this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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TechTakes

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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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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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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 24 points 1 day ago (4 children)

as one of the two non-computer scientists here, every time I check in there seems to be some load bearing open source project I've never heard of that's gone fash. "GreenBlox is refusing to kick out a contributor who said the jewish question should be on the table??" "PipeLinux official account is posting that pronouns don't exist?" open source people, are you ok?

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

Hello other non-cs person!

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 24 points 1 day ago (1 children)

open source people, are you ok?

No.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

Think this about narrows it down. I was thinking about a longer post on all the bad dynamics and other weird things cs people and esp open source people have to deal with but you did it better.

[–] aio@awful.systems 24 points 1 day ago (1 children)

CS has a huge number of people who think you can derive the solutions to social problems from first principles. It's impossible to reason with them.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago

it seems to me that bigger problem is that they also think that software can solve these problems

[–] rook@awful.systems 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

For the most part, the sudden rash of people deciding that their bigotry is now publicly acceptable is mostly around non-loadbearing things, because aggrieved entitled nerds aren’t great at working in a team (hyprland has definitely suffered from alienating people and missing out on fixes and compatibility work).

The rubygems stuff was a special case, because it was a hostile takeover of some important infrastructure by a shitty company, but most of the rest are unexciting projects that have found that giving it the old H-H is good publicity and more importantly: there are some rich folk throwing money around. Not a lot of cash in open source under normal circumstances.

[–] rook@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago

Not that I want to minimise the problems that open source and tech in general very definitely have, but in this specific case it is a small number of people who are very loud and/or very rich, and sometimes both.