this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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TechTakes

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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.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Many of our favorite people abuse meth and meth adjacent sustances. In the long term, this behavior visibly degrades dental health.

Therefore, it wont be long until we witness actual real life cases of smartmouth.

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

We need a word for when they make up a guy who doesn't exist and then get mad at him.

[–] ShakingMyHead@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

Pretty sure that's a strawman.

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[–] jaschop@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Fresh of the press, only in german unfortunately: tagesschau

President of bavaria (and head of the extra fashy bavarian splinter party of the christian conservatives) wants to cut 10.000 public service jobs using AI.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago

OT: Baldur Bjarnason's lamented how his webdev feed has turned to complete shit:

Between the direct and indirect support of fascism and the uncritical embrace of LLMs and the overwhelming majority of the dev sites in my feed reader have turned to an undifferentiated puddle of nonsense…

…Two years ago these feeds (I never subscribed to any of the React grifters) were all largely posts on concrete problem-solving and, y’know, useful stuff. Useful dev discourse has collapsed into a tiny handful of blogs.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The billionaires' dreams of defeating death with technology have been "realised" by Marvel, which is planning an AI-Powered^tm^ hologram of him at L.A. Comic Con.

To the shock of nobody, this act of exploitation through digital necromancy is being met with unfiltered disgust.

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[–] jaschop@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

Does anyone have a good definition or classic examples for the term mall ninja at the ready?

I first heard that term on this channel, and I feel like I should understand that phenomenon better.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

clueless and enthusiastic (often overly so), getting real into something but often at the lower end rungs

aiui the term it started its life as a description of people who’d get real into weapons, but only at the grade you can buy in mall mass retail. never dug into the history tho

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago

I feel that strip mall dojos where you were ostensibly taught some very mainstream belt-based martial art like karate or TKD (or straight up make-believe stuff like ninjutsu) but were essentially glorified daycare should figure somewhere in the history of the term.

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

Recently thought about how this one xkcd has probably done more recruiting for the rat community per unit effort spent making it than that 700k word salad.

Where are we on xkcd? I haven’t looked at it regularly for over a decade now. Nothing personally against the author or comic itself, I just completely deconverted from consuming nerd celebrity content at that point in the past.

[–] Seminar2250@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago

maybe this just betrays that i don't know shit about fuck, but it feels like this xkcd would make more sense if the frequentist did the experiment more than once

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago
[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Doing my screaming into the void offtopic thing, but the Dutch parliament, consisting of the the liberal VVD all the far right (PVV, FVP, JA21) and half the extreme christian (but not far) right (SGP the reformed/protestants (*)) , and the conspiratorial partially far right farmers party (BBB) accepted a motion (also important to note that these are not that meaningful, nothing has changed legally) by the far right to declare antifa a terrorist organization.

Congrats to everybody here now being terrorists in the eyes of the Dutch gov. Ah the joys of living in an American colony.

*: Even less relevant to this sub, but perhaps interesting, did you know we have a so called bible belt in the Netherlands? See this wiki page and look at the voting results graph. (while there is no direct graph our second very christian party (The CU who often also votes with them (but didn't this time because they are not that extreme) also generally gets their votes from this area. What makes this downright weird is that these voters are basically from our rural areas, but on the line that historically splits between protestantism and catholicism. But all these votes are more from the protestant side. Some sociologists prob could/can have written some interesting papers on that. So it can't just be explained by pillarisation. Hope you enjoyed my random scream into the void which I tried to make somewhat interesting by talking about parts of our weird political situation.

(Bonus detail, the prot/cath split line is also the line of 'do they celebrate carnival really enthusiastically or not, for which the rule is, if you want a real party go to Maastricht (sorry link in Dutch), as it combines several styles of carnaval with its own thing (there are also some small dressup particularities, but as I don't know them specifically. Great fun if it is your thing (or so I have been told)). Anyway the further south the better (we have different names for the carnaval styles even, 'Bourgondisch carnaval' vs 'Rijnlands carnaval' for example))

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

A nonprofit that serves teenagers complains about getting mugged by Salesforce. dang dons his shining armor and dashes forth to save the uwu smol bean megacorp from the peasant mob.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I’m a bit split on this one

on the one hand, the post as first posted had a lot of “victimised” language (“omg slack is extorting us”) and frankly that felt like bait - esp as many, many volunteer-type orgs that have had similar slack setups have been taking a hammer for months now (as I posted before, a local ZA tech setup was one, and more recently that big k8s one too). there’s enough precedent here that expecting slack to have behaved otherwise (even “honourably”) seems to me to have been almost foolish

on the other, slack 100% only took action once this did hit hype and enough eyeballs, and only reacted since it was an embarrassment

but…yeah. slack hasn’t been a good option for public use for literally years now :|

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[–] HotGarbage@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)
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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)
[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Check the guys profile. He took some random remark from Gwern indicating what looks to me like human interest, as some sort of commandment.

My first instinct was to dismiss him as an oddball—until a friend told me I was dealing with a legend of rationality. I have to admit: I nearly shit myself. His comment got more likes than the post I’d spent years working on.

Someone with, what, a 152 IQ wanted my accounts of surviving bureaucratic military hell? And I’m the same guy who applies scientific rigor to Pokémon analysis

(The text is bolded etc in various places which I didn't reproduce)

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