this post was submitted on 10 Feb 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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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th February 2025 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

(Taking over for Gerard this time. Special thanks to him for starting this.)

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (10 children)

Well this is the final straw. Guess I'll keep my current iPhone while it still works (unless they ruin iOS too much before that)... but then, what? I don't want a Google thing either :(

So I guess it'll have to be some Android fork. GrapheneOS or so? But even that involves giving money to Google for a Pixel phone... there's just no good option.

Or am I overlooking something? I don't need many features or apps on a phone -- I don't really like today's smartphones anyway. Mostly I just need the basic features to work reliably. (Context: my last attempt at a non-Android Linux phone was the original Jolla phone, over 10 years ago, and that has left me a little cautious with the idea of a Linux phone, due to the many bugs with basics like "working mobile data" or "working GPS in a navigation app"...)

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/business/money-report/google-calendar-no-longer-includes-start-of-black-history-month-pride-month/6143829/

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (20 children)

Original writing prompt: “Write a romantic comedy. Difficulty: both lovers are emotionally mature and have excellent communication skills.”

What our good friend Eliezer makes of it

Oscar Wilde's job is in no danger

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

SHE is gowned in a black dress sewn with tiny emeralds, rubies, sapphires too small to detract from the darkness of her gown, instead giving it the illusion of a rainbow sheen.

Following "gowned" so closely with "dress" is awkward, because the latter is redundant. Consider, e.g., "She is gowned in black, the fabric sewn with..." Using both "gowned" and "gown" in the same sentence compounds the problem. Consider introducing further information about the fabric: e.g., "the darkness of the velvet" or "the darkness of the silk".

Whoof. Made it through the first sentence.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nice try, but you're going to have to work a lot harder if you want to trick me into clicking on that. I lived through browsing peak Slashdot at -1, you know

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

ZITRON DROPPED

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (7 children)

I randomly remembered crying wolf and decided to make that everybodies problem

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

That was literally the inflection point on my path to sneerclub. I had started to break from less wrong before, but I hadn't reached the tipping point of saying it was all bs. And for ssc and Scott in particular I had managed to overlook the real message buried in thousands of words of equivocating and bad analogies and bad research in his earlier posts. But "you are still crying wolf" made me finally question what Scott's real intent was.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (8 children)

Even if it wasn't the seed of doubt about his real intentions, it also reveals how out of touch he is in a way (esp now 8 years later), and just how silly some LW stuff is. Like how they all want to be super-predictors, and try to keep notes on how good their prediction etc are, but how little all these other predictions matter when you make a mistake like this. "All this stuff about how [trump] is “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up."(E: Ahum) Also note that he [Scott/Trump/The LGBT person who wrote that text on the flag] didn't notice that the lgbt flag was upside down.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

MoreWronger is concerned that the shitty fanfic the community excretes is limited to LW and Xhitter and wonders if The Atlantic is a better venue

Look I have nothing against fanfic myself but if there's one powerful corrective it lacks, it is commercial content editorial feedback.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

The way the responses talk about "polarization", ugh fucking ghouls.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

hay guys, sorry for spam - I just want to shill my videos/audios i'm trying to put out twice a week (I've already done 9!). They are 3-5 mins long and all around one particular theme of tech crit

video versions: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwvAAoSdsXWxHwFbULgbpVGiLmJZv4X1g audio versions:

apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/faster-and-worse/id1792154689
spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/62Q7vclARxKjMAOtwXfOIu
they are also in all the other major podcast platforms. Let me know if you're interested but can't find it.

Let me know if you like it/hate it

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

In lighter news, has anyone else noticed that it's necessary for any kind of Cybersecurity course to open with what is effectively a Tumblr-style DNI for unethical hackers? Like, I'm not criticizing exactly and I certainly don't have any better ideas to prevent people using these skills for evil, but the disclaimer up top fits into a certain kind of pattern that I, for one, find hilarious.

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