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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy Pride :3)
This week the WikiMedia Foundation tried to gather support for adding LLM summaries to the top of every Wikipedia article. The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by the community, but the WMF hasnāt gotten the message, saying that the project has been āpausedā. It sounds like they plan to push it through regardless.
Todayās āChrist, what an assholeā award goes to Ravi V. Bellamkonda, executive vice president and provost at thāOSU.
Time for my infrequent missive about the intersection of sneerspace and comedy podcasts. The current episode of one of my favourite comedy podcasts, Doughboys, jumpscared me today when one of the hosts, Mitch, came back from a toilet break and independently came up with the fundamentals of Rokoās Basilisk (the torture in cyberspace part). Anyway here it is, or if you want, you can start with the context of the toilet break. Whatās important to note is that these guys do not try to present themselves as intelligent, and usually present themselves as stupid.
Off topic: really enjoying Mike Duncanās Revolutions podcast at the moment. Listened to the French Revolution and am now in the midst of the July Revolution.
image transcription
Zach Weinersmith skeeted: Movie idea:
Effective Altruism Star Wars, in which itās OK to be a Sith as long as the majority of your earnings go through vetted charities.
āŖPlodā¬ skeeted: And when the Death Star explodes itās due to fraudulant accounting
āŖtiedotonā¬ skeeted: Building endless swaths of droids that do nothing but continuously experience bliss to offset any suffering caused by the Empire.
Not sure if that would be done by the Empire or the Rebellion
A student put on some Internet radio station for background music at the end-of-semester barbecue, so I heard a Grammarly ad. In related news, I now long for the sweet embrace of a peat bog.
https://bsky.app/profile/tomdellaringa.bsky.social/post/3lr4djpa4zc2t
https://bsky.app/profile/dennisbhooper.bsky.social/post/3lr4lyaxmkc2b
eugenics, saas edition
sigh
Possibly OT, but fits in with the āfinance ruins everythingā motif weāve got going here:
My wife and I have been playing Stardew Valley again, and now the algorithms occasionally find us things like this
Twitter rumour mill is churning about that guy arrested in connection with the IVF bombing - possible zizian or so it goes.
another good piece from 404, teachers being real unhappy with the tsunami of bullshit autoplag has loaded them with
hackernews enthusiast tpacek is filled with incredulity when some friends wonāt join his new religious movement. This of course has triggered a 1200 reply long thread:
I feel like this article might deserve its own post, because I think itās the first time Iāve ever seen an attempted counter-sneer. itās written like someoneās idea of what a sneer is (tpacek swears sometimes and says he doesnāt give a shit! so many paragraphs into giving a shit!) but all the content is awful bootlicking and points that donāt stand up to even mild scrutiny? and now Iām wondering if tpacekās been reading us and thatās why heās upset, or if this is what an LLM shits out if you ask it to write critihype in the tone of a sneer
I bet youāre right on the money.
Edit: someone deep in the thread dared him to post a video of one of his coding speedruns if itās so good, which tickled me
fly.io is closed source, of course heās not gonna show you the engineering excellence. trust me bro, you fool, you poltroon,
This almost reads like tptacek doesnāt understand why lucidityās piece a year ago was so effective and tried to write it from the opposite angle by punching down instead of punching up.
Iād have thought that a guy who writes on the internet like itās a competition sport could recognize the obvious problems of this, but maybe Iām just a vibe coding Youtuber.
Thatās a whole lotta words to say āIām a bad programmer who aspires to be a bad manager of a team of programmers.ā
heās not a bad programmer, which is part of the problem here.
I guess thatās fair. I was focusing in on his attitude towards craft, which seems incompatible with actually taking pride in doing a good job as opposed to simply skating by. But while I still take issue with his attitude there and want to give him a clockwork orange-style refresher about tech debt I think a bigger problem is that heās taking predictable problems of the median programmer trying to use these systems and saying, effectively, āget gudā. This is especially galling given that the tech here is going to replace or supplant the kind of junior developer roles that allowed fresh graduates to actually get that experience that allows you to shepherd the next generation of junior devs (or I guess LLM assistants now).
Not high on the list of thought crimes, but a particular ick for me:
Also: 100% of all the Bash code you should author ever again
Why the bash hate?
Fr, eschewing the command line is the cs guy version of not being able to change a flat tire
speaking as someone who uses bash all the time, itās a fully equipped programming language and you absolutely should not use it as one because itās made of footbullets. Use Python. For extra sysadmin flavour, make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash.
make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash
Oh god, please no. I have PTSD from 50-line Python scripts by anti-bash fundamentalists full of
os.system,subprocess.runand/orsubprocess.callthat could have just been 15-line bourne shell scripts.If youāre gluing programs together, shell scripts are often the best way to do it. If youāre not gluing programs together, do you even Unix? If you want to be fundie about it, obey
shellcheck.It sucks that bash is such a footgun. Perl was supposed to fix a lot of that, but now everyone hates it, because it also lets people to do clever and subtly incorrect things, which have then become quasi-idiomatic. Mom, can we have a sensible human-computer interface?
AI audio transcription is great.
https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114627512725655987
Sean Murray @NoMansSky
Ignore the auto-generated captions. We did not have a secret room hiding deaf kids.
Nintendo never once sent us deaf kids. We were hiding dev-kits. DEV-KITS.
new yorker profile on moldbug (archive)
(still reading)
I also appreciate how many of the ātransformativeā actions are just ādid a really good thingā¦ with AI!ā
HR reduced time-to-hire by 30%! How? They told Jerry to stop hand-copying each candidateās resume (I sleep). Also we tried out an LLM forā¦ something (Real shit).
Like, these are not examples of how AI adoption can benefit your organization and why being on board is important. Theyāre split between āthings you can do to mitigate the flaws in AIā and āthings that would be good if your organization could doā and an implication that the two are related.
This FT post about the VC ghouls getting blindsided by daddies Elon and Trump fighting is pretty entertaining
https://www.ft.com/content/df15f13d-310f-47a5-89ed-330a6a379068
David Friedberg, a co-host of the All-In podcast that often features Musk and that has become a sounding board for the Trump-aligned tech world, suggested there was a broader cost to America from the spat between the US president and the Tesla boss. āChina just won,ā he posted.
Behind the scenes, prominent Silicon Valley figures were desperately trying to prevent Musk from appearing on an emergency episode of the podcast, according to two people familiar with the matter, out of concern that the billionaire would make the dispute even worse and poison the relationship with techās most powerful ally in Washington, vice-president JD Vance.
L. O. L.
