Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    151·
    5 days ago

    Potential hot take: AI is gonna kill open source

    Between sucking up a lot of funding that would otherwise go to FOSS projects, DDOSing FOSS infrastructure through mass scraping, and undermining FOSS licenses through mass code theft, the bubble has done plenty of damage to the FOSS movement - damage I’m not sure it can recover from.

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
        121·
        5 days ago

        The deluge of fake bug reports is definitely something I should have noted as well, since that directly damages FOSS’ capacity to find and fix bugs.

        Baldur Bjanason has predicted that FOSS is at risk of being hit by “a vicious cycle leading to collapse”, and security is a major part of his hypothesised cycle:

        1. Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.

        2. Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.

        3. OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable.

        4. That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          13·
          5 days ago

          yeah but have you considered how much it’s worth that gramma can vibecode a todo app in seconds now???

    • ________@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      5 days ago

      I remember popping into IRC or a mailing list to ask subsystem questions to learn from the sources themselves how something works (or should work). Depending who what and where definitely had differing experiences but overall I felt like there was typically a helpful person on the other side. Nowadays I fear the slop will make people a lot less willing to help when they are overwhelmed with AI generated garbage patches or mails losing some of the rose-tinted charm of open source.