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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th February 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 2 weeks ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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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 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 soo 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.

(Taking over for Gerard this time. Special thanks to him for starting this.)

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[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

US government tech hellscape roundup part the third (ugh):

  1. Elon Musk jokes(?) that the government doesn't use SQL ??? (source, note that his tweet has an ableist slur). I don't even know what to think about this. Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?

  2. Article: Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency -- People here probably already knew all this; but one of the ways the admin thinks they can fire everyone is by replacing people with AI / automating everything. Some of the social media responses from federal workers are pretty great:

    Really excited to see AI put on some waders and unclog a beaver dam from a water structure for me.

    If I've learned anything from all this it's about how ~~unfathomably based~~ cool a lot of federal workers are.

  3. The less fascist / cowed parts of the infosec industry are currently raising the alarm about how insecure this all is. A representative social media post from Gossi The Dog

    I definitely recommend posting about what is happening in the US on LinkedIn as you will quickly learn many of the largest security vendors are staffed by people who have no interest in protecting people, while posting with their employers names.

  4. Some federal workers have been fired via emails calling them [EmployeeFirstName].

Edit:

  1. ~~Elon Musk~~ The US State Department plans to buy $400m worth of armored Cybertrucks from Elon Musk (nytimes) (Edit: may have been ordered under Biden's administration)

  2. doge.gov has been updated. Mostly just with more useless baby's first website materials; but they promise a "comprehensive, government-wide org chart" and are hiring "software engineers, InfoSec engineers, and other technology professionals".

    Aside: I already found ~~two~~ three minor website bugs despite not really looking for them and the website being tiny. But that can't be right... they're IT professionals while I'm DEI.

  3. Find replace is so hard :( and that's why the government writes about "gay and rights" to avoid saying the... the... the forbidden t-word of which I dare not speak

  4. So about how I said doge.gov gives baby's first website vibes; it's database was left world writable lol

  5. doge.gov shares classified information

  6. Classic Musk "humor": a "tech support" T-shirt to allude to all of this. The dude really likes custom T-shirts (which to be fair custom t-shirts can be awesome when they're less bad)

[-] nightsky@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago

Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?

Or: does he even know what it is?

[-] nightsky@awful.systems 3 points 1 week ago

Nr 7 would be amusing if the context was not so evil. It's weird also how they allow gay but not transgender (oh no I said the word!), but I guess the question is "for how long"...

Nr 8 is just... wow. Very surprising that they don't care at all and/or are super incompetent. I wonder how much AI was involved in creating that site.

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago

It is quite the feeling seeing the federal government do their best to erase and discriminate against me and other trans people so openly and flagrantly and suddenly. Can't really put it into words easily. I now feel like a stranger in my own country.

r.e. incompetence look at #9 that I just added :D (I guess I should cut it off there and start collecting stuff for a new comment next week)

[-] nightsky@awful.systems 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yeah, it's really horrible how they are rolling back progress, and it's happening so quickly. For whatever it's worth, I have a lot of sympathy for what you and other trans people have to experience.

Nr 9... uggh! Especially great the part in the article where they just deny it, while the reporter says it was still going on.

this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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