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.)


I bump into a lot of peers/colleagues who are always āya but what is intelligenceā or simply cannot say no to AI. For a while Iāve tried to use the example that if these āAI codingā things are tools, why would I use a tool thatās never perfect? For example I wouldnāt reach for a 10mm wrench that wasnāt 10mm and always rounds off my bolt heads. Of course they have āit could still be usefulā responses.
Iām now realizing most programmers havenāt done a manual labor task thatās important. Or lab science outside of maybe high school biology. And the complete lack of ability to put oneself in the shoes of another makes my rebuttals fall flat. To them everything is a nail and anything could be a hammer if it gets them paid to say so. Moving fast and breaking things works everywhere always.
For something not just venting I tasked a coworker with some runtime memory relocation and Gemini had this to say about ASLR:
Age, Sex, Location Randomization
On a semi-related sidenote, part of me feels that the AI bubble has turned programming into a bit of a cultural punchline.
On one front, the stench of Eau de Tech Asshole that AI creates has definitely rubbed off on the field, and all the programmers who worked at OpenAI et al. have likely painted it as complicit in the bubbleās harms.
On another front, the tech industryās relentless hype around AI, combined with its myriad failures (both comical and nightmarish) have cast significant doubt on the judgment of tech as a whole (which has rubbed off on programming as well) - for issues of artistic judgment specifically, the slop-namiās given people an easy way to dismiss their statements out of hand.
you have so many of these! itās amazing! are you going to publish soon? it seems like it might need a whole guide of its own!
moderately barbed jesting aside, a serious question: have you spoken with any programmers/artists/researchers/⦠? so many of your comments have āpart of me feelsā parts hitting pop-concern-direction things and, like, I get it, but. have you spoken with any of them? what were those conversations like? what did you take away from them? what stuck with you that you want to share?