this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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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 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.)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

on how trying to make programming languages easier in some ways is doomed to fail

This is prob right, but the 'in some ways' part does a lot of work here. Think the issue is that some complexity can be removed without problem, and some absolutely cannot. And the problem of figuring out which is which is hard. (Which if you squint, seems to be similar to the chemistry stuff you describe here). With software it (as far as I can tell) is also quickly that bigger projects need bigger teams, and that adds a lot of communication problems, and as a non-stacking process you can't just add more programmers to make stuff go faster (compared to for example building a building, which can be sped up a lot more with just more workers) as these communication problems remain. From what I heard is that this, and the problem of maintaining software on a large scale is what Java was trying to fix. Which is why all programmers love Java. It is a language for enterprise scale projects. (On that note, which is also why a lot of reason people hate Java for the wrong reasons, a lot of the hated stuff makes sense if you recall it is made for enterprise scale projects/teams etc. It is an attempt to make those projects easier (lets leave it in the middle if that attempt worked or not (Do think it is amusing that Minecraft of all things was coded in Java by a single person (initially))).

Interesting our community seems to attract a few outspoken chemistry people. Not something I know much about, know somebody who does something with crystal chemistry machines, and when he technically talks about it I'm happy I understand about 30% :).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

i can't find that essay now, but i think it was written in latex, and also complained on top of cobol about java, ada (in military context) and a kind of non-programming where block diagram made by non-programmers was turned into executable

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

it was written in latex

Of course it was. (I enjoy LaTeX myself but still, it is a type of person)