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.

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

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    1 day ago

    I am in the same boat, except all of the software Iā€™ve ever written has been TeX

    Iā€™m sorry

    giving contrived examples to undergrads to demonstrate why dp[i][j] is a shit table name or why āˆž is better than float('inf') or MAX_INT in pseudocode

    that sound you can hear is my despairing screaming[0]

    VPN client where ā€¦ jump through the hoops of learning a new shitty client

    (not a pitch, but multiple commercial references) I really liked how simple tunnelbear made this for a lot, and also quite like how slick the wireguard desktop-style handling is (you can see this for example with fly.ioā€™s integration to that). I think thereā€™s long context here, and if you buy me a beer I could rant in detail

    PS: There is Goldwarden

    oh good, itā€™s in Go, my other code allergy

    shitposting aside, re the password manager thing: @self and I have co-ranted in dms, and about similar gripes.

    so, by way of idea, loose laundry list for foundations/design: modern crypto (jfc why is so much still going ā€œyeah gpg is fineā€), crdt sync, a sane fucking language to build everything on, own-devices friendly (in the ā€œyou can sync device to device peer-wiseā€ sense, vs the ā€œthereā€™s a remote server brokerā€ sense), and pretty okayā„¢ interfaces for client building/extensibility

    • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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      Iā€™m sorry

      me too, also i lied/forgot to mention that my particular PhD situation is so fucked up that i went from pure mathematics to cuda

        • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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          1 day ago

          That is a good rule. The GPU programmers seem to think this is good code and that itā€™s well-documented. I am still pretty out of my depth in this field, but it feels so silly to me. There is this historical bullshit about fortran only allowing 5 characters for a function name, and that (combined with some appeal to domain-specific knowledge) is used to justify stupid, freshman level shit like

          if uplo == 'U':
              # manually fill in this part with the version of the algorithm that is for upper triangular matrices
          else:  # just assume it's always U or L without checking, god forbid you use something modern like an enum, or even just a boolean
              # manually fill in this part with the version of the algorithm that is for lower triangular matrices
          

          edit: if memory serves, booleans were first discovered in 2011 by John T. Boole, which is why they donā€™t show up in fortran