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

  • nightsky@awful.systems
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    4 days ago

    Donā€™t worry they will use ChatGPT to learn all the COBOL they need.

    Oh why would they. They will just rewrite it from scratch in a weekend, right? And reading the original code would only pollute the mind with historic knowledge, and that stands in the way of disruptive innovation.

    (btw I appreciate your correctly nested parentheses.)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      4 days ago

      (btw I appreciate your correctly nested parentheses.)

      I once fucked those up and people got mad. (I kid, they pointed out I usually use them correctly). I mostly use parentheses to note that im going a bit offtrack, which keeps happening, it is a bad habit.

      • zogwarg@awful.systems
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        3 days ago

        Myself Iā€™ve learned to embrace the em dashā€”like so, with a special shoutout to John Greenā€”and interleaving ( [ { } ] ). On mac and linux conveniently short-cutted to Option+Shift+ā€˜-ā€™, windows is a much less satisfying Alt+0150 without third party tools like AutoHotKey.

        • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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          3 days ago

          I write -- for ā€œen dashā€ and --- for ā€œem dashā€ and I end up looking like an asshole in emails a lot. However, they appear to work correctly here:

          en: -- en: ā€“
          em: --- em: ā€”

          Also, Gnome Characters can be useful, though I have been looking for a good replacement.

          • nightsky@awful.systems
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            3 days ago

            I like to use -- in plain text too! LaTeX user high fiveā€¦?

            Although I read somewhere recently that some people consider usage of em-dashes as a sign of AI-generated text. Oh well.

            • self@awful.systems
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              2 days ago

              this feels like a pattern too ā€” so many naturally divergent or non-standard (from the perspective of a white American who thinks they own the English language) elements of writing are getting nonsensically trashjacketed as telltale signs that a text must be generated by an LLM. see also paully g trashjacketing ā€œdelveā€ for purely racist reasons and the authors of the Nix open letter having the accusation of LLM use leveled at them by people who didnā€™t read the letter and didnā€™t want anyone else to either.

            • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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              2 days ago

              LaTeX user high fiveā€¦?

              I need to finish crying over all my underfull hboxes, can we high-five in the evening?