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.)

  • Deep thinker asks why?

    Thus spoketh the Yud: “The weird part is that DOGE is happening 0.5-2 years before the point where you actually could get an AGI cluster to go in and judge every molecule of government. Out of all the American generations, why is this happening now, that bare bit too early?”

    Yud, you sweet naive smol uwu babyesian boi, how gullible do you have to be to believe that a) tminus 6 months to AGI kek (do people track these dog shit predictions?) b) the purpose of DOGE is just accountability and definitely not the weaponized manifestation of techno oligarchy ripping apart our society for the copper wiring in the walls?

      •  Jayjader   ( @Jayjader@jlai.lu ) 
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        I swear these dudes really need to supplement their Ayn Rand with some Terry Pratchett…

        “All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

        REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

        “Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

        YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

        “So we can believe the big ones?”

        YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

        “They’re not the same at all!”

        YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

        “Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

        MY POINT EXACTLY.”

        Hogfather

  • https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@lritter/114001505488538547

    master: welcome to my Smart Home

    student: wow. how is the light controlled?

    master: with this on-off switch

    student: i don’t see a motor to close the blinds

    master: there is none

    student: where is the server located?

    master: it is not needed

    student: excuse me but what is “Smart” about all of this?

    master: everything.

    in this moment, the student was enlightened

  • Kelsey Piper continues to bluecheck:

    What would some good unifying demands be for a hostile takeover of the Democratic party by centrists/moderates?

    As opposed to the spineless collaborators who run it now?

    We should make acquiring ID documents free and incredibly easy and straightforward and then impose voter ID laws, paper ballots and ballot security improvements along with an expansion of polling places so everyone participates but we lay the ‘was it a fair election’ qs to rest.

    Presuming that Republicans ever asked “was it a fair election?!” in good faith, like a true jabroni.

    •  swlabr   ( @swlabr@awful.systems ) 
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      What would some good unifying demands be for a hostile takeover of the Democratic party by centrists/moderates?

      me, taking this at face value, and understanding the political stances of the democrats, and going by my definition of centrist/moderate that is more correct than whatever the hell Kelsey Piper thinks it means: Oh, this would actually push the democrats left.

      Anyway, jesus christ I regret clicking on that name and reading. How the fuck is anyone this stupid. Vox needs to be burned down.

    • i know that it’s about conservative crackheadery re:allegations of election fraud, but it’s lowkey unhinged that americans don’t have national ID. i also know that republicans blocked it, because they don’t want problems solved, they want to stay mad about them. in poland for example, it’s a requirement to have ID, it’s valid for 10 years and it’s free of charge. passport costs $10 to get and it takes a month, sometimes less, from filing a form to getting one. there’s also a govt service where you can get some things done remotely, including govt supplied digital signature that you can use to sign files and is legally equivalent to regular signature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUAP

      • Yeah, the controversy over federal ID cards is completely bafflying to me as well, and I imagine like many things in the US it’s some sort of libertarian bugbear or something? But considering the President has now mandated that one’s federal identity is fixed at birth by the angels, it turned out to be a blessing.

        • I definitely heard it presented as a libertarian bugbear. The American right tends to treat the federal government like it’s Schrodinger’s State. When it does something they like it’s an inviolable declaration of our values and identity as a nation, the truest guarantor of liberty and blah blah blah. When it does literally anything else it’s a sinister plot to hand over even more control over your life to unelected bureaucrats!

        •  V0ldek   ( @V0ldek@awful.systems ) 
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          The reason is that any government mandated ID is clearly the Mark of the Beast and will be used to bring upon a thousand years of darkness.

          You think that’s fringe nonsense and you’d be right on the nonsense part, but that’s literally what Ronny Reagan said while he was president

          • OK this is just my unresearched opinion as an American but I really don’t know what I’m talking about so keep that in mind and treat it as vibes more than research. It’s messy and I haven’t learned about any of it since highschool (and my highschool left a lot of important parts out):

            A bunch of uninformed rambling

            US states aren’t thought of as countries for good reason, but in the country’s legal framework that kind of how they work – just with a lot of work to make borders almost a non-issue, shared citizenship, shared economy, etc. This means that historically a lot of stuff that would be associated with a country (ID, driving permit, residency, military) either only happens at the state level; or happens at both the state and the federal level.

            In the constitution the federal government is supposed to stick to it’s lane as well: any powers which aren’t explicitly given to the federal government are reserved for the states (10th amendment). Though in practice the federal government has a lot of powers.


            That’s the background and helps explain both the lack of a (compulsory) national ID and how there can be state level election shenanigans:

            For national ID this was indeed a conservative bugbear. They were essentially worried about the government building a dossier on them or something. I don’t remember the details it’s been a long time: Conservatism 15 years ago was an entirely different beast than it is today. It’s kind of hard to even imagine if the conservatives still have the same fears today, if the liberals don’t, or how it would actually play out. Congress being deadlocked for so long means it’s hard to get a vibe on how things would shake out if they started actually passing lots of laws again.

            Oh yeah did I mention congress is deadlocked? This both means that the US is essentially operating on decades outdated laws, and that the legislature’s infighting has lead to a power vacuum that the executive and judicial branch have slurped up (which helps explain the current Elon Musk mess)

            Anyway election shenanigans: States were historically supposed to be, well, states as in closely aligned countries and this was all set up in the days before fast and easy long distance travel and communication (did I mention America is really big?). This means that each state runs it’s own election (which it can do in any legal way it pleases). The outcome of the election is one or more electors, and those electors are who actually send in their choice for president. There have been cases of “faithless electors” who vote for someone besides the party they represent. Oddly this hasn’t really been seen as a big deal (since the parties choose the electors they tend to be pretty loyal).

            The point of the previous paragraph is this is a mess. Like a real mess. It’s law that made some sense 200 years ago (and maybe not even, they were kinda #yolo-ing the constitution at the time) but is really dated. This means there’s lots of room for shenanigans. Can a state legally disqualify voters? Maybe? Sometimes? Kinda? They’re not supposed to be like racist or anything, but determining that depends on a lot of details and shifting supreme court rulings.

            • okay so in absence of federal ID how do you authenticate anything when dealing with govt things? just by SSN? we have something similar, but years of security malpractice by people who were not trained to do this made these numbers public to probable attackers, so authentication with just that is not considered secure for a couple of years by now. instead, with anything important (like taking a loan, opening bank account, buying a car or real estate etc), you have to also provide your ID number which doesn’t have this problem

              but wait there's more

              on top of that, for a year of so, govt implemented a switch in that service from upthread, you can also access it offline. this switch allows you to deactivate your SSN-like number so that anything authenticated with that when it’s off is considered legally void, and probably won’t work in the first place because it’s supposed to be checked in national db. when you have to authenticate something legitimately, you can switch it on for a day, then switch it off again. this was in response to incidents of identity theft

              for some things, but not all things, you can also use digital signature

              • Your SSN is often used as a federal registration number even though the card has “do not use for identification” on it in great big letters. Most functions just trust state ID for authentication purposes and use SSN as a label. An identifier in the database sense rather than the authentication sense. At least in theory.

                See also how so many of the laws governing this are frankly archaic at this stage, with congress to busy fighting over whether the government should exist or not to actually govern anything effectively. (Note: government inefficiency has never been treated as a reason to govern better, only to govern less and assign more functions to for-profit private entities.

              • Usually SSN yes. In recent years airports and secure federal buildings are starting to require “real IDs” / star cards which are state IDs which meet federal identity verification requirements. I couldn’t be bothered with all that since I already have a passport so my driver’s license says “Federal Limits Apply”.

                For thinks like bank loans, state IDs are widely accepted.

          • I mean, a single national ID card would be one way of preventing this so long as there was a trustworthy way of ensuring that it was updated with everybody’s actual address and the like. I don’t know that we would implement it in such a way as to have that, leading ultimately to another target for this kind of activity rather than a shield from it.

            Nightmare scenario with the current administration would be such a thing being tied to citizenship somehow. Mail comes back undelivered and suddenly you have to dig out your birth certificate and explain things to some shitheel from ICE?

            • but there already is some form of address that govt knows, in most of cases, right? when govt needs to deliver something to you, like, say, court order, they need some address

              out there it works like this: there is a legal requirement to have registered an address. it’s on you, because when it’s not done, some important papers might end up somewhere where you have no idea they might be. it’s not in ID, and based on this couple of things are determined like voter lists per district or what tax office are you associated with

              • My experience is that it’s pretty fragmented with different agencies or programs tracking information separately. You obviously need to let the DoL know where you’re living as part of registering for whatever, but they don’t share that information with the unemployment people or whoever. And that’s before you get into the state vs federal divide.

          • National ID wouldn’t change that unless voter local registration and change-of-address updates were all rigidly and securely integrated.

            So long as voter registration is a locally-managed list of names and addresses it’s possible to go in and arbitrarily declare some of the registrations void.

    • Presuming that Republicans ever asked “was it a fair election?!” in good faith, like a true jabroni.

      Imagine saying this after the birther movement remained when the birth certificate was shown. “Just admit you didnt fuck pigs, and this pigfucking will be gone”.

    •  froztbyte   ( @froztbyte@awful.systems ) 
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      those opinions should come with a whiplash warning, fucking hell

      can’t wait to once again hear that someone is sure we’re “just overreacting” and that star of david passbooks voter ID laws will be totes fine. I’m sure it’ll be a really lovely conversation with a perfectly sensible and caring human. :|

  •  Soyweiser   ( @Soyweiser@awful.systems ) 
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    Not really a sneer, nor that related to techbro stuff directly, but I noticed that the profile of Chris Kluwe (who got himself arrested protesting against MAGA) has both warcraft in his profile name and prob paints miniatures looking at his avatar. Another stab in the nerd vs jock theory.

  • New piece from Brian Merchant: ‘AI is in its empire era’

    Recently finished it, here’s a personal sidenote:

    This AI bubble’s done a pretty good job of destroying the “apolitical” image that tech’s done so much to build up (Silicon Valley jumping into bed with Trump definitely helped, too) - as a matter of fact, it’s provided plenty of material to build an image of tech as a Nazi bar writ large (once again, SV’s relationship with Trump did wonders here).

    By the time this decade ends, I anticipate tech’s public image will be firmly in the toilet, viewed as an unmitigated blight on all our daily lives at best and as an unofficial arm of the Fourth Reich at worst.

    As for AI itself, I expect it’s image will go into the shitter as well - assuming the bubble burst doesn’t destroy AI as a concept like I anticipate, it’ll probably be viewed as a tech with no ethical use, as a tech built first and foremost to enable/perpetrate atrocities to its wielder’s content.

    • wait that’s it? he wants to “replace” states with (vr) groupchats on blockchain? it can’t be this stupid, you must be explaining this wrong (i know, i know, saying it’s just that makes it look way more sane than it is)

      The basic problem here is that Balaji is remarkably incurious about what states actually do and what they are for.

      libertarians are like house cats etc etc

      In practice, it’s a formula for letting all the wealthy elites within your territorial borders opt out of paying taxes and obeying laws. And he expects governments will be just fine with this because… innovation.

      this is some sovereign citizen type shit

      • yeah shillrinivan’s ideas are extremely Statisism: Sims Edition

        I’ve also seen essentially ~0 thinking from any of them on how to treat corner cases and all that weird messy human conflict shit. but code is law! rah!

        (pretty sure that if his unearned timing-fortunes ever got threatened by some coin contract gap or whatever, he’d instantly be all over getting that shit blocked)

    • Having read the whole book, I am now convinced that this omission is not because Srinivasan has a secret plan that the public would object to. The omission, rather, is because Balaji just isn’t bright enough to notice.

      That’s basically the entire problem in a nutshell. We’ve seen what people will fill that void with and it’s “okay but I have power here now and I dare you to tell me I don’t” and you know who happens to have lots of power? That’s right, it’s Balaji’s billionaire bros! But this isn’t a sinister plan to take over society - that would at least entail some amount of doing what states are for.

      Ed:

      “Who is really powerful? The billionaire philanthropist, or the journalist who attacks him over his tweets?”

      I’m not going to bother looking up which essay or what terrible point it was in service to, but Scooter Skeeter of all people made a much better version of this argument by acknowledging that the other axis of power wasn’t “can make someone feel bad through mean tweets” but was instead “can inflict grievous personal violence on the aged billionaires who pay them for protection”. I can buy some of these guys actually shooting someone, but the majority of these wannabe digital lordlings are going to end up following one of the many Roman Emperors of the 3rd century and get killed and replaced by their Praetorians.

      • the majority of these wannabe digital lordlings are going to end up following one of the many Roman Emperors of the 3rd century and get killed and replaced by their Praetorians.

        this is a possibility lots of the prepper ultra rich are concerned with, yet I don’t recall that I’ve ever heard the tech scummies mention it. they don’t realize that their fantasized outcome is essentially identical to the prepper societal breakdown, because they don’t think of it primarily as a collapse.

        more generally, they seem to consider every event in the most narcissistic terms: outcomes are either extensions of their power and luxury to ever more limitless forms or vicious and unjustified leash jerking. there’s a comedy of the idle rich aspect to the complacency and laziness of their dream making. imagine a boot stamping on a face, forever, between rounds at the 9th hole

      •  Soyweiser   ( @Soyweiser@awful.systems ) 
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        That’s basically the entire problem in a nutshell.

        I think a lot of these people are cunning, aka good at somewhat sociopathic short term plans and thinking, and they confuse this ability (and they survivor biassed success) for being good at actual planning (or just thinking that planning is worthless, after all move fast and break things (and never think about what you just said)). You don’t have to actually have good plans if people think you have charisma/a magical money making ability (which needs more and more rigging of the casino to get money on the lot of risky bets to hope one big win pays for it all machine).

        Doesn’t help that some of them seem to either be on a lot of drugs, or have undiagnosed adhd. Unrelated, Musk wants to go into Fort Knox all of a sudden, because he saw a post on twitter which has convinced him ‘they’ stole the gold (my point here is that there is no way he was thinking about Knox at all before he randomly came across the tweet, the plan is crayons).

                •  Soyweiser   ( @Soyweiser@awful.systems ) 
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                  Prff, like you would be part of the 20% that survives basic training. I know I wouldn’t.

                  (So many people miss this little detail, or the detail that it is cheaper to send a human with a gun down to a planet to arm the nukes (sorry Hellbombs) than to put a remote detonator on the nukes, I assume you were not one of those people btw, it is just me gushing positively about the satire in the game (it is a good game) and sort of despairing about media literacy/attention spans).

              • Yeah, I have reread the book last year. (Due to all the hot takes of people about the book in regards with Helldivers) and the movie is a lot better propaganda than the book (The middle, where they try to justify their world, drags on and on and is filled with strawmen and really weird moments. Esp the part where the main character, who isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, is told that he is smart enough to join the officers. You must be this short to enter)).

            • @Soyweiser @YourNetworkIsHaunted
              @cstross But it’s not only that: satire can’t reach the fash because they internalise and accept the monstruous, and thus, what is satirised to expose in ridicule its and their monstruosity and aberrant values for average, still decent and sane people, for them it is “Yes, this is what we want.” It’s never “if you can’t tell it’s satire it’s bad satire”, you can be as “subtle” as a kick in the face and they won’t get it because it \ what they want.

        • Unrelated, Musk wants to go into Fort Knox all of a sudden

          you know, one of better models of schizophrenia we have looks like this: take a rat and put them on a schedule of heroic doses of PCP. after some time, a pattern of symptoms that looks a lot like schizophrenia develops even when off PCP. unlike with amphetamine, this is not only positive symptoms (like delusions and hallucinations) but also negative and cognitive symptoms (like flat affect, lack of motivation, asociality, problems with memory and attention). PCP touches a lot of things, but ketamine touches at least some of the same things that matter in this case (NMDA receptor). this residual effect is easy to notice even by, and among, recreational users of this class of compounds

          richest man in the world grows schizo brain as a hobby, pillages government, threatens to destroy Lithuania

      • I can buy some of these guys actually shooting someone, but the majority of these wannabe digital lordlings are going to end up following one of the many Roman Emperors of the 3rd century and get killed and replaced by their Praetorians.

        i think it’ll turn out muchhh less dramatic. look up cryptobros, how many of them died at all, let alone this way? i only recall one ruja ignatova, bulgarian scammer whose disapperance might be connected to local mafia. but everyone else? mcaffee committed suicide, but that might be after he did his brain’s own weight in bath salts. for some of them their motherfuckery caught up with them and are in prison (sbf, do kwon) but most of them walk freely and probably don’t want to attract too much attention. what might happen, i guess, is that some of them will cheat one another out of money, status, influence, what have you, and the scammed ones will just slide into irrelevance. you know, to get a normal job, among normal people, and not raise suspicion

        • I’m probably being a bit hyperbolic, but I do want to clarify that the descent into violence and musical knife-chairs is what happens if they succeed at replacing or disempowering the State. The worst offenders going to prison and the rest quietly desisting is what happens when the State does something (literally anything, in fact. Tepid and halfhearted enforcement of existing laws was enough to meaningfully slow the rise of crypto) and they fail, but if they were to directly undermine that monopoly on violence I fully expect to see violence turned against them, probably at the hands of whatever agent they expected to use it on their behalf. In my mind this is the most dramatic possible conclusion of their complete lack of understanding of what they’re actually trying to do, though it is certainly less likely than my earlier comment implied.

  •  froztbyte   ( @froztbyte@awful.systems ) 
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    ran into this earlier (via techmeme, I think?), and I just want to vent

    “The biggest challenge the industry is facing is actually talent shortage. There is a gap. There is an aging workforce, where all of the experts are going to retire in the next five or six years. At the same time, the next generation is not coming in, because no one wants to work in manufacturing.”

    “whole industries have fucked up on actually training people for a run going on decades, but no the magic sparkles will solve the problem!!!11~”

    But when these new people do enter the space, he added, they will know less than the generation that came before, because they will be more interchangeable and responsible for more (due to there being fewer of them).

    I forget where I read/saw it, but sometime in the last year I encountered someone talking about “the collapse of …” wrt things like “travel agent”, which is a thing that’s mostly disappeared (on account of various kinds of services enabling previously-impossible things, e.g. direct flights search, etc etc) but not been fully replaced. so now instead of popping a travel agent a loose set of plans and wants then getting back options, everyone just has to carry that burden themselves, badly

    and that last paragraph reminds me of exactly that nonsense. and the weird “oh don’t worry, skilled repair engineers can readily multiclass” collapse equivalence really, really, really grates

    sometimes I think these motherfuckers should be made to use only machines maintained under their bullshit processes, etc. after a very small handful of years they’ll come around. but as it stands now it’ll probably be a very “for me not for thee” setup