this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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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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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.)

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 1 week ago

Xanadu’s micropayment-oriented transclusion-and-royalty system is impossible to correctly implement, due to a mismatch between information theory and copyright; given the ability to copy text, copyright is provably absurd

it kept being funny to me that even while xanadu had already shown the problems with content control the entirety of the NFT craze just went on as if it was full greenfields novel problem

The details lie in the devil, for sure…you’d want the price [of making a change to a document] low enough (zero?) not to incur Trivial Inconvenience penalties for prosocial things like building wikis, yet high enough to make the David Gerards of the world think twice.

some of these people just really don't know their history very well, do they

on a total tangent:

while xanadu's commercial-aspiration history is intimately tied up in why it never got much further, I do occasionally daydream about if we had, and if we could've combined it with more-modern signing and sourcing: daydream in the respect of "CA and cert chains, but for transcluded content", esp in the face of all the fucking content mills used to push disinfo etc. not sure this would work ootb either, mind you, it's got its own set of vulnerabilities and problems that you'd need to work through (and ofc you can't solve social problems purely in the technical domain)

has there been any meaningful advancement or neat new research in agoric computing? haven't really looked into it in a while, and the various blockchain nonsense took so much air out of the room for so long I haven't had to spoons to look

(separately I know there's also been some developments in remote trusted compute, but afaict that's also still quite early days)