Want to wade into the sandy 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 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.)
Dont know the exact details, but there now is a fork from the popular doom engine gzDoom called, UZDoom, because the initial dev came out retirement out of nowhere and started to vibe code, causing all the others to quit.
More here https://zdoom.org/news#p80996
Via a prev sneer, here’s a Bloomberg post about call center workers being accused of being LLMs:
I used to work in a call-center adjacent industry and the amount of crap some employers used to make sure their workers sounded as much as robots as possible was astounding.
The FSF considers large language models, failing to recognise the purpose of plagiarism machines in the process.
Comments are also pretty sneerable - main thread’s a bunch of promptfondlers trying to gas up spicy autocomplete, but I did find some guy claiming programmers steal and plagiarise much like LLMs do.
“Blue Monday” was released in 1983.
noticed someone like “comments are lazy! never use them! write better code!”
A:
- I’m paid for doing the job, I’m not paid to be not lazy.
- comments are fucking useful
I once had someone tell me to my face that comments were a code smell.
Depends on how they are used. They are extremely useful when they add context that is otherwise not present in the code, but way too often I see people simply restating what the code does in the comment. That’s not very useful and can become confusing if the code later gets updated without updating the associated comment.
this seems counterintuitive but… comments are the best, name of the function but longer are the worst. Plain text summary of a huge chunk of code that I really should have taken the time to break up instead of writing a novella about it are somewhere in the middle.
I feel a lot of bad comment practices are downstream of javascript relying on jsdoc to act like a real language.
I’ve found that people who talk about “code smell” generally should not be listened to as it’s entirely vibes-based-on-the-last-medium-post-i-read-this-morning. I had a dipshit manager tell me that he didn’t like my use of decorators (in python mind you) because it was a “code smell” and recommended I read “clean” code, and I immediately threw every other opinion he had in the trash.
Managers gonna manage, but having a term for bad code that works that is more palatable than ‘amateur hour’ isn’t inherently bad imo.
Worst i’ve heard is some company forbidding LINQ in C#, which in python terms is forcing you to always use for-loops in place of filter/map/reduce and comprehensions and other stuff like pandas.groupby
that’s truly assenine as LINQ is supposed to be one of the few reasons to want to use C#
So anybody else noticing regular outages here today or was it just me?
uggggh yep sorry, I meant to deploy some changes that would mitigate this a couple nights ago but had a bunch of things crop up. I’ll do my best to work it in tonight!
some specifics for the changes to expect:
- iocaine finally
- some better nginx settings to kill likely scraper connections faster
Nah it happens, at least it isnt on my end.
current issue is likely the most recent bout scraper waves (based on it matching data myself and others have seen elsewhere); suggestions have been made, so hopefully soon™ changes
(don’t mean to speak on @self’s behalf ito plans, mind. that’s for them to do :D)
Yeah, there’s been a bunch of outages recently.
nah same for me
Guys, it’s a problem that GenPop thinks “AI” is useless, because that means they will deny the inevitable coming existence of the Evil Robot God and make it harder to stop it
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/W2dTrfTsGtFiwG5hM/origins-and-dangers-of-future-ai-capability-denial
The whole thing has to be read to be believed. But there are some fun nuggets:
- saying that an evil robot god is coming is Rational. Doubting that is a conspiracy theory
- slagging flat-earthers on LW is truly the pot calling the kettle black
- “I can imagine a world where AI becomes extremely good at flipping burgers or driving cars well before it learns how to write software or detect cancer. In that case, I think it’s a lot harder to deny its achievements. But in our world, a lot of AI’s greatest achievements take context to understand, like protein folding or playing board games.” - yeah sure buddy all the pro board game players are quaking in their boots
I can imagine a world where AI becomes extremely good at flipping burgers or driving cars well before it learns how to write software or […] protein folding or playing board games
That’s because despite Moravec’s paradox being noted down in the 80s (y’know, the last ai winter) there’s still a certain kind of asshole who thinks that flipping burgers is an easy task performed by stupid people but playing go is somehow the height of human intellect, despite 40+ years of evidence to the contrary.
Well, it is true that computer programs have far surpassed humans in board games. They are very well suited for it. It just has nothing to do with the hypothesized abilities of future “AI” as rationalists conceive them.
i’m only at the beginning, but this already stuck out to me:
It would be extremely bad if many people come to believe this: arguments about existential risk mostly rely on the assumption that AI is capable, so they fall flat for people who don’t agree with that. I think we should be emphasizing the core capability of AI more and talking about x-risks less.
“Guys we need to pump this
bubbleRational Stock Appreciation Trend more, the plebs are starting to think it’s all bullshit!!”
In lighter news, this anti-LLM rhyme made me chuckle:
I will not talk with a chatbot
I do not want it while I shopI do not want it on Windows X-box
I do not want it in FirefoxI do not want it in my house
I do not want it on my mouse
I do not want it here or there
I do not want it anywhere.I do not want AI and Spam
I do not want them Sam-Alt-ManI suppose it is an iambic tetrameter, but the third and fourth lines do not fit.
You don’t recognize it?
No, I don’t.
one of today’s lucky 10,000
very short children’s book, with intentionally atypical rhythm, by Dr Seuss
written in call-response style in dialogue between two characters (unnamed and Sam-I-Am)
https://www.readstoriesforkids.com/Green-Eggs-and-Ham-text.html - text without images, but best enjoyed with the images
the full book on The Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/greeneggsham0000unse/
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dr seuss - green eggs & ham
That’s how you know a human wrote it
For something lighter, here’s an AI bro getting wowed by the shittiest “video game” I’ve ever seen (trust me, the screenshot doesn’t do it justice):
In lieu of sneering this shit, I’d like to argue that arts education should become mandatory for all students post-bubble, regardless of their profession. STEM, humanities, tech, doesn’t matter - give them four years of art so they don’t turn out like this guy.
Amazon unveils AI-Powered AR glasses for delivery drivers.
The response I’ve seen from actual drivers has been somewhere between “eh? I guess?” and “fuck you, pay me”.
Does it have GPS so it can flash “WRONG HOUSE, FUCKWIT”
The glasses also support prescription lenses along with transitional lenses that automatically adjust to light.
Actual prescription lenses or generic supermarket lenses?
holy discontiguous interscene blending, watman
there are so many parts that people in the skeet[0] replies have already pointed at but the thing that someone just went “tune the smoother way up! just make sure it looks good!” and thought they were done with the assignment… amazing. really does a fantastic job of highlighting the same old problem of these things only managing short-duration outputs coherently!
10/10 would cringe again
0 - what’s a blacksky skeet called? do they have their own term? I don’t know how standalone blacksky operates and I refuse to learn any more about skeeterprotocol than I already know
Level design, color palette, continuity, assets and physics by a bowl of salvia
Hey now, at least the bowl of salvia has a theme, predictable effects, immersive sensations, and the ability to make people feel emotions.
I read that as saliva and I thought you were both absolutely correct.
Besides the ridiculousness of those issues, I’m taken aback that this “game” is just a series of crappy cutscenes and then you can pick 1 of 3 choices here and there? Worst “choose your own adventure” ever…
Salvia, LSD, peyote, and three hallucinogens unknown to science.
Also: They made a “game” that is 100% glitches.
Oh, so Call of Duty
I literally can’t even.
As someone who spent countless hours of my youth in hammer, laying out areas with props and lighting and doing play testing about areal movement with test npcs, it’s hilarious that these people see this slop and say, yes this is the future.
also : “I’m working on a theory that “AI is art” boosters have some kind of limited ability to perceive details. Like they literally only perceive large shapes, colors, and noises. Anything remotely more detailed than ‘big thing go boom’ they actually lack the ability to see it.” 🤔🤔🤔
also: after discussing with my brother I came to the realization that this rube was likely very into the “play2earn” bullshit during the nft era
The video game equivalent of
JFC some CSAM collector stormed a Wikipedia conference with a gun https://slate.com/technology/2025/10/wikipedia-editors-conference-gunman-culture-war.html
Wow. What a statement:
“At the end of the day, Omarchy is a developer vanity project with marketing polish. A beautifully themed, slightly dangerous, over-engineered dotfile bomb.”
https://eepy.moe/notes/ae7rhgxvpw8d09kw
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Lol at the sealion in that thread
I’m running Hyprland on my Framework 13 (not doing omarchy cause I’m a NixOS fan,
of course
Naturally, the worst people on that thread are praising it - for example, here’s the “DHH destroying Basecamp is based” guy whining about people not accepting outright fascists:
100% certain this dork has the wikipedia page for logical fallacies open 24/7
The fact that a mod named “catastrophe” did this is morbidly funny to me.
Anyways, whatever doubts I (or anyone had) about Framework are basically gone. I hope Nirav and the Framework team enjoy their Nazi bar.
just once i want to buy a computery thing and not have it end up being fasctech
i was so excited about this laptop 😭
MNT Reform’s doing a similar thing to Framework, but its nowhere near what they offered. The team is completely free of venture capital, and its got a non-binary head representing it, so it should be safe from a fashtech turn.
this is cool, but honestly, after the red hat/fedora announcement that they’ll allow slop contributions, i may just try and use my phone for everything
android 16 QPR1 gets a proper desktop mode and it should get ported to grapheneos soon enough
this is just copium, of course. thank you for sharing the link to the mnt reform. <3
@BlueMonday1984 @Seminar2250 LGBTQ is no protection from fascism. Pim Fortuyn, the predecessor to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, was gay.
@fazalmajid @BlueMonday1984 @Seminar2250 peter thiel, too, and probably many others indeed, heck, ernst rhöm, leader of the SA, was homosexual, too, bad people come in all shapes, colors, culture, and orientation.
Did not know Farage was gay
@gerikson actually you got me to doubt and verify and i’m not sure anymore, i might have mixed up with someone else, will edit out.
there was also yolo minneapolis, or whatever was his name i don’t think he was relevant since covid
Uh I think his name is actually jimbob snuffleupagus
today in I fucking called it fedora aka mostly red hat has decided to allow slop code in a way that violates even their utterly mid stated principles around the tech
if you’re downstream from any fedora packages (and I don’t know the scope of this policy so it might be safe to consider anything owned by red hat in general to be tainted — yes I realize most of us are downstream from a bunch of red hat shit) it might be time to evaluate an alternative if available
among others, so many systemd and libvirt things :|
fortunately a long-ish tail on a lot of that, but fucking still
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Trump freed Binance fraudster, SBF pardon futures mooning rn
Does anyone else get flashbacks to that episode of the Powerpuff girls where the villain takes over the city and makes a law that “crime is now legal”? Because that keeps popping into my head for some reason.
