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.)

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    6·
    8 hours ago

    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.

  • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    12 hours ago

    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.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    16 hours ago

    Hey I think I discovered a way to fix America! What if we rewrite the US Constitution in Rust?

  • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    1 day ago

    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?

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      1 day ago

      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

      • jackr@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        5·
        12 hours ago

        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

      • Evinceo@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        17 hours ago

        but with Haskell replaced with a much worse ML with a much less coherent type system

        Urbit moment

  • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
    19·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      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.

      • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        1 day ago

        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.

        • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          1 day ago

          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.

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          1 day ago

          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.

    • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      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

    • aio@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      Sorry for you and your cat. You did the right thing, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    2 days ago

    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

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      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)

      • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        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!

      • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        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

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      Lately, I’ve become more and more concerned that “systemd free” is shifting from a thoughtful objection to an outright crank signifier

      • jackr@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        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.

      • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        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…

      • jackr@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        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…)

  • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    3 days ago

    new odium symposium episode, available on all platforms: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-7-whos-147209632

    this time we looked at gerald schoenewolfe, a “gender centrist” psychoanalyst. lots of discussion of freud in this one

    on a side note, we sent off an email hoping to get a podcast network to fund us to do a miniseries on rationalists. i think there’s basically no chance this sort of cold call works but 🤞🏼

    • x0rcist@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      You might consider pitching Cursed Media if that’s not who you already pitched-- I’ve been wishing for a while they had some EA/rationalist experts around who could do a series.

      • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        2 days ago

        that is who we reached out to. i think rat material would fit extremely well with what they’ve got going on and represents a significant gap in their current coverage

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          2 days ago

          The number of times I’ve been listening to QAA and thought “dang, these guys are missing a lot of relevant context” when talking particularly about the current crop of tech oligarchs is high enough that I have at times had to hit pause and step away for a while.

          • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            2 days ago

            unfortunately i don’t think there’s any way to communicate how significant the gap is without coming off as condescending or churlish. but like qaa is probably my favorite podcast and i too am tormented by this