25

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 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.

(December's finally arrived, and the run-up to Christmas has begun. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 14 points 2 days ago
[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago

If TCP/IP stack had feelings, it would have a great reason to feel insulted.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago

hi hi I am budweiser jabrony please join my new famous and good website 'tapering incorrectness dot com' where we speculate about which OSI layers have the most consciousness (zero is not a valid amount of consciousness) also give money and prima nocta. thanks

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Tcp/ip knew what it did, with its authoritarian desire to see packets in order. Reject authority embrace UDP!

But yes, they are using 'layer' wrong

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

Well that and "core". I could consider social media and even chatbots parts of internet infrastructure, but they both depend on a framework of underlying protocols and their implementation details. Without social media or chatbots the internet would still be the internet, which is not the case for, say, the Internet Protocol.

Also I would contend they're misusing "infrastructure". Social media and chat bots are kinds of services that are provided over the internet, but they aren't a part of the infrastructure itself anymore than the world's largest ball of twine is part of the infrastructure of the Interstate Highway System.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

Heh yeah, “infrastructure” in the same way that moneyed bayfuckers are “builders”

It is also a useful study in just how little they fucking by get about how anything works, and what models of reasoning they apply to what they perceive. Depressing, but useful

It legitimately feels like at least half of these jokers have the same attitude towards IT and project management that sovereign citizens do to the law. SovCits don't understand the law as a coherent series of rules and principles applied through established procedures etc, they just see a bunch of people who say magic words that they don't entirely understand and file weird paperwork that doesn't make sense and then end up getting given a bunch of money or going to prison or whatever. It's a literal cargo cult version of the legal system, with the slight hiccup that the rest of the world is trying to actually function.

Similarly, the Silicon Valley Business Idiot set sees the tech industry as one where people say the right things and make the buttons look pretty and sometimes they get bestowed reality-warping sums of money. The financial system is sufficiently divorced from reality that the market doesn't punish the SVBIs for their cargo cult understanding of technology, but this does explain a lot of the discourse and the way people like Thiel, Andreesen, and Altman talk about their work and why the actual products are so shite to use.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

Yeah, it is just a part of the application layer, and not even the whole one.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

Ah but, you see, the end goal of the internet is serving slop and ads

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

They somehow misused every word in that sentence.

Chicken penne is now rivaling spaghetti Bolognese as a core layer of pasta infrastructure.

[-] nightsky@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

please hate this article headline with me

I'm right there with you

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

the article headline: "Chatbots are now rivaling social networks as a core layer of internet infrastructure"

Counterpoint: "vibe coding" is rotting internet infrastructure from the inside, AI scrapers are destroying the commons through large-scale theft, chatbots are drowning everything else through nonstop lying

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

The real infrastructure is the friends we made along the way

this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
25 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

2316 readers
41 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS