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)

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    5 days ago

    I donā€™t think itā€™s exclusively due to rust but itā€™s a very cool change

    can only imagine how much wailing and consternation it must be causing in some areas

    • self@awful.systems
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      5 days ago

      the C reactionaries[*] I know definitely arenā€™t ok, but thatā€™s not a new condition. the cognitive load of never, ever writing bugs takes its toll, you know?

      [*] and I feel like I have to specify here: your average C dev probably isnā€™t a C reactionary, but the type of fuckhead who uses C to gatekeep systems development definitely is

      • bitofhope@awful.systems
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        5 days ago

        You (group A) think C is simple, that it can be thought of as portable assembly, that it teaches you how computers actually work, and that itā€™s easy to avoid memory safety errors with good programming discipline, and is therefore fine.

        You (group B) think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that itā€™s very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, therefore C shouldnā€™t be use for new software development.

        I think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that itā€™s very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, which are some of the features that make C so fun and exciting. Like rawdogging a one night stand!

        We are not the same.

        • gerikson@awful.systems
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          4 days ago

          Yeah thatā€™s the property of C that ensures it will never go away. If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course theyā€™ll start using it. Thereā€™s all sorts of rationalizations going on - itā€™s portable, itā€™s performant, itā€™s what the computer is really like - to justify basically driving a fast car without a seatbelt for the sheer thrill of it.

          • V0ldek@awful.systems
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            4 days ago

            If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course theyā€™ll start using it

            I always suspected that I wasnā€™t a REAL MANā„¢, but I didnā€™t know that me learning programming through C++ and being like ā€œwell this shit sucks, what the fuck, there has to be a better wayā€ was one of the first symptoms.

          • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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            4 days ago

            Past a certain point itā€™s a little bit like learning to type on a typewriter. On one hand it forces you to think about certain types of mistakes and forces you to avoid making errors. On the other hand it gives you a whole bunch of trained habits that are either useless or actively harmful once youā€™re working with better tools.

          • bitofhope@awful.systems
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            4 days ago

            Now to be fair, C really is quite close to what the machine is really like, if by C you mean B and by machine you mean PDP-7.

            Itā€™s also highly portable in the sense that all twenty or thirty well-formed, standard-compliant and nontrivial C programs ever written can be compiled to a mind-bogglingly huge variety of hardware and OS targets and even work correctly on some of them.

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        4 days ago

        [*] and I feel like I have to specify here

        and like all C things, the specificities of pointer mechanics might mean any one of a number of things and theyā€™re all correct

        • istewart@awful.systems
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          5 days ago

          The original statement was clearly meant to dereference a pointer to an object of type ā€œreactionary,ā€ but I expected it to return maybe a Yarvin or at least a Catturd

          • self@awful.systems
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            4 days ago

            the thrill of UB: you try to dereference a C reactionary but get a lambda calculus neoreactionary instead

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      4 days ago

      I donā€™t think itā€™s exclusively due to rust

      to be fair, I donā€™t know any other languages concerned with safety other than rust, so it was my only option for joke construction.

      • self@awful.systems
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        4 days ago

        the US DoD used to push for Ada adoption, with mixed success outside of where its use was mandated, due to Adaā€™sā€¦ well, look at it