self

Want to wade into the sandy 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.)

(adapted from a series of mastodon posts that somewhat blew up, so the format's going to be weird)

why not embrace fashtech! they’ve got:

• terrible Fisher-Price CSS
• the most toxic part of the Wayland ecosystem, and that’s saying something
• the worst part of the X11 ecosystem, and that’s saying something
• suckless tools and they all fucking suck
• corporate control over the packages you wrote, for your own protection
• distributed functional programming that doesn’t function or distribute
• a non-working web browser moving to a proprietary language that only supports macs, which appears to exist purely to divert funding away from Servo (for anyone posting to tell me Swift technically isn't proprietary, here's how that's going)
• a working chromium fork whose only business purpose is to push slop extruders and a scam cryptocurrency
• a web browser which runs single-process so that if a single website freezes or crashes then the entire session freezes or crashes (credit: 2something)
• “diverse sponsorship” but it’s all MilTech companies; you’re surrounded by a rich market! of drone and other murder manufacturers (credit: @froztbyte@awful.systems)
• slop extruders
• cryptocurrencies

if you're puzzled by the above vaguepost, I've written a little answer key:

got a favorite I didn’t list? comment with your receipts!

kinda glad I bounced off of the suckless ecosystem when I realized how much their config mechanism (C header files and a recompile cycle) fucking sucked

no excerpts yet cause work destroyed me, but this just got posted on the orange site. apparently a couple of urbit devs realized urbit sucks actually. interestingly they correctly call out some of urbit’s worst points (like its incredibly high degree of centralization), but I get the strong feeling that this whole thing is an attempt to launder urbit’s reputation while swapping out the fascists in charge

e: I also have to point out that this is written from the insane perspective that anyone uses urbit for anything at all other than an incredibly inefficient message board and a set of interlocking crypto scams

e2: I didn’t link it initially, but the orange site thread where I found this has heated up significantly since then

hey let’s see what the people who killed and buried hacker culture think should go in the jargon file!

If the spirit of the original Jargon file was to be a living document, alas, it failed to keep with the times.

Hackers at large have moved away from Lisp despite Paul Graham and other evangelists […]

Hackers also have moved away from academia at large, and 9-5 jobs at tech behemoths are more natural habitats for them, which also shaped the lingo. I mean, there’s a whole layer of slang usually pertinent to outsourcing agencies and to cubicle farms.

I can’t wait for the corporate-approved jargon file, with any hint of anti-capitalism replaced with fun words and quotes from billionaires to share as the soul leaves my body

So in order for the document to evolve, we need a system to determine consensus. Everyone who cares runs a program on their computer that joins the network and registers their intent. With each proposed change, a query goes out to the network, and it's up to everyone on the network to say yea or nay to the proposal. With enough "yea"s, the document is updated.

...this is starting to sound like a blockchain, isn't it.

for the absolute sake of fuck. coming soon: HackerDAO! collect 10xer tokens and finally prove to the junior devs why corporate gives you so many points to crunch on! vote on fun new jargon, but only if it’s crypto-related! surely you’re hacker enough to be on the pump side of this pump and dump!