Want to wade into the sandy 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/allbirds-bird-stock-shoes-ai.html
I had such a hard time coming up with an original joke for this, until i realized the reason why is that allbirds is stealing jokes from the dotcom bubble in the first place.
Oh. so, bit of a misleading headline there CNBC. This wasnāt a real publicly traded company, it was a company on life support that got pivoted by a greedy founder looking to cash in. Cynical move or the delusions of a true believer? does it matter?
Regardless, the stupidity is too much, the resemblance too striking. good luck to Allbirds in the totally normal footwear-to-high tech pivot that is happening in this totally normal economy.
What the fuck happened here. How did a shoe company get so high and how on earth did it lose 98% of its value? Were shoes really big during covid and then the demand disappeared, wtf
@V0ldek @techtakes
Bro we all run on tank tracks these days, weāre all absolutely crushing it in the workplace Bro shoes are so pre-AI, you canāt grow forever all the way to upload heaven on a sole
(Pops another Special K)
@cstross @V0ldek @techtakes I donāt know what āSpecial Kā means in the context of āPops another Special Kā, but I choose to visualize opening one of those snack sized boxes of Special K cereal and chugging it down in one go.
@isaackuo
yes, though itās the extra-ketamine flavour box :D
@cstross @V0ldek @techtakes
@Landa @cstross @V0ldek @techtakes Oh wow. The BOX is flavoured? You donāt even have to open the box. You just chomp it down along with the contents.
This is brilliant! Quick I need to Shark Tank pitch this and get rich quick. And then when the product tanks Iāll pivot to AI and get even richer quicker!
@isaackuo Movers and shakers aināt got time to unpack, just chomp down on the whole box.
It will make you instantly look like the alphaest of ~~Alpha^WSigmas~~
Lots of fibre too!
@cstross @V0ldek @techtakes
@isaackuo @Landa @V0ldek @techtakes AI is so 2026, Bro, to get ahead of the game for 2027 you need to pivot to Quantum Computing, ideally on the blockchain in an orbital data centre.
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@V0ldek @sansruse
The shoes are/were good. I wear them daily now. Every librarian I know in New Zealand wears them to work, a quick poll in my wider development team at work had 80% of the people wearing them that day and 90% owned at least one pair.
My guess is someone convinced the founders they could break into the US market and become billionaires, so they took on debt and VC funding and were crushed under the repayments when it didnāt work out.
If theyād been happy making good shoes, taking home a million bucks a year and staying a profitable business in NZ, I think theyād still be doing that.
Greed mucks everything upā¦
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The Golgafrinchans shipped off the B Ark and then died of a plague (book 2). The Shoe Event Horizon happened on Brontitall (radio series) or Frogstar World B (book 2).
@V0ldek @sansruse Iām sure a lot of people thought what with the mRNA vaccines people would grow at least one extra leg.
When that didnāt happen, wellā¦
@V0ldek @sansruse
There was a big consumer migration from brick and mortar to online. All of the people who thought themselves the smartest people in the room just knew that would last forever And that the trend in growth would never stop. āLine go up forever!ā
The line did not got up forever, and in 22-23 when there was a return to brick and motor many online businesses were hurt from Amazon to online shoe retail.
@V0ldek @sansruse another Meme stock, like Tesla and OpenAI? Where the valuation bears no relation to actual sales or profitability.
And now it seems they are trying again.
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@V0ldek @sansruse
Shoes were *huge* during Covid, do you not remember when all our feet swelled up?
Sorry