Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th December 2025 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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 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. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, and happy holidays in general!)

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

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    9Ā·
    3 months ago

    Also I canā€™t help but notice that he didnā€™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
      7Ā·
      3 months ago

      Itā€™s okay, he definitely wants to verify it but actually confirming that this whole disaster pile worked as intended and produced usable code apparently didnā€™t make the cut.

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

      GUI ā€” I didnā€™t even have time to make an Emacs UI, let alone a nice web UI. But someone should totally make one, and if not, Iā€™ll get around to it eventually.

      Plugins ā€” I didnā€™t get a chance to implement any functionality as plugins on molecule steps, but all the infrastructure is in place.

      The Mol Mall ā€” a marketplace and exchange for molecules that define and shape workloads.

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

      Also worth noting that in the jargon heā€™s created for this, a ā€œwispā€ 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 thereā€™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.