Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th June 2025 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy 4th July in advanceā€¦I guess.)

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    12Ā·
    17 minutes ago

    New thread from Baldur Bjarnason publicly sneering at his fellow programmers:

    Anybody who has been around programmers for more than five minutes should not be surprised that many of them are enthusiastically adopting a tool that is harmful, destroying industries, sabotaging education, and hindering the energy transition because they feel itā€™s giving them a moderate advantage

    That they respond to those pointing some of this out with mockery (ā€œnutsā€, ā€œshove your concern up your assā€) and that their peers see this mockery as reasonable discourse is also not surprising. Tech is entirely built on the backs of workers with no regard for externalities or second order effects

    Tech is also extremely bad at software. We habitually make fragile, insecure, complex, and hard to maintain code that backs poor UIs. The best case scenario is that LLMs accelerate already broken software dev processes in an industry that is built around monopolies and billionaire extremists

    But, sure, feeling discouraged by the state of the industry is ā€œlike quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table sawā€

    Whatever

    EDIT: Found out where Baldur got the ā€œtable sawā€ quote from - added it accordingly.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      5Ā·
      23 hours ago

      This ties back into the recurring question of drawing boundaries around ā€œAIā€ as a concept. Too many people just blithely accept that itā€™s just a specific set of machine learning techniques applied to sufficiently large sets of data. This in spite of the fact that weā€™re several AI ā€œcyclesā€ deep where every 30 years or so (whenever it stops being ā€œretroā€) some new algorithm or mechanism is definitely going to usher in Terminator II: Judgement Day.

      This narrow frame focused on LLMs still allows for some discussion of the problems weā€™re seeing (energy use, training data sourcing, etc) but it cuts off a lot of the wider conversations about the social, political, and economic causes and impacts of outsourcing the business of being human to a computer.