this post was submitted on 29 Dec 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.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th January 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 1 week ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Want to wade into the snowy 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.

(Last substack for 2025 - may 2026 bring better tidings. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] rook@awful.systems 14 points 5 days ago (2 children)

How about some quantum sneering instead of ai for a change?

They keep calling it a 'processor,' but it's actually a refrigerated probability sculpture they beg to act like it Is a NAND gate for just half a microsecond

“Refrigerated probability sculpture” is outstanding.

Photo is from the recent CCC, but I can’t find where I found the image, sorry.

alt text

A photograph of a printed card bearing the text:

STOP DOING QUANTUM CRYPTOANALYSIS

  • DECADES of research and billions in funding, yet the largest number a quantum computer quantum physics experiment has ever factorized remains a terrifying 21
  • They keep calling it a 'processor,' but it's actually a refrigerated probability sculpture they beg to act like it Is a NAND gate for just half a microsecond - fever dreams of the QUANTUM CULT
  • The only countdown ticking toward Y2Q is researchers counting the years of funding they can squeeze out of it
  • Harvest now, decrypt later: because someday quantum computers will unlock the secret... that all the encrypted traffic was just web scrapers feeding Al model training
  • Want to hack a database? No need to wait for some Quantum Cryptocalypse, Just ask it politely with 'OR 1=1'

(I can’t actually read the final bit, so I can’t describe it for you, apologies)

They have played us for absolute fools.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Y2Q

I'm sorry, what does this stand for? Searching for it just results in usage without definition. I understand it's refering to breaking conventional encryption, but it's clearly an abbreviation of something, right? Years To Quantum? But then a countdown to it doesn't make sense?

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

I think it's a spin on Y2K. A hypothetical moment when quantum computing will break cryptography much like the year 2000 would have broken the datetime handling on some systems programmed with only the 20th century in mind.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago

But... But Y2K = Year 2000, like it's an actual sensible acronym. You can't just fucking replace K with Q and call it a day what the fuck, did ChatGPT come up with this??