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.)
Hey fellas they’re building a mako reactor in my back yard:
OT: I had a realization awhile back that I’d basically cut American scifi out of my life. The politics are just gross to me now, and the overseas stuff is just plain more fun.
What comes out of the states seems to reduce to libertarian (closeted white nationalist) wank fodder, and I guess its been this way since…Campbell? Certainly Niven-Pournelle. It just got gross.
(Partially prompted by me listening to Iron Council again).
Dunno I just enjoyed the fuck out of “Landlocked in Foreign Skin”, like it’s been a long time since I pause my life to devour a book in one sitting like this, and given that Drew Huff writes from Seattle I’m thinking they’re a USian? And I was really engrossed by Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire which resonated a lot with my experiences as a Third World immigrant, with a certain honesty in portrayal of what it feels like to admire “culture” at a distance from a colony that I seldomly see (I’m on book #2 currently). I’m more of a fantasy reader, but Octavia Butler and Le Guin’s sci-fi were absolutely formative to me, and if you ask me one modern sci-fi series I liked besides those mentioned so far, I’d probably say Wayfarers or Monk & Robot. Plenty of good SF authors from the USA whose politics are more or less the opposite of what you describe.
The trick is I read books by queer folk, women and PoC almost exclusively. Absolutely don’t regret it, all the fun stuff is there in the margins.
I’ll have to try some of this then!
Ngl, Iron Council made me ugly cry.
Also highly recommend Machineries of Empire by Yoon Ha Lee.
It’s got romance. It’s got swashbuckling. It’s got vendettas. A woman smashes an evil empire with mathemagic. The empire’s greatest general is a gay dude with dyscalculia from the Korean part of Space Texas who lives in peoples shadows, and it makes sense how that happened. Different factions try to subvert each other via cleverly designed board games. There are soooo many unhealthy relationships.
5/5 stars
Cloudflare seems to be trying to make a shitcoin https://netdollar.cloudflare.com/
Okay, let’s see what the dumbshits are trying to sell this time
(This took longer than I’d liked, because copy-paste is pretty laggy on Cloudflare’s shit-ass page)
Built for the rise of agents and machines, NET Dollar will enable seamless, automated transactions without human intervention.
“Agents” are automatic data breach machines, letting them repeat that time they stole vibe-coders’ crypto on a larger scale is a terrible idea
The rise of autonomous agents and connected devices is creating a new economic paradigm
Autonomous agents don’t exist, and the only “new economic paradigm” being made is one where tech is completely unmoored from reality
These systems need a reliable medium of exchange that can handle high-frequency, automated transactions without human intervention.
See my previous point
Rules, triggers, and workflows can be embedded directly into payments, making them smarter and adaptable.
Went so well for Wolf Game, didn’t it?
NET Dollar will work across networks and ecosystems, enabling frictionless, global commerce.
And by “frictionless, global commerce”, I presume they mean “sanctions evasion and ransomware”
Every coin will be fully collateralized by a U.S. dollar, ensuring transparency, reliability, and price stability.
NET Dollar will be made available soon.
How about never.
Cloudflare is about to get really familiar with North Koreans.
They banned the guy that wrote the theil antichrist notes.
https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/23/spilled-peter-thiel-s-antichrist-secrets-now-s-banned-lectures/
Stephens and Thiel did not respond to requests for comment. Kulkarni declined to answer questions about the lectures, citing the off-the-record policy.
legal threats?
Doubt that is legal, but yeah good luck suing Thiel over an event like this and keeping a job. Stuff is so fucked. Remember when hackers were proud to leak this stuff, like how people worked together to go after scientology.
personal vent: at my job yesterday i had to come up with a few fake book titles/author combinations for a project. a fun little task and opportunity to hide some cheeky easter eggs. so, i came up with a few and then asked my coworkers to share in the fun. one of them though just couldn’t come up with anything at all, and eventually just resorted to “asking chat gpt”.
mind you, i work a creative job, and so do my coworkers. this is a minor thing i guess, but it just made me very sad. how could you just outsource your creative joy to some mindless word salad machine?
Man, knowing nothing else about your coworker, they sound like a completely joyless person. Coming up with fake titles for things is like, such a high fun-to-effort ratio. “Creativity and the essence of Human Experience” by Chat GPT. Boom, there’s one. “Cooking With Olive Oil” by Sam Altman. “IQ184” by Harukiezer Murakowsky. This is so fun and easy that it’s basically hack outside of situations where it is solicited.
Sorry to ask to dissect the frog, but what’s the story behind Altman and olive oil?
Kind of a fluff story (archive) where salty’s douchiness is on full display.
I referenced it because fake book titles are throwaway jokes, you can reference something hyperspecific and not have to worry about whether or not someone will get it, because they might not even notice it at all.
not joyless at all. i suspect they’re creatively worn out. if you make a job out of your hobby, etc etc. combine that with habitual chatbot use and there you go. it’s overall just grim honestly. i’ll change vocation though if i’m ever forced to partake in the slop at work, thankfully so far that hasn’t happened yet.
Ah, gotcha. fwiw I wasn’t saying that to say “joyless people are bad”; burnout also tends to look like joylessness.
Is NP P or is NP not P, thats the question, by Scott Scottersons-Scottsson
Quantum Computing Since Diogenes by Karl Snarx
God, we had so much fun doing this at my uni when creating an example DB table for an exam (only it was fake song/band combinations). Are you sure your coworker isn’t a robot themselves?
This story gives “Bezos buying random cassettes at the gas station” doesn’t it?
I eagerly await the day when we hear about these people from 1-900-HOTDOG instead of Behind the Bastards
Disappointed that no one has tried to sell the US government an “Agent Smith” smh
Not sure if a LessWronger extensively quoting Accelerando as a blueprint for a singularity takeoff is complimentary to Charles Stross:
Worht noting is that the novel is 20 years old…
I keep meaning to reread it and report back on zeerust aspects!
Do like somebody left a nice trap there:
You write “you can buy it here” but there is no link.
However, you can do better: the whole thing is available for free online. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html on the author’s website is a good place to start; it has links to various versions of the book and also a little bit of explanatory material.
(Unrelated, hope Stross’s recovery is going well, sorry for being a bit parasocial relationshippy here).
I like singularity sky more as a sort of critical book about how a post scarcity singularity would be easy to mess up. Very funny that it inspired the US to give free phones to Afghans to try and combat the Taliban.
Just got back from the Ted Chiang talk at the law school, talk was good but all the Q&A was lawyers ask-telling about LLMs. Not a single question for him about his fiction. :(
Ted Chiang rules.
A full timeline on the RubyGems takeover has been put together - looks like the entire situation’s been caused by pressure from Shopify.
Today’s related news: the tailwind css guy is a big fan of dhh and the rubygems takeover.
https://bsky.app/profile/jaredwhite.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy/post/3lzofv4wi4yz2
I miss the days when being publicly fashy was considered poor pr, but on the other hand it does make it a lot easier to avoid their companies and products.
Tailwind is pointless, incidentally.
I have no idea about Ruby or the politics behind the scenes, but I do know who DHH is and so it seems like literally none of this would’ve happened if not for point 2. on the list?? Just like, don’t platform the rancid toxic cesspit of a man and you’re fine??
Who’s left to do actual work? Who would start a new project that depends on these institutions? Does ruby just die now?
Also:
When the Advanced Custom Fields plugin was stolen by WordPress, DHH said “This is totally crazy. Like if the operators of rubygems dot org just decided to expropriate the official Rails gems, hand over control to a new team, and lock the core team out of it. We’re in uncharted and dangerous territory for open source now. What a sad sight."
lol
Does ruby just die now?
Part of the background to this issue is the development of
rvwhich apparently offers a future where rubygems is much less important, and some folk seem to be taking that as a threat.Whether or not the new tooling delivers, the rubygems debacle has probably helped the new project considerably.
It’d be lovely to see the correct folks build a better one with blackjack and webhooks.
I’m curious whether you or @BlueMonday1984@awful.systems are familiar with the concept of MINASWAN. The only time it’s appeared in the discussion is in one of the apologies posted by one of the Ruby Central board members, as their signoff line. Quoting a 2016 analysis of MINASWAN in which it is argued that Ruby’s central tenet is not MINASWAN, but wa (和):
Just for the record, MINASWAN is at least half true. Matz is nice. … I would not call DHH nice. … So if MINASWAN is really a basic truth about the Ruby culture, then how does DHH fit in at all? … MINASWAN is garbage. It’d be more accurate to say, “Ruby showcases the Japanese value of 和, but we are arrogant Americans, so we reduce this to a really basic American idea, harshly compressing it in the process to a state where it cannot possibly mean anything any more, instead of bothering to learn something about the outside world for once.” But MINASWAN was already a long acronym, so I guess they had to draw the line at RSTJVO和BWAAASWRTTARBAIHCIITPTASWICPMAAMIOBTLSATOWFO.
Also, I really think it’s worth understanding that Ruby is not at risk here. Ever since the release of RPG Maker XP in 2005, Ruby has been a staple of embedded scripting for game engines. Really, what we’re seeing here is the demise of Rails.
Who’s left to do actual work? Who would start a new project that depends on these institutions? Does ruby just die now?
Honestly, it probably will. The RubyGems takeover shattered any trust people had in the Ruby ecosystem - that’s something which is damn-nigh impossible to recover from.
Found a well-done essay by Jared White recently: AI Apologists and the Humanist Legacy of Steve Jobs, which does a good job sneering the ideology of AI and arguing for a more pro-human approach to tech.
This article also reminded me of how when they are trying to promote AI agents they dont get further than shopping, a secretary, or help you cook with random ingredients. No real human connections
it would be very funny if Rocco Basilico’s legacy was that his name bore resemblance to Roko Basilisk and nothing else
image desc
Quote tweet: “my name is rokos basilisk and i’m making artificial intelligence that you put on your body”
Quoted tweet: an embedded article platforming Meta’s Chief Wearables Officer named “Rocco Basilico”
My name is Rocco Pa’perclip Basilico Yudkowski Way…
They put ‘environmental impact of AI’ on the front of the student newspaper (below the fold, but still), then you flip and see this
kinda feeling two steps forward, three steps back rn on top of all the other drama on campus
Satire warning!!! 🚨🚨🚨 You have been warned!!!
Some great tips for using ChatGPT to stop being a “Brain only” person to a fully optimised person!
Harvard Business Review: AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
[…] Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.
