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.
(Last substack for 2025 - may 2026 bring better tidings. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
One of my old teachers would send documents to the class with various pieces of information. They were a few years away from retirement and never really got word processors. They would start by putting important stuff in bold. But some important things were more important than others. They got put in bold all caps. Sometimes, information was so critical it got put in bold, underline, all caps and red font colour. At the time we made fun of the teacher, but I don't think I could blame them. They were doing the best they could with the knowledge of the tools they had at the time.
Now, in the files linked above I saw the word "never" in all caps, bold all caps, in italics and in a normal font. Apparently, one step in the process is mandatory. Are the others optional? This is supposed to be a procedure to be followed to the letter with each step being there for a reason. These are supposed computer-savvy people
I'll admit I did not read the scripts in detail but this is a solved problem. The solution is a script with structured output as part of a pipeline. Why give up one of the only good thing computers can do: executing a well-defined task in a deterministic way. Reading this is so exhausting...