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 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.

(2026 is off to a great start, isn’t it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
    21·
    12 days ago

    OT: He’s gone. Last thing he saw was my face and then there was no more pain. His veins had all collapsed (vet had to inject the phenobarb into the liver), so I was right to bring him in when I did.

    • aio@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      12 days ago

      Sorry for you and your cat. You did the right thing, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

    • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      12 days ago

      also the universe has granted me a small mercy and for once the alcohol/semaglutide thing I mentioned a thread or so ago seems to be totally impotent against the might of scottish chemical engineering. thank you jesus

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      12 days ago

      I’m so sorry. it’s never easy when this happens, but for what it’s worth it sounds like you gave him the best life possible. it takes a great deal of strength to be with a pet until the very end, and I hope you’re able to take the time you need to grieve and recover your emotional strength.

      • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        12 days ago

        I adopted him from the shelter. He’d spent months if not close to a year there and no one wanted him. If I hadn’t adopted him, he would have been put down the next day. That was close to eight years ago. He was antisocial to other people but loved me.

        Despite his discomfort, he still came and curled up on my chest in bed for a while last night. I appreciated that.

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          11·
          12 days ago

          thanks to you he had 8 more years of life and a much happier existence than any he’d known before he met you. I think that’s remarkable.

        • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          12 days ago

          my condolences; we’ve gone through similar with our previous cats, all rescuees, and even when you know it’s the right decision, the pain is still there.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    21·
    11 days ago

    Hey I think I discovered a way to fix America! What if we rewrite the US Constitution in Rust?

  • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    14 days ago

    OT: My truck got rear ended today, and then my cat had breathing difficulties when I got home…he’s under oxygen at the university clinic right now and its probably cancer instead of pneumonia. Just feeling totally destroyed rn.

  • jonasty@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    15 days ago

    Any tips on managing the guy-urge to assume good faith? I know what to expect of “contrarian thinkers” but there is always that fish-brain saying “Well, you don’t know a lot about the topic. And who knows, the vibes you feel could be wrong and you could even broaden your worldview” (spoilers: it doesn’t broaden). So much time and energy wasted by trying to dig nuggets of gold out of piles of dung.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      17·
      14 days ago

      part of what helps is coming here and seeing the spectrum of chud output to inoculate yourself a little.

      What REALLY helps is broadening your own knowledge and worldview, in the sense that when you realise that everything is political, you start asking yourself the meta questions. Like, what’s the agenda here, what’s not being said, etc. I mean, understanding author intention is already part of reading comprehension, it’s going a little further beyond the face-value meaning. As the memes say, you are not immune to propaganda.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        13 days ago

        I would add to this that, just to keep things interesting, I also hear the “everything is political” and “do your own research” lines from the absolute looniest cranks and conspiracists. It can be a way to lock yourself into your current positions and dismiss people who disagree, even when those positions are objectively insane.

        Having a broad base of knowledge and understanding a range of different perspectives is important, but the best way to do that includes keeping an open mind and engaging with things that are absolutely not, in the final accounting, worth the time and energy to do so (referring once again to the cranks and conspiracists). The best way I can think to deal with this is to seek out media and discussion spaces that don’t have either a general public or someone like you specifically as the intended audience. And a lot of what gets sneered here does seem to fit into that category, since it’s a lot of technocapital cultists writing things for each other rather than giving interviews to the NYT. Like, there is no amount of empathy that will make Curtis Yarvin seem decent when he’s writing for other fascists, but you won’t necessarily see that unless you’re looking a bit deeper than the public profiles.

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          13 days ago

          My following response is a little rambly and unfocused, sorry!

          I also hear the “everything is political” and “do your own research” lines from the absolute looniest cranks and conspiracists.

          Yes, I acknowledge that you will hear this from them. What they mean can differ and usually is pretty extreme, e.g. “democrats are making the frogs gay with fluoride”, “lizard people illuminati”, or even “there’s a war on Christmas” type shit. And when they say “do your own research”, they don’t mean “seek out a variety of sources and verifiable data”, they mean “read the stuff that agrees with what I’m saying”.

          When I say that everything is political, I mean that at minimum, language is political, and because you need language to talk about anything, everything becomes political. How things are named skews perception; the most relevant example to us is AI. We know that there is no “intelligence” in an LLM, but does the public? etc. I’ll admit that many might find this trivial, but I would counter that most of these strawmen are the same ones who are scared of pronouns and say they don’t know what they are allowed to say in the workplace anymore.

          And generally agree with your second paragraph :) I don’t think anyone here needs this reminder, but I’ll note that an open mind means that you don’t just reject everything new that comes to you; you at least look at it for a bit, see if it passes whatever metaphorical sniff tests you have, and then choose to toss it or engage further. I’m not saying everyone has a nefarious agenda they are trying to push; there are definitely spaces where people are attempting purely informational reporting.

          And to bring it back to the original question. If you read something and it’s not exactly within your purview, and you’re not sure if it’s being said in good faith, you should try to see what else the person has said, especially about things you know about.

          E: redaction of fluff

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      14 days ago

      I’ve joked sometimes that I was lucky in that my childhood reading included more pulp mysteries than pulp science fiction, so my instinct is to think everyone is hiding their agendas by telling half-truths.

      “Well, Detective. It looks like this is a house of lies… and wankers.”

      —Alasdair Beckett-King

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      13 days ago

      I think actually listening to people remains important. But you’re only truly listening to someone when you try to understand when they lie or the ways they can be wrong.

      Assuming 100% good faith is not actually the most empathetic way to engage with a person.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      11 days ago

      It’s pattern recognition.

      Listen enough to chuds and you learn to recognise chuds based on vibes. You can approach people with 100% good faith, but the moment you sniff a chud – trust your guts.

    • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      12 days ago

      Since someone linked to Bergstrom above, I wanted to mention his Marshack Colloquium talk from last year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxn40xiK9g0 - basically the idea is we are all “information foragers” but the “information environment” has shifted radically around us all in a really short amount of time. In “information abundance” the right strategy is to visit a lot more different sites instead of just a few, if the model / analogy works for people about as good as it does for ant eaters. If vibes are off, on to the next tab, it will broaden your worldview too.

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    13 days ago

    I’m doing this shitey online optional module for my college course because I left it too late to pick a proper one, and Christ in heaven people are using a lot of AI. This is meant to be a class about sustainability

      • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        13 days ago

        in the fall of 2024, i was getting teams messages from my students that were clearly llm-generated

        The purpose of this block of code is to efficiently BLAH FUCKING BLAH WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT

        i have to assume it’s only gotten worse

      • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        13 days ago

        Genuinely don’t understand how dependent these people are on AI. “I’ll generate an image of a skeleton at a bus stop” one of them said (it was relevant). I’ll go to Google images, I said. It’s faster! And you don’t end up with a mangled version of the Dublin Bus logo!

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      12 days ago

      I’ve started seeing people make paperwork with explicit carve-outs for prompt use (merely referred to as “AI” with no explicit definition, so …. gonna be fun when the lawsuits start)

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    13 days ago

    I know zilch about linux but I think there was some discussion in here about suckless. Well look at what I came across on an honest to god nazi’s website*:

    *yes, I have reported this site to their web hosting provider.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      13 days ago

      Lately, I’ve become more and more concerned that “systemd free” is shifting from a thoughtful objection to an outright crank signifier

      • jackr@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        6·
        11 days ago

        It really is insane how many of these fashies hate systemd. Whenever someone says they dislike systemd(or rust being in everything, which is another thing these people seem to object heavily to) I immediately check their history for any weirdo shit and nine out of ten times they turn out to be fash. Saying this as someone who doesn’t particularly like sytemd either.

      • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        12 days ago

        I’ve always thought of linux as a vaguely commie thing but it seems like a) there were more libertarians in there than I thought, b) using linux appeals to some very right wing freaks who don’t like the idea of not being in total control, and c) there’s a right wing computer culture promoted by online influencers to nerdy young men, not dissimilar to right wing gamer culture.

        The above site is hosted on neocities. I’ve been involved in the small web/personal web/indie web for a while (almost 6 years now, Jesus) and I knew there’s a more right wing side to it but I hadn’t come across it much (except for digdeeper linked to above, whose online privacy guides I read and took seriously before he started posting about Covid and I realized he was a conspiracy theorist). Then recently I found a neonazi’s site on neocities through a Christian webring* and spent a while looking around in morbid fascination.

        *You can’t join if you support abortion or gay people, but apparently they don’t check to make sure you’re not a Nazi. I’m tempted to set up a competing webring for Christians with normal views…

      • jackr@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        7·
        13 days ago

        Also being weird about systemd (not saying that’s an automatic nazi thing, I am myself a bit weird about it as well, but y’know…)

    • TrashGoblin@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      8 days ago

      Hating systemd and/or Wayland isn’t a sure sign that someone is a fascist, but it’s one data point in that direction for sure.

      • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
        2·
        8 days ago

        @TrashGoblin @techtakes Au contraire: I am old and grumpy and I want UNIX (or rather, Linux) the way it was in 2003, none of this bullshit new-fangled nonsense that I don’t understand.

        Hint: a LOT of computer users—as opposed to lascivious glassy-eyed computer touchers—are like this. We just want to get shit done, not force-learn a new workflow or debugging tool every five seconds (or years).

  • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    11 days ago

    How to neither downplay the death of Renee Good nor the uncountable number of people, mostly people of color, who were murdered by near equally fascist police forces without the public outrage her murder finally rightly elicited? I am tired and yet I feel bad to even complain about it because look at this shit.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      11 days ago

      There are two things here in my opinion:

      1. American cops are trained murderers, but they are trained, in particular to avoid causing massive PR disasters with their murders*. A paramilitary goon with a rifle in a government organisation so opaque we still don’t even know his identity is materially worse than a cop. It also looks much worse, the police have some completely undue public trust, ICE just looks like military forces.
      2. We immediatelly had video with the full event. When cops kill people of colour there’s usually no evidence since again, they know how to pull murder off without causing PR disasters. Basically the only reason George Floyd’s murder wasn’t successfully brushed aside is that we had video of it, and they tried to bury that shit hard. In this case I don’t even think the victim being white or a citizen matters, the event itself is so fucking horrifying it’d elicit outrage anyway. I am 100% sure that if there wasn’t video, just witness reports, it’d be out of the media cycle already.

      * I don’t want this to seem like a moral distinction, if anything the decorum granted to police forces is arguably a stepping stone that brought the USA here. Recall Mamdami’s recent words: “For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty”. HOWEVER, to me personally this is a rather chilling escalation. It shows that the PR part doesn’t actually matter anymore. America is so far into the fascist pipeline that paramilitary forces can just execute citizens in broad daylight on the street. They don’t need to hide it, they don’t need to play coy about it, they can just post-facto label the victim as an Enemy of the State and move on. I’m sorry but to me this is like one step away from just rounding people up against a wall for fun. Human life is not only practically worthless to state actors, it’s proudly and openly worthless as a matter of policy.

      • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        11 days ago

        i’m a bit conflicted here: on the one hand it’s true that the american fascists are now escalating, buyoed by the feeling of being virtually untouchable, but on the other hand, this is not a distinct change of behaviour, it’s that they basically widened their target group to include white people too.

        the blm protests were fueled not by new knowledge or radically changed police behaviour after all, but by the wider availability of documentation (mainly phone videos).

        (and on the gripping hand, extending brutal repressions to a majority group is a sign of escalation. but that only means that a large population of u.s. residents, i.e. the non-white ones, live and have always lived in a totalitarian state; the totalitarianism just wasn’t evenly distributed until trump.)

        • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          11·
          11 days ago

          this is not a distinct change of behaviour

          This is what I disagree with. The theatrics of justifying police brutality don’t change the outcomes of police brutality – people still die – but the fact that the theatrics can now be dispensed of in favour of paramilitaries directly using violence to terrorise the people is a distinct change of behaviour towards fascism.

          And I think it’s important to recognise that because, as many scholars of fascism have warned time and time again, this is not a binary where a switch get flipped and haha, since today you’re in a fascist state. It’s a progressive erosion of the social contract. ICE as deployed by the Trump regime right now is a basically textbook run: create a paramilitary force, recruit from existing criminal militias to select for loyalists and violent personalities, normalise them as keepers of order, push out or integrate any other enforcement structures so that the paramilitary becomes dominant. Basically the only difference is that Trump didn’t have to create ICE, it was already there just waiting to be pushed through the pipeline.

          Does this event fundamentally change how you and I perceive America? No, if you were paying attention you knew the rot inside, and you’ve been shouting that Trump is a fascist since the very beginning. It is, however, a sign that the situation is much worse than it was months ago, that fascism is progressing, and if this is the point at which someone not paying attention wisens up and goes “shit, we are moving towards a totalitarian nightmare” then good, welcome, grab a pitchfork.

          • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            11 days ago

            It is, however, a sign that the situation is much worse than it was months ago, that fascism is progressing, and if this is the point at which someone not paying attention wisens up and goes “shit, we are moving towards a totalitarian nightmare” then good, welcome, grab a pitchfork.

            oh, i’m not a pitchfork purist. anyone is welcome to grab one at any time.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      11 days ago

      Yeah, just learned a black person was killed in the USA, and the only reason this was getting some attention was because Renee Good was also killed.

      With the benefit of a sea of distance between me and the USA this is just really fucked up. Two different Americas.

  • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    12 days ago

    got my Urbit newsletter for this quarter (or whatever the fuck the cadence is) and what stood out to me this time was nockchain.org. I was going to sit and do a deep dive to come up with sneers for this but I just don’t have the executive function right now. @self thoughts?

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      12 days ago

      dear fuck just when I think I’m out urbit pulls me back in

      analysis coming soon, I’m reviewing some technical sources provided by a world-class cryptocurrency expert (yes it’s @dgerard@awful.systems) and howdy fuck does this ever resemble the cardano grift but with Haskell replaced with a much worse ML with a much less coherent type system