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 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 so 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.)

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    24 hours ago

    Armin Ronacher, who is an experienced software dev with a fair amount of open and less open source projects under his belt, was up until fairly recently a keen user of llm coding tools. (he’s also the founder of “earendil”, a pro-ai software pbc, and any company with a name from tolkien’s legendarium deserves suspicion these days)

    His faith in ai seems to have taken bit of a knock lately: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/

    He’s not using psychosis in the sense of people who have actually developed serious mental health issues as a result of chatbot use, but software developers who seem to have lost touch with what they were originally trying to and just kind a roll around in the slop, mistaking it for productivity.

    When Peter first got me hooked on Claude, I did not sleep. I spent two months excessively prompting the thing and wasting tokens. I ended up building and building and creating a ton of tools I did not end up using much. “You can just do things” was what was on my mind all the time but it took quite a bit longer to realize that just because you can, you might not want to. It became so easy to build something and in comparison it became much harder to actually use it or polish it. Quite a few of the tools I built I felt really great about, just to realize that I did not actually use them or they did not end up working as I thought they would.

    You feel productive, you feel like everything is amazing, and if you hang out just with people that are into that stuff too, without any checks, you go deeper and deeper into the belief that this all makes perfect sense. You can build entire projects without any real reality check. But it’s decoupled from any external validation. For as long as nobody looks under the hood, you’re good. But when an outsider first pokes at it, it looks pretty crazy.

    He’s still pro-ai, and seems to be vaguely hoping that improvements in tooling and dev culture will help stem the tide of worthless slop prs that are drowning every large open source project out there, but he has no actual idea if any of that can or will happen (which it won’t, of course, but faith takes a while to fade).

    As always though, the first step is to realise you have a problem.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      12 hours ago

      the founder of “earendil”, a pro-ai software pbc,

      Is there a public benefit corporation in existence that isn’t angling to be a kinder, gentler form of a VC grift?

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        11 hours ago

        Given that openai is now a precedent for removing the pb figleaf from a pbc, I’m assuming everyone will be doing it now and it’ll just become another part of the regular grift.

        • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          11 hours ago

          Like that classic Žižek bit about fair trade organic coffee in Starbucks being a way of offering temptation, sin, penance and absolution all in one convenient package, you pay to absolve the guilt.

          Invest in benefit corporations to wash the guilt/bad PR from social and environmental damage, and as a bonus if any of them randomly strike a vein in the hype mines, you can let go of the pbc frame and milk some profits. (they think. it remains to see how much profit can be made out of this bloated, costly software.)

          and on the side of the entepreneur, start your grift as a pbc and you get some investment even if you never reach a point where profits may be made.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      12 hours ago

      improvements in tooling and dev culture

      Improvements in Dev Culture and Other Fantastic Creatures

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      17 hours ago

      The Lobsters thread is likely going to centithread. As usual, don’t post over there if you weren’t in the conversation already. My reply turned out to have a Tumblr-style bit which I might end up reusing elsewhere:

      A mind is what a brain does, and when a brain consistently engages some physical tool to do that minding instead, the mind becomes whatever that tool does.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      21 hours ago

      Sounds very much like political extremists winding each other up

      …and if you hang out just with people that are into that stuff too, without any checks, you go deeper and deeper into the belief that this all makes perfect sense.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        14 hours ago

        what, you mean the various people who compared this to cryptocurrency and its ridiculous hype and excesses had a point? shock, horror

        • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          12 hours ago

          ronacher is just the dude who couldn’t understand why people call dhh a fascist after dhh wrote his fourteen-words-in-longform blog about london. (paraphrasing: sure, he said, that’s not a good blog, but why would people say such terrible words about dhh.)