this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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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.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th October 2025 - awful.systems (awful.systems)
submitted 1 week ago by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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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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[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I might flesh this out into a proper post, but I remember stumbling on this weird website: 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

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

the site didn’t have an ssl cert, since that was a way “modern browsers control you”.

I feel attacked. Not in the 'I agree with this person' way, but in a way that this feels like nerd sniping people like me. So stupid you have to react.

Java 8

See! That is what I mean!

But as somebody who values old cultures, I will not throw stones. ;)

Also the guy is an eugenicist wannabe cult leader.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 22 hours ago

Great find. A reactionary fetishising Japan?? Unheard of

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 day ago

I have just realised that I unintentionally fleshed this into a proper post.