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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy Pride :3)
hackernews enthusiast tpacek is filled with incredulity when some friends wonāt join his new religious movement. This of course has triggered a 1200 reply long thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163063
This almost reads like tptacek doesnāt understand why lucidityās piece a year ago was so effective and tried to write it from the opposite angle by punching down instead of punching up.
Iād have thought that a guy who writes on the internet like itās a competition sport could recognize the obvious problems of this, but maybe Iām just a vibe coding Youtuber.
Thatās a whole lotta words to say āIām a bad programmer who aspires to be a bad manager of a team of programmers.ā
heās not a bad programmer, which is part of the problem here.
I guess thatās fair. I was focusing in on his attitude towards craft, which seems incompatible with actually taking pride in doing a good job as opposed to simply skating by. But while I still take issue with his attitude there and want to give him a clockwork orange-style refresher about tech debt I think a bigger problem is that heās taking predictable problems of the median programmer trying to use these systems and saying, effectively, āget gudā. This is especially galling given that the tech here is going to replace or supplant the kind of junior developer roles that allowed fresh graduates to actually get that experience that allows you to shepherd the next generation of junior devs (or I guess LLM assistants now).
fwiw, thereās a telling detail about ptaÄekās attitude to people who he doesnāt see as his equals or peers: today is a second day in a row when heās not able to use proper pronouns with regard to hazel weakly (who dared to criticise his article), despite being corrected by more than one person.
itās either malice, or the principal engineer at fly dot io is not able to remember a single fact despite being informed about it three times.
I feel like this article might deserve its own post, because I think itās the first time Iāve ever seen an attempted counter-sneer. itās written like someoneās idea of what a sneer is (tpacek swears sometimes and says he doesnāt give a shit! so many paragraphs into giving a shit!) but all the content is awful bootlicking and points that donāt stand up to even mild scrutiny? and now Iām wondering if tpacekās been reading us and thatās why heās upset, or if this is what an LLM shits out if you ask it to write critihype in the tone of a sneer
Special bootlicking points:
Source: xcancel.com
For reference Kurt is the CEO of the company that the author works for: https://archive.md/Z2xvg
I bet youāre right on the money.
Edit: someone deep in the thread dared him to post a video of one of his coding speedruns if itās so good, which tickled me
fly.io is closed source, of course heās not gonna show you the engineering excellence. trust me bro, you fool, you poltroon,
(e: wtf, phone client posted to subthread despite top reply arrow icon. bug bug buuuuug. the jank is ever present)
Not high on the list of thought crimes, but a particular ick for me:
Why the bash hate?
Unsneering, I think because it has all sorts of invisible behaviors that work ok in isolation/for the common case but then eventually combine to bite you in the ass. Shellshock, for example; I think Thomas did a pretty decent rant about that one when it came out (damn, has it been more than 10 years already?)
Fr, eschewing the command line is the cs guy version of not being able to change a flat tire