this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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. Also just came back from Spider-Man: Brand New Day, movie was awesome)

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[–] istewart@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

A very strange story about Bill Gates' daughter's startup troubles: https://futurism.com/future-society/bill-gates-daughter-traitor-startup

It honestly doesn't sound any more shady than any of the bullshit her dad got up to in the 90s (which is to say, it's still pretty damned shady!), but this Futurism blog seems to be trying to push the story into some sort of bizarre celebrity-gossip soap opera:

While the story has been well hashed out by now, Bloomberg‘s sourcing is noteworthy for what it implies: the leaked Slack messages strongly suggest that someone inside Phia is hell-bent on taking Gates — and quite probably the entire company — down.

Anonymous internal sourcing seems like a typical feature of these exposés, so framing it like this struck me as a laughably absurd overreach. Plus the site has 3 or 4 different tiny articles on this same topic, making me wonder if it's one of those "any exposure is good exposure" sorts of things where Gates Jr.'s PR team is using the outlet as a cutout to raise her profile.

Bonus laugh line from Gates Jr. herself:

“Our target consumer is a young woman who’s hustling,” the recent Stanford graduate told Fortune. “She shops like a genius, but she doesn’t want to waste her time doing it.”

What does it even mean to shop like a genius? I guess Erdos probably had his amphetamine plug's number well-memorized...

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 4 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Her grift is the exact same one as the Honey extension from the megalag video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk - like her dad she just rips off better programs, but she didn't even have the taste to copy an actual good product.

EDIT:

Oh yeah, she popped up in that How To Rule The World book about Stanford:

“Everyone was very sharp. Very sharp,” one student, who didn’t otherwise love the class, stressed. The cohort my year included freshmen and sophomores funded by Sam Altman or Peter Thiel. Some wanted to “solve aging.” were in defense tech, working on secret projects with contracts from the government or major companies. Some worked on climate change. One had already started a string of robotics companies and earned a display in a museum. Others worked on commodities trading. Another was Phoebe Gates—daughter of Bill and Melinda—who made her name as a prominent sustainability advocate and cofounded a company with her Stanford roommate.[*2] Together, as undergraduates, they’d already collectively raised millions of dollars for startups—and, of course, had done internships at every possible top company, from classic FAANG behemoths (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google), to Jane Street, the quantitative trading firm that pays interns hundreds of thousands of dollars, to top-flight VCs.

Footnote:

*2 When I reached her, Phoebe Gates wrote that she “would rather not speak on the class.”

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

Phoebe Gates went to Stanford, and Stanford's Effective Altruism club is still around and has gone full longtermist https://ea.stanford.edu/manifesto.html Guess which of our friends helped found it?