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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    13Ā·
    2 months ago

    ok my first thought was to make a joke about castle warfare, despite my knowledge set being ephemera from a childhood appreciating tech trees in video games. So I did some research:

    • The etymology of ā€œmoatā€ is that it comes from the word ā€œmotteā€. I will not elaborate.
    • Moats were effective against early forms of siege warfare, like battering rams, siege towers, and mining out the foundations of a castleā€™s defences, or anything that required approaching the castle directly
    • Moats were made somewhat obsolete by siege artillery, which did not need to be in the direct vicinity of the castle

    Err so yeah. Make your own jokes, ig.

    Anyway, this has been MoatFactsā„¢ļø. Paging @[email protected] for better commentary*

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      14Ā·
      2 months ago

      In this context, ā€œmoatā€ is a cargo-cult invocation of Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham. Just another square on the hackernews bingo

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      12Ā·
      2 months ago

      idk what to exactly put there, moat is still an obstacle even in modern context, but assault on a castle with a moat using modern weaponry would be hilariously one-sided. you can suppress defenders with something, use a bridge layer to get inside the moat, then let combat engineers do their shenanigans to ā€œopenā€ castle one way or another. or you can use helis to do the same, or you can just level it all with artillery or airstrike or maybe even loads of ATGMs

      that said itā€™s not completely useless. moats but dry were used as a part of fixed fortifications in ww1 quite successfully. freshly invented electrified barbed wire fence and machine guns made them quite hard to pass, especially if you are, say, a peasant from tula oblast born in 1898 that has never seen powerline before. i think the last proper moat use in large-scale warfare happened during iran-iraq war, in battle of the marshes, when iraqis flooded previously dry area known as fish lake and put underwater coils of barbed wire and high-voltage cables. defensive tactic used there was to shoot at assaulting iranians to make them abandon or fall out of their boats or amphibious vehicles, then when they were in the water high voltage lines were energized. iranians eventually crossed the marshes entirely using speedboats. maybe itā€™s not that outdated considering that last recored bayonet charge happened in 2004 (by brits in iraq). ymmv