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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

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

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    22 hours ago

    Yeah thatā€™s the property of C that ensures it will never go away. If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course theyā€™ll start using it. Thereā€™s all sorts of rationalizations going on - itā€™s portable, itā€™s performant, itā€™s what the computer is really like - to justify basically driving a fast car without a seatbelt for the sheer thrill of it.

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
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      3 hours ago

      If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course theyā€™ll start using it

      I always suspected that I wasnā€™t a REAL MANā„¢, but I didnā€™t know that me learning programming through C++ and being like ā€œwell this shit sucks, what the fuck, there has to be a better wayā€ was one of the first symptoms.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      17 hours ago

      Past a certain point itā€™s a little bit like learning to type on a typewriter. On one hand it forces you to think about certain types of mistakes and forces you to avoid making errors. On the other hand it gives you a whole bunch of trained habits that are either useless or actively harmful once youā€™re working with better tools.

    • bitofhope@awful.systems
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      21 hours ago

      Now to be fair, C really is quite close to what the machine is really like, if by C you mean B and by machine you mean PDP-7.

      Itā€™s also highly portable in the sense that all twenty or thirty well-formed, standard-compliant and nontrivial C programs ever written can be compiled to a mind-bogglingly huge variety of hardware and OS targets and even work correctly on some of them.