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.

(Last substack for 2025 - may 2026 bring better tidings. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    Also I can’t help but notice that he didn’t verify the correctness of the solution

    Think I have mentioned the story I heard here once, about the guy who wrote a program to find some large prime which he ran on the mainframe over the weekend, using up all the calculation budget his uni department had. And then they confronted him with the end result, and the number the program produced ended in a 2. (He had forgotten to code the -1 step).

    This reminded me of that story. (At least in this case it actually produced a viable result (if costly), just with a minor error).

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      It’s okay, he definitely wants to verify it but actually confirming that this whole disaster pile worked as intended and produced usable code apparently didn’t make the cut.

      Federation — even Python Gas Town had support for remote workers on GCP. I need to design the support for federation, both for expanding your own town’s capacity, and for linking and sharing work with other human towns.

      GUI — I didn’t even have time to make an Emacs UI, let alone a nice web UI. But someone should totally make one, and if not, I’ll get around to it eventually.

      Plugins — I didn’t get a chance to implement any functionality as plugins on molecule steps, but all the infrastructure is in place.

      The Mol Mall — a marketplace and exchange for molecules that define and shape workloads.

      Hanoi/MAKER — I wanted to run the million-step wisp but ran out of time.

      Also worth noting that in the jargon he’s created for this, a “wisp” is ephemeral rather than a proper output, so it seems like he may have pulled this solution out of the middle of a running attempt to calculate the solution and assumed that it was absolutely correct despite repeatedly saying throughout his writeup here that there’s no guarantee that any given internal step is the right answer. This guy strikes me as very good at branding but not really much else.