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 so 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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
What in tarnation is happening at adafruit?
https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/14/heres-our-first-gemini-deep-think-llm-assisted-hardware-design/
Limor Fried and I had a class together at MIT in 2001. This has no bearing on the present circumstances and offers me no real insight (anything I could say about our extremely limited interactions would amount to confirmation bias). It’s just the odd little factoid that comes to mind whenever adafruit Does Something Online.
@o7___o7 @techtakes It was Arduino who emitted the llm generated circuit but I was tired and conflated two companies with similar names (whose products I don’t use) before going to bed. Now they’re trying to throw a flame war. Pay no attention.
You handled that whole unhinged situation like a champ.
Seeing once respectable folks get trapped in this bullshit feels like watching my college pal smoke his first clove cigarette.
It seems like, for certain kind of geek, code LLMs sit somewhere between “The One Ring but rubbish” and “mechanical meth.” They certainly feel powerful and productove, and god help anyone who hints otherwise.
You can always blame an LLM for confusing the 2 companies ;)
they’ve jumped the shark a while back. ptorrone is relatively widely documented to go around harassing people (often using his partner as a shield excuse for doing so, just like this time), and a couple months back they sold to qualcomm
ah yes, that absolutely must be a pseudonym, and absolutely couldn’t be a real person
such a fucking weird bit
anyway yeah fuck adafruit. don’t buy their shit, there are other options (and often cheaper)
hey mr. adafruit watch this, I can weaponise oppression olympics too, I’m a trans woman from the third world: fuck off with profiteering from your selling out to the planet-destroying plagiarism machine that’s proudly empowering ICE and the IDF. it’s not your country that will pay the price for your meaningless carbon output to generate nonsense until it looks right. and you brag about it. pega teu fascism-assisted hardware design e enfia no cu. happy never to be an adafruit customer again. assholes.