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.

(December’s finally arrived, and the run-up to Christmas has begun. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    Well that and “core”. I could consider social media and even chatbots parts of internet infrastructure, but they both depend on a framework of underlying protocols and their implementation details. Without social media or chatbots the internet would still be the internet, which is not the case for, say, the Internet Protocol.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      Also I would contend they’re misusing “infrastructure”. Social media and chat bots are kinds of services that are provided over the internet, but they aren’t a part of the infrastructure itself anymore than the world’s largest ball of twine is part of the infrastructure of the Interstate Highway System.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        23 hours ago

        Heh yeah, “infrastructure” in the same way that moneyed bayfuckers are “builders”

        It is also a useful study in just how little they fucking by get about how anything works, and what models of reasoning they apply to what they perceive. Depressing, but useful

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          6 hours ago

          It legitimately feels like at least half of these jokers have the same attitude towards IT and project management that sovereign citizens do to the law. SovCits don’t understand the law as a coherent series of rules and principles applied through established procedures etc, they just see a bunch of people who say magic words that they don’t entirely understand and file weird paperwork that doesn’t make sense and then end up getting given a bunch of money or going to prison or whatever. It’s a literal cargo cult version of the legal system, with the slight hiccup that the rest of the world is trying to actually function.

          Similarly, the Silicon Valley Business Idiot set sees the tech industry as one where people say the right things and make the buttons look pretty and sometimes they get bestowed reality-warping sums of money. The financial system is sufficiently divorced from reality that the market doesn’t punish the SVBIs for their cargo cult understanding of technology, but this does explain a lot of the discourse and the way people like Thiel, Andreesen, and Altman talk about their work and why the actual products are so shite to use.