Want to wade into the snowy 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 soo 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.
(2026 is off to a great start, isn’t it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Hey I think I discovered a way to fix America! What if we rewrite the US Constitution in Rust?
maybe memory safety would help people remember what letting fascists run things tends to do to your country?
Too late, I already put it on the blockchain.
P0 blocker: USAian memory management suffers from multiple holes and transactional consistency issues
Prior attempts haven’t worked, closing LOLBUG
I’d personally just overthrow the US government and make it a British colony once more /j
You should probably read “Monarchy Considered Harmful” (1776)
Edit: sorry I’ll behave now
Edit: sorry I’ll behave now
promises promises… ;p
;D
brexit would look wild in that timeline
Breconstruction
Nearly laughed out loud in a waiting room
OT: He’s gone. Last thing he saw was my face and then there was no more pain. His veins had all collapsed (vet had to inject the phenobarb into the liver), so I was right to bring him in when I did.
Sorry for you and your cat. You did the right thing, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
I’m so sorry to hear that.
also the universe has granted me a small mercy and for once the alcohol/semaglutide thing I mentioned a thread or so ago seems to be totally impotent against the might of scottish chemical engineering. thank you jesus
deleted by creator
Sorry for you and your cat.
💔
I’m so sorry. it’s never easy when this happens, but for what it’s worth it sounds like you gave him the best life possible. it takes a great deal of strength to be with a pet until the very end, and I hope you’re able to take the time you need to grieve and recover your emotional strength.
I adopted him from the shelter. He’d spent months if not close to a year there and no one wanted him. If I hadn’t adopted him, he would have been put down the next day. That was close to eight years ago. He was antisocial to other people but loved me.
Despite his discomfort, he still came and curled up on my chest in bed for a while last night. I appreciated that.
thanks to you he had 8 more years of life and a much happier existence than any he’d known before he met you. I think that’s remarkable.
my condolences; we’ve gone through similar with our previous cats, all rescuees, and even when you know it’s the right decision, the pain is still there.
Fuck, sorry :( internet hugs available if desired
OT: My truck got rear ended today, and then my cat had breathing difficulties when I got home…he’s under oxygen at the university clinic right now and its probably cancer instead of pneumonia. Just feeling totally destroyed rn.
Clinic called back. Its metastasized through his lungs and he’s got months tops. Probably going to be less bc vet said he’s suffering.
Man, that’s rough. I know it’s not much but I’m sending you positive energy from where I am.
That is shit, also sending good vibes. It never is just one thing isnt it. Bad luck always seems to come in multiples.
🫂
That’s awful. I’m sorry.
i am so sorry
🫂
i’m so sorry. (tentative hug of support, if acceptable.)
My condolences, that truly sucks :(
Thinking of yall
That absolutely blows, friend. Hang in there and we’ll see you around.
Fuck bro that sucks
that sucks hard, I’m sorry. mine recently too, went from “looking a bit off” to “have to put 'em down” in less than a month. still hits me like a truck
hope it goes as well as possible for y’all
Any tips on managing the guy-urge to assume good faith? I know what to expect of “contrarian thinkers” but there is always that fish-brain saying “Well, you don’t know a lot about the topic. And who knows, the vibes you feel could be wrong and you could even broaden your worldview” (spoilers: it doesn’t broaden). So much time and energy wasted by trying to dig nuggets of gold out of piles of dung.
part of what helps is coming here and seeing the spectrum of chud output to inoculate yourself a little.
What REALLY helps is broadening your own knowledge and worldview, in the sense that when you realise that everything is political, you start asking yourself the meta questions. Like, what’s the agenda here, what’s not being said, etc. I mean, understanding author intention is already part of reading comprehension, it’s going a little further beyond the face-value meaning. As the memes say, you are not immune to propaganda.
I would add to this that, just to keep things interesting, I also hear the “everything is political” and “do your own research” lines from the absolute looniest cranks and conspiracists. It can be a way to lock yourself into your current positions and dismiss people who disagree, even when those positions are objectively insane.
Having a broad base of knowledge and understanding a range of different perspectives is important, but the best way to do that includes keeping an open mind and engaging with things that are absolutely not, in the final accounting, worth the time and energy to do so (referring once again to the cranks and conspiracists). The best way I can think to deal with this is to seek out media and discussion spaces that don’t have either a general public or someone like you specifically as the intended audience. And a lot of what gets sneered here does seem to fit into that category, since it’s a lot of technocapital cultists writing things for each other rather than giving interviews to the NYT. Like, there is no amount of empathy that will make Curtis Yarvin seem decent when he’s writing for other fascists, but you won’t necessarily see that unless you’re looking a bit deeper than the public profiles.
My following response is a little rambly and unfocused, sorry!
I also hear the “everything is political” and “do your own research” lines from the absolute looniest cranks and conspiracists.
Yes, I acknowledge that you will hear this from them. What they mean can differ and usually is pretty extreme, e.g. “democrats are making the frogs gay with fluoride”, “lizard people illuminati”, or even “there’s a war on Christmas” type shit. And when they say “do your own research”, they don’t mean “seek out a variety of sources and verifiable data”, they mean “read the stuff that agrees with what I’m saying”.
When I say that everything is political, I mean that at minimum, language is political, and because you need language to talk about anything, everything becomes political. How things are named skews perception; the most relevant example to us is AI. We know that there is no “intelligence” in an LLM, but does the public? etc. I’ll admit that many might find this trivial, but I would counter that most of these strawmen are the same ones who are scared of pronouns and say they don’t know what they are allowed to say in the workplace anymore.
And generally agree with your second paragraph :) I don’t think anyone here needs this reminder, but I’ll note that an open mind means that you don’t just reject everything new that comes to you; you at least look at it for a bit, see if it passes whatever metaphorical sniff tests you have, and then choose to toss it or engage further. I’m not saying everyone has a nefarious agenda they are trying to push; there are definitely spaces where people are attempting purely informational reporting.
And to bring it back to the original question. If you read something and it’s not exactly within your purview, and you’re not sure if it’s being said in good faith, you should try to see what else the person has said, especially about things you know about.
E: redaction of fluff
aw, well, i’m not precious about the term. All I meant was that if you look at someone’s post history and they’re a chud, that should inform how you read whatever they write.
Yeah, sorry, this is just a pet peeve of mine. People, including many who should know better, have adopted a term specifically designed to shut down media literacy and foment a “do your own research” culture, and it maddens me.
All good friendo
I’ve joked sometimes that I was lucky in that my childhood reading included more pulp mysteries than pulp science fiction, so my instinct is to think everyone is hiding their agendas by telling half-truths.
“Well, Detective. It looks like this is a house of lies… and wankers.”
I think actually listening to people remains important. But you’re only truly listening to someone when you try to understand when they lie or the ways they can be wrong.
Assuming 100% good faith is not actually the most empathetic way to engage with a person.
Since someone linked to Bergstrom above, I wanted to mention his Marshack Colloquium talk from last year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxn40xiK9g0 - basically the idea is we are all “information foragers” but the “information environment” has shifted radically around us all in a really short amount of time. In “information abundance” the right strategy is to visit a lot more different sites instead of just a few, if the model / analogy works for people about as good as it does for ant eaters. If vibes are off, on to the next tab, it will broaden your worldview too.
It’s pattern recognition.
Listen enough to chuds and you learn to recognise chuds based on vibes. You can approach people with 100% good faith, but the moment you sniff a chud – trust your guts.
I’m doing this shitey online optional module for my college course because I left it too late to pick a proper one, and Christ in heaven people are using a lot of AI. This is meant to be a class about sustainability
My wife has been saying the same thing about her accounting courses. It’s absolutely nuts.
in the fall of 2024, i was getting teams messages from my students that were clearly llm-generated
The purpose of this block of code is to efficiently BLAH FUCKING BLAH WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT
i have to assume it’s only gotten worse
Genuinely don’t understand how dependent these people are on AI. “I’ll generate an image of a skeleton at a bus stop” one of them said (it was relevant). I’ll go to Google images, I said. It’s faster! And you don’t end up with a mangled version of the Dublin Bus logo!
I’ve started seeing people make paperwork with explicit carve-outs for prompt use (merely referred to as “AI” with no explicit definition, so …. gonna be fun when the lawsuits start)
update on the grok csam story: the heat on this was not dying down, so X has taken steps to address the issue.
update update: by restricting the csam generator to paying users
update update update: actually they didn’t do that https://www.theverge.com/news/859309/grok-undressing-limit-access-gaslighting
@sc_griffith @BlueMonday1984 So just making it official that rich white men can commit all the sex crimes they want but those with less privilege might be stopped or face consequences.
If that won’t sell it to governments around the world, I don’t know what will. Elon’s on to a winner with that strategy.
I know zilch about linux but I think there was some discussion in here about suckless. Well look at what I came across on an honest to god nazi’s website*:
*yes, I have reported this site to their web hosting provider.
Lately, I’ve become more and more concerned that “systemd free” is shifting from a thoughtful objection to an outright crank signifier
It really is insane how many of these fashies hate systemd. Whenever someone says they dislike systemd(or rust being in everything, which is another thing these people seem to object heavily to) I immediately check their history for any weirdo shit and nine out of ten times they turn out to be fash. Saying this as someone who doesn’t particularly like sytemd either.
I’ve always thought of linux as a vaguely commie thing but it seems like a) there were more libertarians in there than I thought, b) using linux appeals to some very right wing freaks who don’t like the idea of not being in total control, and c) there’s a right wing computer culture promoted by online influencers to nerdy young men, not dissimilar to right wing gamer culture.
The above site is hosted on neocities. I’ve been involved in the small web/personal web/indie web for a while (almost 6 years now, Jesus) and I knew there’s a more right wing side to it but I hadn’t come across it much (except for digdeeper linked to above, whose online privacy guides I read and took seriously before he started posting about Covid and I realized he was a conspiracy theorist). Then recently I found a neonazi’s site on neocities through a Christian webring* and spent a while looking around in morbid fascination.
*You can’t join if you support abortion or gay people, but apparently they don’t check to make sure you’re not a Nazi. I’m tempted to set up a competing webring for Christians with normal views…
I could see Linux attracting the “I am a superior intellect” types and then those people drifting rightward over the last ten years. If they didn’t start out far right.
definitely. plus the woman-hating background radiation of a lot of online communities and media for teenage boys.
I found out about the rightwing / misogynist strain of FOSS mostly via the furore over RMS defending Minsky from Epstein allegations.
nice find there:
A progressive campaign, “The Great Slate”, was successful in raising funds for candidates in part by asking for contributions from tech workers in return for not posting similar quotes by Raymond. Matasano Security employee and Great Slate fundraiser Thomas Ptacek said, “I’ve been torturing Twitter with lurid Eric S. Raymond quotes for years. Every time I do, 20 people beg me to stop.” It is estimated that, as of March 2018, over $30,000 has been raised in this way.[32]
Oh I saw that name before - https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/contra-ptaceks-terrible-article-on-ai/
i was aware of “left-wing but rancid about women” as a common political perspective in techy fields, but I wasn’t aware of many out and out right-wingers in the FOSS world specifically (beyond the odd TempleOS type kook).
burzum and luke smith, that tracks as well
Also being weird about systemd (not saying that’s an automatic nazi thing, I am myself a bit weird about it as well, but y’know…)
Hating systemd and/or Wayland isn’t a sure sign that someone is a fascist, but it’s one data point in that direction for sure.
@TrashGoblin @techtakes Au contraire: I am old and grumpy and I want UNIX (or rather, Linux) the way it was in 2003, none of this bullshit new-fangled nonsense that I don’t understand.
Hint: a LOT of computer users—as opposed to lascivious glassy-eyed computer touchers—are like this. We just want to get shit done, not force-learn a new workflow or debugging tool every five seconds (or years).
How to neither downplay the death of Renee Good nor the uncountable number of people, mostly people of color, who were murdered by near equally fascist police forces without the public outrage her murder finally rightly elicited? I am tired and yet I feel bad to even complain about it because look at this shit.
There are two things here in my opinion:
- American cops are trained murderers, but they are trained, in particular to avoid causing massive PR disasters with their murders*. A paramilitary goon with a rifle in a government organisation so opaque we still don’t even know his identity is materially worse than a cop. It also looks much worse, the police have some completely undue public trust, ICE just looks like military forces.
- We immediatelly had video with the full event. When cops kill people of colour there’s usually no evidence since again, they know how to pull murder off without causing PR disasters. Basically the only reason George Floyd’s murder wasn’t successfully brushed aside is that we had video of it, and they tried to bury that shit hard. In this case I don’t even think the victim being white or a citizen matters, the event itself is so fucking horrifying it’d elicit outrage anyway. I am 100% sure that if there wasn’t video, just witness reports, it’d be out of the media cycle already.
* I don’t want this to seem like a moral distinction, if anything the decorum granted to police forces is arguably a stepping stone that brought the USA here. Recall Mamdami’s recent words: “For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty”. HOWEVER, to me personally this is a rather chilling escalation. It shows that the PR part doesn’t actually matter anymore. America is so far into the fascist pipeline that paramilitary forces can just execute citizens in broad daylight on the street. They don’t need to hide it, they don’t need to play coy about it, they can just post-facto label the victim as an Enemy of the State and move on. I’m sorry but to me this is like one step away from just rounding people up against a wall for fun. Human life is not only practically worthless to state actors, it’s proudly and openly worthless as a matter of policy.
i’m a bit conflicted here: on the one hand it’s true that the american fascists are now escalating, buyoed by the feeling of being virtually untouchable, but on the other hand, this is not a distinct change of behaviour, it’s that they basically widened their target group to include white people too.
the blm protests were fueled not by new knowledge or radically changed police behaviour after all, but by the wider availability of documentation (mainly phone videos).
(and on the gripping hand, extending brutal repressions to a majority group is a sign of escalation. but that only means that a large population of u.s. residents, i.e. the non-white ones, live and have always lived in a totalitarian state; the totalitarianism just wasn’t evenly distributed until trump.)
this is not a distinct change of behaviour
This is what I disagree with. The theatrics of justifying police brutality don’t change the outcomes of police brutality – people still die – but the fact that the theatrics can now be dispensed of in favour of paramilitaries directly using violence to terrorise the people is a distinct change of behaviour towards fascism.
And I think it’s important to recognise that because, as many scholars of fascism have warned time and time again, this is not a binary where a switch get flipped and haha, since today you’re in a fascist state. It’s a progressive erosion of the social contract. ICE as deployed by the Trump regime right now is a basically textbook run: create a paramilitary force, recruit from existing criminal militias to select for loyalists and violent personalities, normalise them as keepers of order, push out or integrate any other enforcement structures so that the paramilitary becomes dominant. Basically the only difference is that Trump didn’t have to create ICE, it was already there just waiting to be pushed through the pipeline.
Does this event fundamentally change how you and I perceive America? No, if you were paying attention you knew the rot inside, and you’ve been shouting that Trump is a fascist since the very beginning. It is, however, a sign that the situation is much worse than it was months ago, that fascism is progressing, and if this is the point at which someone not paying attention wisens up and goes “shit, we are moving towards a totalitarian nightmare” then good, welcome, grab a pitchfork.
It is, however, a sign that the situation is much worse than it was months ago, that fascism is progressing, and if this is the point at which someone not paying attention wisens up and goes “shit, we are moving towards a totalitarian nightmare” then good, welcome, grab a pitchfork.
oh, i’m not a pitchfork purist. anyone is welcome to grab one at any time.
Yeah, just learned a black person was killed in the USA, and the only reason this was getting some attention was because Renee Good was also killed.
With the benefit of a sea of distance between me and the USA this is just really fucked up. Two different Americas.
*pig turned into a frog
Was it Wednesday, my dudes?
I can’t comment on this better than bergstrom did, so link
Keeper should sell their customer lists to other dating services so those services can keep those weirdos out.
Should have noted Hunter Ash admitted to being a pedophile.
got my Urbit newsletter for this quarter (or whatever the fuck the cadence is) and what stood out to me this time was nockchain.org. I was going to sit and do a deep dive to come up with sneers for this but I just don’t have the executive function right now. @self thoughts?
dear fuck just when I think I’m out urbit pulls me back in
analysis coming soon, I’m reviewing some technical sources provided by a world-class cryptocurrency expert (yes it’s @[email protected]) and howdy fuck does this ever resemble the cardano grift but with Haskell replaced with a much worse ML with a much less coherent type system
but with Haskell replaced with a much worse ML with a much less coherent type system
Urbit moment
Are there any resources(read: sneers) on cardano*? I have a family member who is into that shit.
* Cardano specifically I mean, I am already aware of the extensive literature on crypto in general
It’s a very elaborate parkour trick in Haskell that through piles and piles or rigorous category theory manages to achieve Nothing in a type-safe manner.
That sounds awesome and right up my alley!
…oh, it’s some financialized gambling racket bullshit thing never the fuck mind
I mean, technically it can be anything you want as long as you never deploy it, which I think is the tagline of Haskell
here’s mine on their foray into smart contracts https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/09/06/news-the-eos-ico-was-a-fake-pump-cardano-smart-contracts-fail-cycling-vs-nexthash-microstrategy-de-indexed-el-salvador-live-tomorrow/
cardano is a shitcoin for traders to trade like a shitcoin and it pretends being written in Haskell by a mathematician who failed to get his degree, lied about going into a Ph.D program and claimed to have worked for DARPA but did not makes it very interesting and not just a shitcoin. this turns out not to be the case.
tl;dr UTXO was always fucking stupid if you wanted a system that did more than be a basic shitcoin
if a family member is into cardano nothing will get through. charles is a mathematical genius you see.
From the name alone I assumed it was going to try and turn the whole universe into an endless field of 3/3 elk tokens.
SFGATE columnist Drew Magary has decreed “The time has come to declare war on AI”, and put out a pretty solid sneer in the process. Bonus points for openly sneering billionaire propaganda service Ground News, too.
Scott Alexander: “I wish the neoreactionaries dropped the monarchy shit”
Monkey paw curls (content warnings: antisemitism, Yarvin).
You must sign in to view this post.
My lack of a Bluesky account spares me again. Thankfully, I have Skyview.social to ensure my eyes are scarred anyway (seriously, do we have to fight another world war over if Nazis are bad or not, it shouldn’t take the blood of tens of millions to make that clear)
Also found a nice summary of our current moment in the replies:
(alt: “I am old enough to remember when we all agreed Nazis were bad”)
cue this lobste.rs shitshow where someone states “88 is a known Nazi dogwhistle”, and multiple people come out of the woodwork saying even if it is, it’s not so bad actually, get over it
https://lobste.rs/s/rvgvgj/best_line_length_is_88
Submitted blog post could without loss of generality be titled “Black’s default of 88 for line length is not necessarily the best”, yet author decided to go with the title they have now… edit author seems to be a good egg generally https://mastodon.social/@glyph
Something useful to know, which I’m not saying over there because it’d be pearls before swine, is that Glyph Lefkowitz and many other folks core to the Twisted ecosystem are extremely Jewish and well-aware of Nazi symbols. Knowing Glyph personally, I’d guess that he wanted to hang a lampshade on this particular symbol; he loves to parody overly-serious folks and he spends most of his blogposts gently provoking the Python community into caring about software and people. This is the same guy who started a PyCon keynote with, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Python, not to praise it.”
Glyph has weighed in here
Apparently someone edited in the numeral in the title when submitting to lobste.rs. Another entry on the watchlist.
Sorry forgot to check, despite a friend of mine doing the same to me with tumblr and I’m also annoyed then.
Not sure i had it in me to alt text all that yarvin however
“They might as well be Latvians” is a straight out of Arrested Development.
Found someone showing some well-founded concern over the state of programming, and decided to share it before heading off to bed:
alt text:
Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I’ve had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don’t work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I’m absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis’ because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry’s knowledge is really significant, and it’s honestly very scary.
Haha, wow the reactions to that, 3 levels deep and suddenly people are talking about screws. (Im being positive here btw, funny to see what people have made/learned and how happy they seem with it).
