Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th April 2026

https://awful.systems/post/7852082

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th April 2026 - awful.systems

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 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.)

Starting this Stubsack off, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have threatened to blow up OpenAI’s Stargate datacentre in Abu Dhabi.

They’ve already bombed commercial data centres before, so I’m inclined to believe this isn’t an empty threat.

Iran threatens ‘complete and utter annihilation’ of OpenAI's $30B Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi — regime posts video with satellite imagery of ChatGPT-maker's premier 1GW data center

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) issued this specific threat in a video update.

Tom's Hardware
aside from everything else, as posted by ed zitron previously i doubt that anything is really getting built there
Interesting, got a link?

there’s been a claim of 220GW of datacenters contracted but it’s only something like 5GW being built and only a fraction of that is actually finished or powered on. this mostly goes for american ai dcs, which are 3/4 of them all. not sure if it holds for emirates, but it would completely not surprise me if it’s the case there also wheresyoured.at/the-ai-industry-is-lying-to-you/#…

Except it is a problem, man! As I covered in this week’s free newsletter [link above], I estimate that only around 3GW of actual IT load (so around 3.9GW of power) came online last year, and as Sightline reported, only 5GW of data center construction is actually in progress globally at this time, despite somewhere between 190GW and 240GW supposedly being in progress. In reality, data centers take forever to build (and obtaining the power even longer than that), but nobody needs to harsh their flow by looking into what’s actually happening.

wheresyoured.at/premium-how-much-of-the-ai-bubble… (paywalled) linked claims for 190GW www.sightlineclimate.com/…/data-center-outlook linked claim for 240GW paulkedrosky.com/chart-of-the-day-data-center-bui…

The AI Industry Is Lying To You

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Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Thanks for the sources I’ll come back after I do some reading!