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. Also, happy Pride :3)

    • FredFig@awful.systems
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      4 days ago

      This almost reads like tptacek doesn’t understand why lucidity’s piece a year ago was so effective and tried to write it from the opposite angle by punching down instead of punching up.

      I’d have thought that a guy who writes on the internet like it’s a competition sport could recognize the obvious problems of this, but maybe I’m just a vibe coding Youtuber.

    • self@awful.systems
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      5 days ago

      I feel like this article might deserve its own post, because I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen an attempted counter-sneer. it’s written like someone’s idea of what a sneer is (tpacek swears sometimes and says he doesn’t give a shit! so many paragraphs into giving a shit!) but all the content is awful bootlicking and points that don’t stand up to even mild scrutiny? and now I’m wondering if tpacek’s been reading us and that’s why he’s upset, or if this is what an LLM shits out if you ask it to write critihype in the tone of a sneer

      • zogwarg@awful.systems
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        4 days ago

        Special bootlicking points:

        Source: xcancel.com

        @PITLORDMOSH: weirdly dev-hostile take for a company blog

        @tqbf (The author of the blogpost): I tried to post it on my personal blog and Kurt wouldn’t let me.

        For reference Kurt is the CEO of the company that the author works for: https://archive.md/Z2xvg

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        5 days ago

        I bet you’re right on the money.

        Edit: someone deep in the thread dared him to post a video of one of his coding speedruns if it’s so good, which tickled me

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        4 days ago

        (e: wtf, phone client posted to subthread despite top reply arrow icon. bug bug buuuuug. the jank is ever present)

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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          3 days ago

          I guess that’s fair. I was focusing in on his attitude towards craft, which seems incompatible with actually taking pride in doing a good job as opposed to simply skating by. But while I still take issue with his attitude there and want to give him a clockwork orange-style refresher about tech debt I think a bigger problem is that he’s taking predictable problems of the median programmer trying to use these systems and saying, effectively, “get gud”. This is especially galling given that the tech here is going to replace or supplant the kind of junior developer roles that allowed fresh graduates to actually get that experience that allows you to shepherd the next generation of junior devs (or I guess LLM assistants now).

          • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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            2 days ago

            fwiw, there’s a telling detail about ptaček’s attitude to people who he doesn’t see as his equals or peers: today is a second day in a row when he’s not able to use proper pronouns with regard to hazel weakly (who dared to criticise his article), despite being corrected by more than one person.

            it’s either malice, or the principal engineer at fly dot io is not able to remember a single fact despite being informed about it three times.

    • zogwarg@awful.systems
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      5 days ago

      Not high on the list of thought crimes, but a particular ick for me:

      Also: 100% of all the Bash code you should author ever again

      Why the bash hate?

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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        6 hours ago

        speaking as someone who uses bash all the time, it’s a fully equipped programming language and you absolutely should not use it as one because it’s made of footbullets. Use Python. For extra sysadmin flavour, make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash.

        • bitofhope@awful.systems
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          6 hours ago

          make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash

          Oh god, please no. I have PTSD from 50-line Python scripts by anti-bash fundamentalists full of os.system, subprocess.run and/or subprocess.call that could have just been 15-line bourne shell scripts.

          If you’re gluing programs together, shell scripts are often the best way to do it. If you’re not gluing programs together, do you even Unix? If you want to be fundie about it, obey shellcheck.

          It sucks that bash is such a footgun. Perl was supposed to fix a lot of that, but now everyone hates it, because it also lets people to do clever and subtly incorrect things, which have then become quasi-idiomatic. Mom, can we have a sensible human-computer interface?

      • antifuchs@awful.systems
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        3 days ago

        Unsneering, I think because it has all sorts of invisible behaviors that work ok in isolation/for the common case but then eventually combine to bite you in the ass. Shellshock, for example; I think Thomas did a pretty decent rant about that one when it came out (damn, has it been more than 10 years already?)

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        5 days ago

        Fr, eschewing the command line is the cs guy version of not being able to change a flat tire