guess I gotta git gud!)
.sv Twitter was easy, cos it turns out shitposting is the universal human tongue.
I understand Spanish-from-English in particular has decayed badly in the AI era. Apparently it randomly started teaching someone “vosotros” which was never previously introduced. Pretty sure it still doesn’t teach “vos”, which is annoying (.sv uses vos).
Its main advantage was that I did it at all - the gamification tickled my brain just right - and I did in fact learn anything from it.
I was a paying customer, but my subscription finished a few months after the AI memo, so adios.
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th March 2026English
0·27 days agojesus fuck https://urbit.org/blog/olif-and-urbit-ids
with urbit, you can now sniff each other’s farts
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st March 2026English
0·28 days agoi’ve suffered Masnick’s writing since the early 2000s and he has never learnt to write any better
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st March 2026English
0·28 days agoehh. i’m not inclined to hand it to marcus. i can’t think of an example of him saying something new and interesting.
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Blue Owl won’t give your money back. This is fineEnglish
0·28 days agothe AI bubble, the private credit bubble (this one), the Wall St Bitcoin thing, etc. are all about writing down a big number with a $ in front on thin justification, then borrowing against it
this runs into issues tomorrrow. but not today!
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd February 2026English
0·1 month agoCS 2005 is absolutely worth it, it’s a version of Photoshop that does everything you actually need including CMYK with Pantone.
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Bet against the bubble: Goldman Sachs’ non-AI stock indexEnglish
0·1 month agoI also didn’t say it’s a good hedge. It’ll stay uncorrelated right up to the moment you need it to, when it’ll crash in lockstep.
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026English
0·1 month agoamazed he got through that without somehow blaming sneerclub
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026English
0·1 month ago“Dark Enlightenment” was invented for Nick Land for his essay of the same name.
David Gerard@awful.systemsMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th February 2026English
0·2 months agomore proximately, he also went to the Manifold Markets meetup for statistical predictors that just happened to include Jordan Lasker, which is why he keeps making these posts with curiously Lasker-adjacent talking points. It’s very disappointing.
David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMto
TechTakes@awful.systems•The Anthropic test refusal string: kill a Claude session deadEnglish
0·2 months agoApparently it works in binary.

a Mickey Mouse camera, obviously