Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th July 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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, and happy 4th July in advance.)

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. Sorry this wasn’t up earlier, I couldn’t connect to awful.)

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    https://russwilcoxdata.substack.com/p/china-registered-the-humans-last

    Last July, China gave every internet user a state identity: one number and one credential, good at the bank, the hospital, and the civil-service exam. That system took effect on July 15, 2025.¹ Yesterday, on July 15, 2026, exactly one year later, China did the same thing for AI.

    These are agents, meaning software that perceives, decides, and acts on its own, a category well past the chatbot. As of yesterday, agents in China get registered on a national platform. They receive a digital identity and declare their capabilities the way a business declares its scope, and they can be recalled the way a defective car is recalled. A state planning analyst offered the official gloss: every agent gets a 数字身份证, a digital ID card.² Call it what it is, a birth certificate for machines.

    I never know how to parse mainstream reporting about China or Wilcox’s writing in particular. Maybe this means they have a universal kill switch.

    If you read it the way a lawyer would and the genre is unmistakable. It follows an agent through an entire life. At birth, registration: identity, declared capabilities, payment rails, a procedure for disputes. In life, an audit trail, because in sensitive settings every action must be verifiable and traceable, with blockchain named as the technology of record, so that no act ever floats free of a responsible principal. At death, recall, in the language of defective products.

    hmmm

    The man behind the partnership is Lin Le, founder of Lingshu Technology, the firm ranked first in China for blockchain and trusted-data infrastructure. The founder of the country’s leading trusted-data company signed for board-level entry into a police-agent vendor five weeks before a law requiring trusted-data audit trails on police agents came into force.

    OK back to be being terrified I guess.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
      0·
      9 hours ago

      looks like a confluence of dumb shit that may or may not result in anything that means anything or does anything

      there was a big blockchain push from 2019 on, basically in response to Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency plan. This directly brought us the e-CNY central bank digital currency. They tried to do this with a blockchain, but quickly realised you weren’t going to scale a blockchain to fucking China. So far e-CNY is just another phone money like Alipay or Tenpay. I suppose it’s a public good to have cash be under public control and not just private control, but it doesn’t really have a compelling use case in its own right.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      22 hours ago

      These are agents, meaning software that perceives, decides, and acts on its own, a category well past the chatbot.

      Are these agents in the room with us now?

      How can all this possibly be enforceable.