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 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 so 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.)
@V0ldek @cstross I couldnāt even read the whole list after seeing āCNC Programmersā on it. That may not be the most absurd, but the idea of āhereās a robot with a sharp blade spinning at high RPM that weāre using to make a physical object with extreme precision, so we fired the human who knows how it works and gave their job to the hallucination boxā makes Willyās Chocolate Experience seem like a warmup. I just hope thereās video. Lots of video. Ideally from behind safety glass.
Meanwhile, Iām lookin at the list and amazed by the number of ājobsā I have apparently had (which never paid me in the first place). Certainly, any time I was invited to deejay on the radio, it was never paid. Moreover, even in the 1990s I knew a fellow radio DJ who was more or less replaced by a CD jukebox with song choices dictated from on high and he was basically the voice in between tunes and ads to make it seem as if it wasnāt evil overlords. Maybe, he got paid? I have my doubts.
CC: @V0ldek@awful.systems @cstross@wandering.shop
@geeksam
*Leaded* glass, I hope! Itās only a matter of time before someone in the Hegseth DoD decides this will be excellent for machining plutonium pits.
@V0ldek @cstross
@geeksam
Can confirm. Inbetween me being a self-taught coder in my youth to getting a degree in Software Engineering I also took a detour and got a degree as a Mechanical Engineer.
That involved CAD/CAM and running the output on CNC machines. Which involved hitting the metal piece with the head too far down and metal being flung around at ludicrous speed.
@V0ldek @cstross
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross
Safety glass Hell: Iād insist on remote cameras and several feet of reinforced concrete.
@geeksam
@V0ldek @cstross Donāt worry, any video not shot from behind safety glass will suffer from rapid existence failure
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross
Production CNC machines are beyond safety glass and sheet metal already.
Sometimes even in work cell cages!
Programming CNC has been done by opening up the print or CAD model and telling the CAM package to generate the tool paths for many years already.
Sometimes programmers edit the generated code a little bit to adapt it, but thereās little zero risk in trying machine models on this. The worst that can happen is a crash that scraps a $50k spindle.
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross The original poster of this story canāt read. Somebody in the Bluesky thread found the original paper. The research looked at people in these professions using LLM assistance in their workflow.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935
āCanāt readā is the kind of insult we donāt need in this context.
@blakestacey Redundant?
Pointlessly insulting, cruel, assumes total incompetence at life rather than a momentary mistake in managing the information overflow, juvenile in the bad sense of the word.