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)

  • istewart@awful.systems
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    2 months ago

    Despite the industryā€™s deeply ingrained neophilia, I think it speaks to the importance of backwards compatibility and legacy systems.

    I canā€™t help but think that the genAI craze will end up being a regrettable side-quest along the path to ā€œcoding for non-programmersā€ akin to Visual Basic. But hey, I bet thereā€™s a lot more legacy VB apps being kept alive out there than anyone would be comfortable with.

    • gerikson@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      Despite having been one of those Linux weenies back in the day I have a lot of respect for the amount of work MS puts into backwards compatibility, dev tool upkeep, etc. And now theyā€™re actually Open Source! Hell hath frozen over (or they realized no universities wanted to pay Visual Studio licenses and lost a couple of generations of coders to Linux)

      • bitofhope@awful.systems
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        2 months ago

        And now theyā€™re actually Open Source!

        Eh, kind of but also not. VS Code is proprietary, but you have the vscode:vscodium::chrome:chromium thing. Unlike in Chromiumā€™s case, the proprietary version actually comes with some amenities one might actually care about (mainly in the plugin repository).

        You could say Open Source got some big wins in 2010s, leading to MSFT doing their fair share of contributions to Free software and openwashing as much of the rest as they can manage, but letā€™s not kid ourselves. They wouldnā€™t need to openwash if most of their stuff werenā€™t still proprietary. Last I checked MSVC, SQL Server, Azure, Copilot, IIS, Power BI, and the DirectX SDKs were all totally closed and jealously guarded.

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        2 months ago

        And now theyā€™re actually Open Source

        sorta, but itā€™s a veneer in furtherance of other goals (telemetry, market dominance, and control)

        one of the things I do with my computers is run LittleSnitch in always-prompt mode (LS is an app-level firewalling solution on macos), and hooo boy do I hate it when I end up having to open/touch vscode for some reason. the last time I did, I spent most of the first 5 minutes being prompted for (undeclared!) connections vscode attempted to make in the name of telemetry. similar experience with vscodium interacting with packages, and a bunch of their toolchains