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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      Stephanie Kirchgaessner is the deputy head of investigations for Guardian US, based in Washington DC

      Hannah Devlin is the Guardianā€™s science correspondent, having previously been science editor of the Times. She has a PhD in biomedical imaging from the University of Oxford.

      so is it that both these fuckers are ideologically bankrupt, or are they willing complicit ghouls?

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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    Quick update - Brian Merchantā€™s list of ā€œluddite horrorā€ films ended up getting picked up by Fast Company:

    To repeat a previous point of mine, it seems pretty safe to assume ā€œluddite horrorā€ is gonna become a bit of a trend. To make a specific (if unrelated) prediction, I imagine weā€™re gonna see AI systems and/or their supporters become pretty popular villains in the future - the AI bubbleā€™s produces plenty of resentment towards AI specifically and tech more generally, and the publicā€™s gonna find plenty of catharsis in watching them go down.

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      Personally, Iā€™d love to see the Luddites be rehabilitated as a result of the Great Bullshit Collapse. They were just regular folks fighting for dignity in work, and itā€™s tragic how successful the bastards have been at erasing them from history.

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      I hated seeing that guy just wanting to live his life dragged into weird net drama and pushed under the bus by his company. And wow look at how collected and reasonable he was compared to anyone else in the story.

      All Mr. Paul had to do was shut the hell up for once and the worldā€™d still be talking about his moldy cheese bread instead of about his moldy cheese bread and how he bullies and doxes retail workers.

      All Fred Meyer had to do is be like ā€œwhoops looks like the product recall procedure at that store was vague recollections, weā€™ll get a policy in placeā€.

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        The sole silver lining of this situation is that Loganā€™s deplorable behaviour probably scared at least a few shops away from stocking Lunchly - not just because of the risk you end up selling some mold-ridden garbage (most likely to kids), but because you risk Logan starting a harassment campaign against you or your store.

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      3 days ago

      This made the rounds last week IIRC. Though, looking at it again I realize I didnā€™t notice how over-stressed the hallucinated button is. Itā€™s funny in a disgusting way.

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      Iā€™d like to imagine that Adobe/other AI photo editing people are frantically scrambling to fondle their prompts a little harder to avoid things like this. Infinite whack-a-mole.

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        I wonder if Adobe has considered cooling their new data centers with liquid nitrogen?

        Cold is key to successful turd polishing.

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      New for him, Iā€™d wager, but I think ESR is treading a well-worn path: i.e. a huge weirdo gets himself in trouble but then finds favor with terrible people, and ultimately suffers from audience capture.

      Edit: I was wrong, itā€™s not new (hat tip to @Soyweiser)

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          @dgerard @o7___o7 He was weird and creepy before that (see his attempts to make the Jargon File say that everyone in hackerdom was just like him), but yeah, hoo boy. Him and the LGF guy were prominent cheerleaders for Dick Cheneyā€™s wilder fever dreams back in the day. The LGF guy got better, ESR didnā€™t.

          • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
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            @m @dgerard @o7___o7 @techtakes Back in 2007 I was a guest of honour at Penguicon. ESR was there and we got talking. As of 2007 he was all-in on all the insane ā€œEurabiaā€ conspiracy theories and islamophobia. If youā€™d taken his word salad and substituted ā€œjewsā€ for ā€œmuslimsā€ Julius Streicher would have hired him as a columnist in a split second. (Thatā€™s when I added ESR to my list of ā€œpeople I will not share a platform withā€.)

            He was somewhat less cray-cray in 2003.

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              In the very late 90s - so only a year or two after the Good Friday Agreement - he gave a talk in Dublin. The only part I remember was when he went off on his tangent about access to guns being an essential component of a free society and then stood there wondering why he was suddenly being heckled.

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        Racism is insane; it fixates on superficial characteristics like skin color rather than important ones like IQ and time preference.

        Iā€™m sorry, ā€œtime preferenceā€? Is this piece of shit referring to Colored Peopleā€™s Time as a scientific concept or am I missing something?

        This is such a cursed tweet ughhhhh

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          referring to Colored Peopleā€™s Time

          to the what now? What cursed horror beyond my comprehension am I going to learn today?

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            I recommend looking it up. I believe itā€™s a term that has been reclaimed by Black people. Obama referenced it as CPT (in response to some other event) in his 2016 WHC dinner speech.

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          I think that is a reference to the ā€˜eat 1 cookie now or wait, and get 2 cookiesā€™ childrens thing. Racists refer to it often. (This also means the black eat the 1 cookie kids canā€™t build empires bla bla bla).

          (when I search for the term on youtube, it instantly gave me a video linking it to cultural degeneracy for example. Really annoying you canā€™t block channels properly. Also the mises institute has a video on it)

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              (This particular study, if there even is a real study, is infuriating because what itā€™s really measuring is how much you trust a figure of authority to keep their promise. I wonder why black kids would have issues with this!)

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      Quite the proof he no longer writes his own tweets. Fun fact seems like they created various freerossdayone cryptocurrency tokens, who are all doing badly (according to my quick google) he has lost the mandate of heaven.

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      Truly, we are blessed to have a candidate willing to represent the freedom to sell anything on a darknet market and hire a hitman to take out your previous partners or detractors or whatever.

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      ā€”What kind of gambling do you usually have here?
      ā€”Oh, we got both kinds. We got day trading and betting.

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      I feel like Ed is underselling the degree to which this is just how businesses work now. The emphasis on growth mindset is particularly gross because of how it sells the CEOs book, but itā€™s not unique in trying to find a feel-good vibes-based way to evaluate performance rather than relying on strict metrics that give management less power over their direct reports.

      Of course heā€™s also written at length about the overall problem that this feeds into (organizations run by people with no idea how to make the business do what it does but who can make the number go up for shareholders) but the most unique part of this is the AI integration, which is legitimately horrifying and I feel like the debunk of growth mindset takes some of the sting away.

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    Was browsing ebay, looking for some piece of older used consumer electronics. Found a listing where the description text was written like crappy ad copy. Cheap over-the-top praising the thing. But zero words about the condition of the used item, i.e. the actually important part was completely missing. And then at the end of the description it saidā€¦ this description text was generated by AI.

    AI slop is like mold, it really gets everywhere and ruins everything.

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    eigenrobot:

    almost every smart person I talk to in tech is in favor of mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages in order to deal with the fertility crisis. people are absolutely fed up with the lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism.

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      almost every person in tech (ā€¦) to deal with the fertility crisis

      Why would we be listening to ā€œtechā€ to deal with ā€œthe fertility crisisā€? Why is ā€œtechā€ concerned with ā€œfertilityā€?

      Stay in your fucking lane, will ya. How about mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages to address the growing crisis of open-source development? The crisis of newest C++ standards not being implemented in the popular compilers quickly enough? The crisis of Node.JS existing?

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      Every person I talk to ā€” well, every smart person I talk to ā€” no, wait, every smart person in tech ā€” okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybodyā€¦

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      Man, I didnā€™t even know how to react to this nonsense. The obvious sneer is to point out that if the alternative is to interact with people like ER here we really shouldnā€™t be surprised to see a declining birth rate. But I think the more important takeaway that this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious.

      Like, thereā€™s plenty of surveys and research into why people are having fewer kids than they used to, and itā€™s not because toddlers are little hellions more so than in the past. And ā€œgenerational insolvencyā€ is a pretty big fucking part of the explanation actually, as is empowering families to choose whether or not to have children rather than leaving it entirely up to the vicissitudes of biological processes and horniness. The latter part cuts both ways, in that people who want families are (theoretically; see above re: financial factors) able to take advantage of fertility treatments or IVF or whatever and have kids where they historically would have been unable to do so.

      But no, rather than actually engage with any of that or otherwise treat the world like other people have agency they have identified what they believe to be the problem and have decided that the brute application of state power is the solution, so long as that power is being applied to other people. For all that we acknowledge the horrors of fascism, I think the stupidity of these people is also worth acknowledging, if for no other reason than to reinforce why this shit shouldnā€™t be taken seriously.

      • maol@awful.systems
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        Saying theyā€™re dumb and incurious offers almost too much respect. They believe in racial eugenics based on IQ - look at the kind of shit Elon Musk retweets. Scaremongering about fertility is just the way they get to the racial eugenics, while pretending itā€™s a necessity not a choice.

        Edit: and now I see froztbyte said almost the same thing first. Oops

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        Man, I didnā€™t even know how to react to this nonsense

        same way as other nazis - boop 'em on the nose

        Iā€™d be willing to wager a guess that this fragile little flower has never had a ā€œphysical altercationā€ in their life and would walk away with fucking ~ptsd from a single ā€œhey that shit is not okayā€ boop

        this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious

        if youā€™re talking about eigenrowboat, I donā€™t think I agree. theyā€™re quite curious, but they ā€œjustā€ go in with a particular viewpoint and a desire to ā€œprove their pointā€ in the most prevaricating way possible. itā€™s no accident that the entire sphere of ā€œhow do we make scientific racism and nazism more socially palatableā€ gravitates around these fuckers. if youā€™re instead talking about them making these comments in a ā€œsee the poor are dumb and useless and thus deserve what they getā€, well, see aforementioned shitty opinions

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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          Nah, itā€™s the Nazis who are dumbasses, not that that makes them less dangerous. They certainly think theyā€™re smart and the want to present themselves as curious, but in reality they reduce knowledge to another political tool. There is no true spirit of inquiry or asking questions, only trying to marshal arguments in favor of their pre-established answer. Intellectual discourse becomes both a source of power to give their preexisting ideology a veneer of legitimacy and also an arena of conflict where they can prove that theyā€™re the biggest bestest boys.

          These people possess neither a desire nor a willingness to engage with the world as it actually is. Instead they want the power to impose their vision of what the world should look like (a strict hierarchy with them at the ostensible top) onto reality, and when it inevitably fails because thatā€™s not how any of this works they end up uselessly doubling down and retreating into conspiracies. Next time theyā€™ll have more power and itā€™ll work, even though itā€™s the basic underlying shape of Creation that theyā€™re ultimately at war with.

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      Cue the scene where Buck Turgidson finds out that Dr. Strangelove proposes humanity survive deep inside mineshafts, with multiple women for every man.

      Anyway I like how the options presented are ā€œsocialismā€ - vaguely defined so as to be something anyone can project their fears on - on the one hand, and state-ordered sexual slavery on the other. True freedom, amirite?

      I had to doublecheck what ā€œpolygynousā€ means, and I ā€œloveā€ this Google-generated Wiki excerpt. Itā€™s technichally correct in some parts of the world.

      • maol@awful.systems
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        ā€œsocialism or barbarism you say? well maybe barbarism has its upsidesā€

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      Oh but you see itā€™s not regressive because itā€™s polygynous not polygamous. Those women totally want to be forced to have the ubermenschā€™s children

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      why do we want people who canā€™t deliver viable technology raising more kids?

      why should we assume that they would be any better at the kid-raising than the technology?

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      aww, is the poor baby missing that maybe thereā€™s people who donā€™t want to talk to them because of how much of a piece of shit they are? how sad

      lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism

      this dipshit continues to make the most astounding not-even-wrong posts. guess theyā€™re angling for a job as the next Noahpinion or Yglesias

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      I donā€™t think itā€™s exclusively due to rust but itā€™s a very cool change

      can only imagine how much wailing and consternation it must be causing in some areas

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        the C reactionaries[*] I know definitely arenā€™t ok, but thatā€™s not a new condition. the cognitive load of never, ever writing bugs takes its toll, you know?

        [*] and I feel like I have to specify here: your average C dev probably isnā€™t a C reactionary, but the type of fuckhead who uses C to gatekeep systems development definitely is

        • bitofhope@awful.systems
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          You (group A) think C is simple, that it can be thought of as portable assembly, that it teaches you how computers actually work, and that itā€™s easy to avoid memory safety errors with good programming discipline, and is therefore fine.

          You (group B) think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that itā€™s very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, therefore C shouldnā€™t be use for new software development.

          I think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that itā€™s very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, which are some of the features that make C so fun and exciting. Like rawdogging a one night stand!

          We are not the same.

          • gerikson@awful.systems
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            Yeah thatā€™s the property of C that ensures it will never go away. If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course theyā€™ll start using it. Thereā€™s all sorts of rationalizations going on - itā€™s portable, itā€™s performant, itā€™s what the computer is really like - to justify basically driving a fast car without a seatbelt for the sheer thrill of it.

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              If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course theyā€™ll start using it

              I always suspected that I wasnā€™t a REAL MANā„¢, but I didnā€™t know that me learning programming through C++ and being like ā€œwell this shit sucks, what the fuck, there has to be a better wayā€ was one of the first symptoms.

            • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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              Past a certain point itā€™s a little bit like learning to type on a typewriter. On one hand it forces you to think about certain types of mistakes and forces you to avoid making errors. On the other hand it gives you a whole bunch of trained habits that are either useless or actively harmful once youā€™re working with better tools.

            • bitofhope@awful.systems
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              Now to be fair, C really is quite close to what the machine is really like, if by C you mean B and by machine you mean PDP-7.

              Itā€™s also highly portable in the sense that all twenty or thirty well-formed, standard-compliant and nontrivial C programs ever written can be compiled to a mind-bogglingly huge variety of hardware and OS targets and even work correctly on some of them.

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          [*] and I feel like I have to specify here

          and like all C things, the specificities of pointer mechanics might mean any one of a number of things and theyā€™re all correct

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            The original statement was clearly meant to dereference a pointer to an object of type ā€œreactionary,ā€ but I expected it to return maybe a Yarvin or at least a Catturd

            • self@awful.systems
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              the thrill of UB: you try to dereference a C reactionary but get a lambda calculus neoreactionary instead

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        I donā€™t think itā€™s exclusively due to rust

        to be fair, I donā€™t know any other languages concerned with safety other than rust, so it was my only option for joke construction.

        • self@awful.systems
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          the US DoD used to push for Ada adoption, with mixed success outside of where its use was mandated, due to Adaā€™sā€¦ well, look at it

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    Got linked to this UFO sightings timeline in Popbitch today. Thought it looked quite interesting and quite fun. Then I realized the information about individual UFO sightings was being supplied by bloody Co-pilot, and therefore was probably even less accurate than the average UFOlogy treatise.

    PS: Does anyone know anything about using Arc-GIS to make maps? I have an assignment due tomorrow and Iā€™m bricking it.

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        I donā€™t know what these acronyms mean šŸ«”

        Iā€™m just going to have to send an email in and be like hi Iā€™m out of my depth. Can I still pass this class if I fail this assignment

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    https://www.infoworld.com/article/3595687/googles-flutter-framework-has-been-forked.html/

    Iā€™m currently using Flutter. Itā€™s good! And useful! Much better than AI. It being mostly developed by Google has been a bit of a worry since Google is known to shoot itself in the foot by killing off its own products.

    So while itā€™s no big deal to have an open source codebase forked, just wanted to highlight this part of the article:

    Carroll also claimed that Googleā€™s focus on AI caused the Flutter team to deprioritize desktop platforms, and he stressed the difficulty of working with the current Flutter team

    Described as ā€œFlutter+ā€ by Carroll, Flock ā€œwill remain constantly up to date with Flutter, he said. Flock will add important bug fixes, and popular community features, which the Flutter team either canā€™t, or wonā€™t implement.ā€

    I hope this goes well!

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      that android project of some months was a venture into flutter (and havenā€™t touched it before)

      I had similar impressions on some things, and mixed on other

      dartā€™s a moderately good language with some nice primitive, tooling overall is pretty mature, broad strokes works well for variant targeting and shit

      libraries though holy shit the current situation (then) was a mess. one minor flutter sdk upgrade and a whole bunch of things just exploded (serialisation things in nosql-type libraries I tried to use for the ostensible desired magic factor (just went back to sqlite stuff again after)). this canā€™t have been due to sdk drift alone, and felt like an iceberg problem

      and then the documentation: fucking awful, for starting. excellent as technical documentation once you grok shit but before that all the examples and things are terrible. lots of extremely important details hidden in single mentions in offhand sentences in places that if you donā€™t happen to be looking at that exact page good luck finding it. this, too, felt like inadequate care and attention by el goog

      I imagine if one is working with this every day you know the lay of the land and where to avoid stepping into holes, but wow was I surprised at how much it was possible to rapidly rakestep, given what the language pitches as

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        Yes to be clear when I say flutter is ā€œgoodā€ I deliberately avoided a definition of ā€œgoodā€. I find itā€¦ usable.

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          yep yep - didnā€™t mean to argue with your post inasmuch as to fill in details to the fork, but I guess I couldā€™ve been clearer about that