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.)

  • TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    1 day ago

    That’s a question I ask myself sometimes. It usually ends with “I focused too much on trying to make easy cash”.

    I studied computer science because I was a huge computer nerd growing up. I always loved programming and learning everything I could about how computers worked. Learning new programming languages felt like uncovering a new universe of knowledge – knowledge I could use to create things. I spent endless hours studying computers and learning to do amazing things with them. It was fun. It still is.

    So when I see people using LLMs to create things instead of doing it themselves, I can’t relate. Why do that when you can get the pleasure from doing it yourself? I guess if making money is the primary motivating factor, then it makes sense. But for me it is totally self-defeating.

    • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      23 hours ago

      So when I see people using LLMs to create things instead of doing it themselves, I can’t relate. Why do that when you can get the pleasure from doing it yourself? I guess if making money is the primary motivating factor, then it makes sense. But for me it is totally self-defeating.

      I have a theory (similar to that “it’s been vibe coding all along” post) that it’s a combination of wishful thinking, lack of knowledge of real science, and a lack of any liberal arts skills, that altogether produces this farce.

      I think it’s a good explanation for “the code has been battle tested because it’s so old and widely used, if it had bugs/security issues, we would have discovered them by now”, as well as the widespread “we invented a tech solution that is just a worse engineering solution”. Looking at you, chain of self-driving cars.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        19 hours ago

        Remember FizzBuzz? That was originally a simple filter exercise some person recruiting programmers came up with to weed out everyone with multi-year CS degrees but zero actual programming experience.