Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st November 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Happy Halloween, fellow sneerers!)

Welcome to November, and 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      XSLT is basically used for one thing - styline RSS feeds so they look like HTML

      (yes I know the XSLT lovers point to data sources that went all in on XML in the early 2000s then never got the budget to update, but in the first approximation that’s the use case)

      Seeing as RSS is basically as popular/well known as XML, I doubt this tantrum will move the needle in any way.

      Mostly people are mad at Google, which is fine by me

    • robjwells@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      6 hours ago

      Here’s the relevant WHATWG issue, and it’s not just Google. Leaving aside the merits of “don’t break the web” vs “it’s barely used”, I think largely we’ve ended up here because browser vendors depended on a library (libxml2) to which they gave ~zero time or money.

      Oh and, of course, in that issue the most recent comments are from a Mozilla employee saying “I asked Claude…”.