this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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TechTakes

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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.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] BioMan@awful.systems 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (29 children)

The Great Leader himself, on how he avoids going insane during the onging End of the World because among other things that's not what an intelligent character would do in a story, but you might not be capable of that.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (6 children)

The first and oldest reason I stay sane is that I am an author, and above tropes.

Nobody is above tropes. Tropes are just patterns you see in narratives. Everything you can describe is a trope. To say you are above tropes means you don’t live and exist.

Going mad in the face of the oncoming end of the world is a trope.

Not going mad as the world ends is also a trope, you fuck!

This sense -- which I might call, genre-savviness about the genre of real life -- is historically where I began; it is where I began, somewhere around age nine, to choose not to become the boringly obvious dramatic version of Eliezer Yudkowsky that a cliche author would instantly pattern-complete about a literary character facing my experiences.

We now have a canon mental age for Yud of drumroll nine.

Just decide to be sane

That isn’t how it works, idiot. You can’t “decide to be sane”, that’s like having a private language.

Anyway, just to make the subtext of my other comments into text. Acting like you are a character in a story is a dissociative delusion and counter to reality. It is definitively not sane. Insane, if you will.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

they really thonk that people work just like chatbots, are they

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago

Its the most obvious explanation for their behaviour I can think of.

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