this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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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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Want to wade into the sandy, spooky 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.

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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. The spooks are well underway.)

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[–] sinedpick@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

With the agents pouring concrete, we can now focus on the thing as a whole.

This is such a dumb take because it's wrong in both directions.

Either LLMs are really bad and shouldn't be trusted to write code and by trusting them you're going to utterly fail. Or LLMs are actually good enough to write code, but then they'll also be good enough to design/architect anything you could and reduce your labor's value to zero (e.g. someone will create a harness that lets the business guys TRULY prompt whatever they want into existence). The only situation where this works out for labor is if LLMs end up frozen in some middle ground where they don't get any more capable.

This idea that the LLM is analogous to a camera is such an insipid, thought-terminating cliché.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

This idea that the LLM is analogous to a camera is such an insipid, thought-terminating cliché.

Its completely wrong, too - the camera's invention didn't render painting obsolete like he implies. The only way you'd come to that conclusion is if you're utterly devoid of creativity and artistic insight.

Iris suggested "prevent[ing] people from studying software development and only software development" in her article. I fully endorse that idea - at the bare minimum, it'd hopefully reduce the number of dipshits like this guy.

[–] pikesley@mastodon.me.uk 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@BlueMonday1984 @sinedpick

> The only way you’d come to that conclusion is if you’re utterly devoid of creativity and artistic insight

You might be onto something here

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 3 points 23 hours ago

I vaguely recall once arguing that an arts education should be mandatory for all students. Honestly, that would probably solve a lot of problems in society.

Maybe if we banned teaching MBAs altogether alongside it...

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

I think the advent of photography decimated a particular genre of painting - portraits, but it was still a tail-off. The middle classes could get photo portraits done but they were only B&W and small (a Daguerreotype is basically twice as big as a standard photo print) and still quite expensive. So if you wanted a big color portrait of a loved one, you still had to commission a painting. Same for landscapes.