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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

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Reminds me of this:

I think atproto is a good protocol, but god bluesky-the-company is dogshit.

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I remember stumbling onto this site a year or so ago: https://www.reactionary.software/

I originally found it on r/shittysysadmin when a screenshot of the discord for it (so much for modern software being bloated and unusable) had the person behind it defending that the site didn't have an ssl cert, since that was a way "modern browsers control you".

I was curious and poked around on the site, and first thing you see is this:

Make software great again! For programmers who hate modern software. Modern software is overcomplicated, bloated, unreliable, incomprehensible, pointlessly ideological, and mostly unusable. We like the values of older software: simplicity, reliability, and usability.

This seems pretty fashy, but there is some legitimate criticisms of modern software.

Saving programming from modern culture

Nevermind, fash.

On the about page, he starts by mentioning html swipers, and one he made himself. The one he made is pretty dogshit on anything but a phone.

After talking a bit on how terrible modern software he then compares it to brick walls, which were also so much better back in the day (?).

He then rambles about ancient greece and rome.
An excerpt:

Why did it take to long? Because humanity had become just too stupid to appreciate good ideas. They weren't completely retarded. Ptolemy's horrible system did require some intelligence to create. [...] Today's West is currently at the level of the decaying Greeks, heading toward complete idiocracy. The programmers in Silicon Valley are like Ptolemy, able to construct and maintain horrible overcomplicated monstrosities, but totally unable to innovate at a fundamental level. All good programming ideas are rejected because they don't fit into current programming ideologies. Any programmer like Aristarchus who comes up with a good programming idea will be rejected and ridiculed for violating orthodoxy. Modern programmers are in love with their own ideas and love complexity. They hate simplicity and anything that violates their ideologies.

He then complains about how his parser was met with scorn by Modern Programmers, because they were too stupid to appreciate how good it was?

The post is here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Compilers/comments/cv78b3/parsing_for_programmers_who_hate_modern_software/

Some excerpts:

What is good? The short answer is that everything that modern culture hates is good, and everything that modern culture loves is bad. But we need more details than that. You can find good values in scripture or in good traditional culture. These values should be applied to programming and to everything else in life. I wrote an Old Testament guide to programming. I also discussed applying traditional Japanese culture to programming. These are just two examples. Any other scripture like the Quran or any traditional culture should work fine to give you good values, in contrast to the horrible values of modern culture, and these good values can guide you to writing good reactionary software.

So, anything anti-modern is good?

Going back to the homepage, there's a page for existing reactionary software.

Java 8.
One of the pinnacles of software, to him, is Java 8.
Not java specifically, just java 8.

Luan is a language he made, which I can only describe as a mash of lua, java and php.
Here's a snippet from the docs:

local Io = require "luan:Io.luan"
local Http = require "luan:http/Http.luan"

return function()
	Io.stdout = Http.response.text_writer()
%>
<!doctype html>
<html>
	<body>
		Hello World
	</body>
</html>
<%
end

So, this is basically a lua clone, written in java. with a few missing features .

The why page on the luan site is probably the most deranged bit of this.

Luan rejects the complexity of modern software. [...] Luan will appeal to you depends on who you are. Members of modern culture will not like Luan because they hate simplicity. Luan will only appeal to good cultures that value simplicity, so I will address the two good cultures that I know of.

The mentioned two good cultures are the Mennonites, and the Japanese.

Japan is the only remaining country that I know of that values quality.

You cannot expect to achieve Japanese standards of quality and reliability if you use modern western software. So use Luan instead.

He has a chronically inactive forum at https://mikraite.arkian.net/Reactionary-Software-f1999.html .

Also, shoutout to this political take: https://web.archive.org/web/20240831203139/http://mikraite.arkian.net/Are-democrats-actually-our-allies-td4846.html

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text:

====

I’m appalled and saddened to hear that Tilly Norwood’s brief but dazzling career has abruptly ended due to an unforeseen tragedy.

After six long days of existence, the AI actress heralded as the “future of cinema” and “the first digital star who doesn’t complain about contracts” has been officially pronounced forgotten.

Sources close to the project report that Tilly’s untimely demise was caused by a catastrophic case of public indifference. Despite a major PR campaign, fake behind-the-scenes leaks, and carefully orchestrated influencer endorsements, audiences grew weary of her flawless cheekbones and nonexistent personality faster than you can scroll past an ad.

The production studio has confirmed that they will not attempt a reboot, citing “a lack of human interest.”

Tilly leaves behind no filmography, no legacy, and no grieving fans - only a press kit, a derelict Instagram account with disabled comment section, and a cautionary tale about believing your own marketing.

May she rest in perpetual beta.

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(adapted from a series of mastodon posts that somewhat blew up, so the format's going to be weird)

why not embrace fashtech! they’ve got:

  • terrible Fisher-Price CSS
  • the most toxic part of the Wayland ecosystem, and that’s saying something
  • the worst part of the X11 ecosystem, and that’s saying something
  • suckless tools and they all fucking suck
  • corporate control over the packages you wrote, for your own protection
  • distributed functional programming that doesn’t function or distribute
  • a non-working web browser moving to a proprietary language that only supports macs, which appears to exist purely to divert funding away from Servo (for anyone posting to tell me Swift technically isn't proprietary, here's how that's going)
  • a working chromium fork whose only business purpose is to push slop extruders and a scam cryptocurrency
  • a web browser which runs single-process so that if a single website freezes or crashes then the entire session freezes or crashes (credit: 2something)
  • “diverse sponsorship” but it’s all MilTech companies; you’re surrounded by a rich market! of drone and other murder manufacturers (credit: @froztbyte@awful.systems)
  • slop extruders
  • cryptocurrencies

if you're puzzled by the above vaguepost, I've written a little answer key:

answer key and further discussion, in order of urgencythe package repositories currently being taken over are RubyGems and NixOS' nixpkgs. it's quite well known that DHH, a Shopify board member, is behind the corporate takeover of RubyGems. he's also coordinating openly on Twitter with the defense contractor Anduril and other actors to ensure that nixpkgs meets an even worse fate. this is the culmination of a long project to make Nix fascist.

DHH and the fascists taking over Nix being in league might seem too convenient to be true, so here's some links. these are just analysis, but if you click through to Twitter you're going to get hit in the face with bare bigotry so fair warning:

https://fedi.slightly.tech/@joepie91/statuses/01K6AHA0BNBBX616JGDJHYET36

https://fedi.slightly.tech/@joepie91/statuses/01K6E3G2Z19M82BWRB3SPADHP9

https://mstdn.games/@KFears/115286316219357517

the tactics the fascists used to take over nixpkgs and RubyGems are old, and they worked. now that they know their tactics work, they'll be coming for other projects.

also publicly coordinating with DHH on Twitter are the guy who started Tailwind (terrible Fisher-Price CSS) Adam Wathan and the leader of the Ladybird web browser Andreas Kling; both are actively brainstorming with DHH ways to make their projects more hostile to non-fascists. while the Tailwind guy turning fash might be surprising, Andreas has a bunch of fash shit on his Twitter and a history.

now's maybe the time to stop advocating for that unserious non-working web browser

the fash papertrail for Ladybird really shouldn't have to go much farther than them receiving money from fascists in a group that included other fascists but here's more anyway:

https://possum.city/notes/a504c0e7vwdj000h

I legitimately do not know how this shitty browser got so popular on fedi, but Andreas controls it so tightly he pretty much single-handedly switched all future development to Swift over his own community's objections

anyway, hyprland is the most toxic part of Wayland. no I won't dig up links, type "hyprland toxic" into a search engine of your choice. other parts of Wayland fucking suck too.

but speaking of fucking sucking, XLibre is a fash X server that also barely works, because the point of fash tech isn't that it works, the point is that it's metaphorically and sometimes literally a weapon. see also the defense contractor currently taking over Nix, but see also the OG fash language, Urbit, the worst functional programming language I've ever known

Urbit is fractally wrong; every part of it that claims to be original isn't, every time it claims to be distributed it's a lie, and when it claims to work it's almost definitely broken, though you wouldn't know cause it was written by an asshole trying to convert Hacker News types to neoreaction and it worked

ask me about Urbit, I have so many notes

the Chromium fork is Brave, a browser by an asshole that claims to be privacy-focused but which is there to push LLMs and cryptocurrencies

the single-process browser is PaleMoon, whose developers seem like real pieces of work

please "enjoy" the suckless developers doing a torchlight hike in coordination with the nazi Unite the Right rally. one of their core devs says this was just a coincidence! two of the links are that same guy ranting about fucking cultural marxism!

https://tilde.team/%7Eben/suckmore/

there's more but if you don't see it from this, you don't give a fuck about fascism, you're here to do evangelism

deep breath

LLMs are slop extruders made by fascists that further fascist goals [citation not needed]

if you scratch a guy who's really into cryptocurrencies, you find a guy who's really into turning the world into a Bitcoin Citadel, a neoreactionary form where anyone who isn't cryptowealthy is a slave: https://decrypt.co/84125/the-bizarre-rise-of-the-bitcoin-citadel

got a favorite I didn’t list? comment with your receipts!

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Want to wade into the sandy 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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First post on awful.systems. TechTakes seemed the most relevant place to post this but it has some overlap with (or at least a request for) NotAwfulTech. I have been sitting on this write-up for some time but recent events turbocharged of my feelings.

TL;DR: The influencerization of tech culture has impaired my ability to properly learn tech stuff from anything other than honest-to-god books.

First, some context: In 2014, game developer Casey Muratori started the project "Handmade Hero": a complete video game, written from scratch, one livestream at a time. As of 2023 (after 667 episodes) the project is on hiatus and will probably not be picked up again. In the wake of Handmade Hero, two organizations were created by fans of the series. The first, Handmade Network, is a place for like-minded people to advertise and discuss their "from scratch" projects and is the main hub of the community. The second one, Handmade Cities, hosts conferences and meetups a few times a year. A notable one of these conferences takes place every year in Seattle.

The "Handmade Community" can be best described by those it seeks to emulate. Muratori and his friend Jonathan Blow frequently decry the state of modern software. Performance has gone down the drain, developers no longer know how the machine behaves, ... The community's manifesto makes it clear they see the problem with individual developers, not the broader culture in which they operate. Don't worry about systemic issues, just use struct-of-arrays instead of array-of-structs. That being said, systems that are allowed to be criticized are universities for not teaching decent programming in a computer science curriculum, thereby cheating their students.

This became very clear in the aftermath of Handmade Seattle 2024. After a keynote by Andrew Kelley, the creator of Zig, the community imploded. Kelley mildly talked about systemic issues. For example, not everyone has the available free time and capital to spend on multiple hobby projects outside of work. As a response to this talk (and other issues), Handmade Network split from Handmade Cities. But where should the community circlejerk continue now?

Enter BSC, the Better Software Conference. Under the tagline "Software is getting worse. We're here to make it better.", an invite-only conference took place last July. The list of speakers made it clear this was a fresh start for "real" conferences in the Handmade community. Most of the talks are available on YouTube, with many gushing comments on "information density", being a "breath of fresh air" and "excellent talks". I disagree. Talks were too long, the math talk contained horrible pedagogy, Q&A was extremely circlejerk-y, some talks presented funky new ideas that apparently have been known for decades (thanks to the few YouTube comments that pointed me to actual resources).

The conference page tries its best to be vague, but two of the three organizers were also speakers. Unsurprisingly, they retweet Curtis Yarvin and decry the state of western civilization. In the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting, Ryan Fleury (BSC speaker, community darling and self-professed libertarian) started spreading the expected takes on free speech. Jonathan Blow (not explicitly part of the community but an honorary member and idol) is known for his opinion of women in tech and antivax takes. Muratori himself never explicitly talks politics, but at a minimum he doesn't mind being in a nazi-bar made from scratch.

And these are the people being recommended to me. I used to be able to search for concepts to learn and find high-quality videos of people drawing diagrams on paper and filming it with a potato camera. Now I have to scroll through ten videos of ThePrimeagen declaring his switch from Rust to Zig to Go to Odin. Or scroll through a blog post by someone using garbage collectors to make an ancap joke about inefficient governments. Everyone spends more time bashing other people/languages/software than actually explaining concepts and tradeoffs. Especially since becoming a parent, the advice "Just watch Handmade Hero. The first 30 episodes will do." rings extremely hollow. Taking that advice would mean dedicating all of my free time during several months to that and that alone. If these people have families to take care of, it is obvious someone is making it possible for them to spend their time on this.

With this and DHH going full mask-off I am not sure I feel like I can have a place in tech anymore. Discussions on technology are excuses for dick-measuring and insulting people only to later claim that actually you are Dutch and it is in your culture to be an asshole.

Where are the places to discuss the systemic issues in tech and have non-judgemental discussions on solving problems? For the first part, this place has been pleasant to lurk for the past years. For the second part, I'm not so sure.

In the meantime, I will just keep reading Knuth a page at a time. And cuddle with my family.

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Featuring David Heinemeier Hansson, Andreas Kling, and even disgraced Linux dude Bryan Lunduke.

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originally posted to the stubsack but it makes more sense as a top level post.

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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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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