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.
(2026 is off to a great start, isn’t it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I first sighted Nick Bostrom in a series of mad-science-flavoured erotic horror comics on the Internet Archive (The Apsinthion Protocol and Progress in Research by the same writer). I wish more people had the sense to keep those ideas in the world of weird fiction like Charlie Stross does
The comic I linked is pretty tame (particularly the first few pages with the Bostrom reference). The whole series contains a wide variety of squicks so use your judgement before exploring.
@CinnasVerses @techtakes TESCREAL is very obviously an emergent syncretistic religion that follows the same basic structure as Christianity: it’s evangelical, but unlike pre-Constantine Xtianity it specifically targets billionaires and power elites (white males). At the rate it’s speed-running its development they’ll be burning witches for denying the divinity of the singularity within another couple of decades.
There is a better timeline where Eliezer Yudkowsky got better religious education, understood that he was having messianic thoughts reinforced by Orison Scott Card’s Mormonism, and ended up working in a cafe, writing pulp fiction, and participating in the local kink scene (I think Scott Alexander knows damn well what he is doing and thinks the Truth about the Lesser Breeds is more important)
He’s not wrong. Previously, on Awful, I pointed out that folks would have been on the wrong side of Sega v. Accolade as well, to say nothing of Galoob v. Nintendo. This reply really sums it up well:
[I]t strikes me that what started out as a judo attack against copyright has made copyright maximalists out of many who may not have started out that way.
I think that the turning point was Authors Guild v. Google, also called Google Books, where everybody involved was avaricious. People want to support whatever copyright makes them feel good, not whatever copyright is established by law. If it takes the example of Oracle to get people to wake up and realize that maybe copyright is bad then so be it.
Yes he is. It’s not copyright maximalism to be angry that the enforcement of copyright protects and does not bind large corporations with huge financial backing and binds yet fails to protect artists and other producers of creative work who do not have a net worth of millions, billions or trillions of dollars.
Cantrill’s equivocation between cleanroom implementation of an API and sucking up every piece of code on the internet to be cleanroom-washed by the statistical text regurgitator is not the own he thinks it is. It’s also a really hypocritical look given his previous righteous fury over Oracle re-proprietarizing Sun’s open source work. Actually it’s fine when open source code is turned proprietary, we just pulled it out of this black box that filed the serial numbers off first.
People more plugged in than me in US culture war issues: is the opposition to infant male circumcision driven primarily by anti-semitism / anti-islamism or by more general manosphere vibes?
my experience has been that it’s actually driven primarily by the absolute weirdest ppl you will ever meet, these people having overlap with anything weird you can think of, including antisemitism, wellness fascism, inceldom, MRAs, etc, but not tending to be based particularly in any of those groups.
all of which is unfortunate because i also think they are just correct in their claims that this is a real bodily autonomy issue
I think the incels are into intactivism because a circumcision is an unrectifiable loss. Incels are deeply attracted to events and actions that are unrectifiable. Think about all the robots on 4chan bemoaning the absence of mutual adolescent love. One can be a turbo virgin all the way into college at least and still turn out fine. Incels didn’t (turn out will), and they didn’t (get any tail in highschool); so that must mean that being a virgin in highschool is what broke them.
In a similar way, many intactivists (especially the r/circumcisiongrief types) blame their sexual inadequacy on their post-natal circumcision, rather than their own psycho sexual issues or their habits of completely monkey-wrenching their shit on the daily. To be absolutely fair, a circ will almost definitely negatively affect your sex life, and really, it’s frustrating to have a completely pointless operation done to your meat without your consent, but I think intactivism is a heatsink its proponents fervor, rather than the source of the anger.
this is very insightful, and it sheds some light for me on something underappreciated: the way in which inceldom is not the same as not having sex. it’s an ideology characterized by misogyny, misanthropy, and a sense of one’s own brokenness, and in particular by a fixation on the sense of unrectifiable loss you describe. people really struggle with the idea that there are incels who have had sex or that someone can not have had sex and not qualify for the label incel.
more generally, chan culture and its offshoots really successfully capitalized upon these tendencies in ways that seem to be underexamined. there’s a reason /lgbt/ attracted so many trans people. if you went through the wrong puberty, you have suffered actual, extremely painful unrectifiable loss, and a culture that recognizes that and encourages wallowing in it can serve an oppositional role to a broader culture that just lies to you about what you’ve experienced. i rarely hear about this and when i do it comes wrapped in moralizing terms like “brain poison” which are in their own way accurate and useful, but which are not sufficient for a complete examination
got my Urbit newsletter for this quarter (or whatever the fuck the cadence is) and what stood out to me this time was nockchain.org. I was going to sit and do a deep dive to come up with sneers for this but I just don’t have the executive function right now. @self thoughts?
dear fuck just when I think I’m out urbit pulls me back in
analysis coming soon, I’m reviewing some technical sources provided by a world-class cryptocurrency expert (yes it’s @dgerard@awful.systems) and howdy fuck does this ever resemble the cardano grift but with Haskell replaced with a much worse ML with a much less coherent type system
Are there any resources(read: sneers) on cardano*? I have a family member who is into that shit.
* Cardano specifically I mean, I am already aware of the extensive literature on crypto in general
It’s a very elaborate parkour trick in Haskell that through piles and piles or rigorous category theory manages to achieve Nothing in a type-safe manner.
That sounds awesome and right up my alley!
…oh, it’s some financialized gambling racket bullshit thing never the fuck mind
I mean, technically it can be anything you want as long as you never deploy it, which I think is the tagline of Haskell
