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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt 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.)


How about some quantum sneering instead of ai for a change?
āRefrigerated probability sculptureā is outstanding.
Photo is from the recent CCC, but I canāt find where I found the image, sorry.
alt text
A photograph of a printed card bearing the text:
STOP DOING QUANTUM CRYPTOANALYSIS
(I canāt actually read the final bit, so I canāt describe it for you, apologies)
They have played us for absolute fools.
Iām sorry, what does this stand for? Searching for it just results in usage without definition. I understand itās refering to breaking conventional encryption, but itās clearly an abbreviation of something, right? Years To Quantum? But then a countdown to it doesnāt make sense?
I think itās a spin on Y2K. A hypothetical moment when quantum computing will break cryptography much like the year 2000 would have broken the datetime handling on some systems programmed with only the 20th century in mind.
But⦠But Y2K = Year 2000, like itās an actual sensible acronym. You canāt just fucking replace K with Q and call it a day what the fuck, did ChatGPT come up with this??
Itās a stupid fucking name alright. I guess itās a bit like any old scandal being noungate despite the Watergate scandal being named after the building and having nothing to do with water.
I mean itās so stupid that you had to explain to me that itās based on Y2K because it makes no sense
Yes, this is why we need to resist stupid names before they enter mainstream or the world will continue to get dumber
o7ās already posted it! https://awful.systems/post/6746032/9903043