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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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    5 hours ago

    re: election results. unfortunately i’m not surprised or even disappointed by now. it makes me feel sad for my 2015 self and her naivete. she didn’t understand what a disgusting and evil culture she lived in

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      1 hour ago

      Yeah this is fucked up. I feel so bad for everybody (esp the Americans, but this will hurt the world). Shit this prob means I should start looking into seriously helping out locally when all this explodes into more international shit. (Which imho is the best you can do anyway, do things locally, build a bit of a support network for your community).

      (Note I’m not American, but I think this will end badly, just the fucker stepping out of the paris accord for example, and all the weird blowhard fascists this will make feel emboldened to do more politics locally).

      E: I really hope the people who go ‘this is the same as in 2020, wait till all votes are counted’ are correct and not on hopeium.

    • self@awful.systems
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      4 hours ago

      I don’t have too much coherent to say right now

      fuck the fascists for what they’ve done and what they intend to do

      fuck the neoliberals for doing their best to convince marginalized people that they shouldn’t defend themselves against a terrible fate

      fuck the accelerationists for pumping shitheaded propaganda into the fediverse, for the victory lap they’re taking now, and for the general idea that their revolution is worth our deaths

      shit’s about to get very hard and very weird and I can’t stress enough how important it is to be careful who you trust with your life

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        1 hour ago

        I can’t stress enough how important it is to be careful who you trust with your life

        strong agree

        minor upside: it’s going to be a good time to make lists of people who suddenly feel comfortable to mask off

        fucking fuck this sucks

      • self@awful.systems
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        2 hours ago

        what a surprise, the thread all the leftist shitposters on mastodon boosted about how you’re a class traitor if you don’t vote for the Green Party (who I don’t buy as socialist) or “any other socialist party” (fucking who??? am I supposed to write “socialism” on my ballot in crayon???) conveniently went missing

        anyway post your favorite fuckhead accelerationist here, mastodon’s a shooting gallery tonight

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          anyway post your favorite fuckhead accelerationist here, mastodon’s a shooting gallery tonight

          I’ve intentionally been avoiding feeds the last few days because I just do not have the headspace for it, but I quickly checked on shit now

          and

          fuck

  • bitofhope@awful.systems
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    5 hours ago

    Bitcoin peaks as Trump is elected

    (Article encrypted in Finnish, see spoiler for translation)

    lightly fixed machine translation

    The cryptocurrency Bitcoin climbed to a new high record on Wednesday as Republican Donald Trump seemed to be taking the lead in the US presidential election. Bitcoin went up by almost $6,000 and traded above $75,000. The previous record from March, when the rate settled slightly below $73,800?

    Trump has previously branded cryptocurrencies a scam, but he changed his line and during his campaign has praised them and promised to make the United States the world’s centers for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

    “The price of Bitcoin has followed Trump’s position in opinion polls and the betting market. Investors estimate that the victory of the Republicans would increase the demand for digital currencies", says Russ Mold, an analyst at the financial company AJ Bell, to the AFP news agency.

    In the United States, the stock exchanges in New York were on the plus side at the end of the trading day on Tuesday after the previous day’s declines.

    The technology-focused Nasdaq closed up by a percent 1.4, while the more general S&P 500 was up 1.2 percent. The Industrial-oriented Dow Jones, on the other hand, ended the day with a 1.0 percent increase.

    The dollar is initially weakened against the euro, but began to rise in Asian markets against both the euro and the Japanese yen as Trump’s lead. Stock exchange rates were also rising in various parts of Asia. In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 index ended by a percent 2.4.

    The presidential race is a struggle between Democrats Kamala Harris and Republican Trump.

    Trump has proposed a combination of low corporate tax rates and looser regulation that would be boosted by corporate profits and tighten the stock market, experts told ABC News.

    Dry heaving at the shameless public fellatio Trump performed on Musk in his speech.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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    22 hours ago

    Recently read Brian Merchant’s latest piece on the upcoming election, and I felt like making a quick-and-dirty prediction:

    If Harris wins, I expect there will be some pretty harsh regulation against Silicon Valley. Putting aside everything but simple political pragmatism:

    1. Elon Musk’s election antics and Trump’s support from tech billoinaires have shown SV holds a significant amount of power over politics - power which will almost certainly prove a constant thorn in Harris’ side. As such, it’d be in her self interest to kneecap the Valley ASAP.

    2. Public opinion of Silicon Valley has taken a pounding over the years for a variety of reasons, with the AI slop-nami just the latest and most serious grievance the public has against them. Any tech regulation a Harris presidency makes (especially against AI) is gonna enjoy significant public support from day one.

  • self@awful.systems
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    2 days ago

    Ubisoft’s NFT game is going great:

    Ubisoft’s NFT game, which has about 6 active players, has a game breaking exploit where one player is winning every match.

    “One player pointed out that the Paulstar111 account was top of the rankings with over 56,000 matches played. It’s not yet clear how the player has been able to connect to so many games and automatically win them”

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    1 day ago

    In Arizona’s U.S. Senate race, Republican Kari Lake told Politico why she feels confident in her chances, despite recent polling showing her behind Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego: “Our polling is a little different. We take polling, but we also combine it with AI, which reads all of what’s happening on social media and across the Internet.”

    https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/mondays-campaign-11424-kari-lake-adds-ai-polls-rcna178681?icid=latestpost_bot

    Edit: Found the map she’s using:

    https://xcancel.com/IwriteOK/status/1853647442740441289#m

    • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 days ago

      A significant fraction of the people commenting on HN believe themselves to be the next Jeff Bezos. They cheer for the boot that crushes them, as surely one day they themselves will own that boot.

      • istewart@awful.systems
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        Said it before, I’ll say it again: if Americans are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires, HN is where the temporarily embarrassed billionaires go to hang out

  • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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    2 days ago

    For any drive by readers who slightly want to know more background about some stuff: Why Richard Feynman wasn’t a great rolemodel.

    (more context for the drive by readers, Feynman is often held up as a great man in STEM circles, and even more so in the world of LessWrong Rationalism. (Which is fine if it is about scientific achievements, but it often goes beyond that as here in their page on ‘traditional rationality’)).

    • corbin@awful.systems
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      21 hours ago

      Feynman reminds me of the brujo (one specific man, not brujería in general) from Pirsig’s Lila. Feynman’s safecracking and unorthodox approaches are like the brujo’s routine flaunting of social norms; through routinely doing things the wrong way (sacred clowning), new possible behaviors and modes of social existence are explored. Also, Feynman’s attitudes towards women remind me of that brujo’s tendency to spy on women by looking through their windows into their homes while they were not necessarily dressed, which the brujo’s society did not tolerate.

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      Before my postmodern deconstruction and unlearning of the worship of Great Men, all I needed to know about feynman not being a good person to look up to was the calling women bitches thing. Miss me with that PUA shit

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        22 hours ago

        Considering the history of PUA stuff on lesswrong, Im going to assume this was a pro not a con for them even.

  • maol@awful.systems
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    Forced to endure an episode of an Irish tv programme about the environment in which a guest sincerely listed carbon capture & storage and small nuclear reactor as potential energy solutions. As mentioned above, the earth is our coffin, hope is a mistake, etc

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      Carbon capture, small nuclear reactors. We stopped thinking big. To really solve climate change we need to do one easy, but big thing. Blow up the Sun.

      • istewart@awful.systems
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        Malcolm McDowell successfully blew up a star in one of the Star Trek movies, even if it did immediately get reversed by a time-travel MacGuffin. Perhaps we just need new leadership?

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          Don’t think we should put another space guy into politics, no matter their expertise at blowing up stars. They tend to go bad quickly.

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    Been seeing some stuff from this artist. This is the most recent thing to pop up for me. They seem alright, though I don’t have the energy to fully investigate their politics.

    • ashley@awful.systems
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      I’m about to pass out from the cognitive dissonance I’m feeling from seeing andressen and musk talking about privilege

      • swlabr@awful.systems
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        20 hours ago

        Unfortunately there aren’t enough mind altering, ego-killing drugs out there for either of these dicks to understand and internalise the (common usage of the) words they posted.

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    2 days ago

    Just some thoughts about musk trying to be liked and doing whatever idiotic thing he can to become liked, specifically speaking at trump rallies:

    • The maga turn as framed by this working theory makes sense, but it is also just what you’d expect of any idiot that got lucky under capitalism.
    • I read a hypothesis somewhere that when he does the jumping jacks at the trump rallies, he’s trying to make the letter X with his body. I’m just hoping this somehow derails the fitness industry.
    • it’s telling that he wears that occupy mars shirt, the thing that people liked him for before, well, pretty much everything after he became well known.

    Also: I don’t think we’ll make it to mars!!! Fuck mars. The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.

    NB: am not a US voter.

    • maol@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      The Martians seem to think that Mars will be like a new colony, with all the “hope” that implies, but it seems to me that colonization was a wretched process for many of the colonists (to say nothing of the people being colonized). Musk is only cheerful about it because he thinks he’ll be whipping the slaves rather than working the arid red soil.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        2 days ago

        Their grindcore coverband is called Earthcofffin Hopecrusher. Their 2 minute long album with 14 songs was pretty good.

        • Steve@awful.systems
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          Afterwards I was thinking it could also pass as an emo album name. I wonder if there is a good guessing game in “metal album title or emo album title?”

          • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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            I feel like it’s slightly more emo for sheer length, “The Earth is Our Coffin” and “Hope is a Mistake” are both awesome metal albums in their own right, but the combination can only be from the genre that brought you “A Detailed and Poetic Physical Threat to the Person who Intentionally Vandalized My 1994 Dodge Intrepid Behind Kate’s Apartment”