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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Jeff āCoding Horrorā Atwood is sneering ā at us! On Mastodon:
T. chatbot booster rhetoric. So what are those examples, buddy? Very specifically? He replies:
Um helloā½ Maybe Jeff doesnāt have a spare room or room to sublet, but surely he can spare a couch or a mailbox? Let your friend use your mailing address. Store some of their stuff in your garage. To use the jargon of hackers, Jeff should be a better neighbor. This is a common issue for unhoused folks and they cannot climb back up the ladder into society without some help. Jeffās reinvented the Hulk tacos meme but they canāt even eat it because printer paper tastes awful.
āProvide an overview of local homeless servicesā sounds like a standard task for a volunteer or a search engine, but yes āyou can use my address for mail and store some things in my garage and I will email some contacts about setting you up with contract workā would be a better answer than just handing out secondhand information! Many āamazing things AI can doā are things the Internet + search engines could do ten years ago.
I would also like to hear from the friend āwas this actually helpful?ā
Friend: āI have a problemā
Me, with a stack of google printouts: āMy time to shine!ā.
E: ow god, I thought the examples were multiple and the friend one was just a random one. No, it was the first example. āI gave my friend a printout, which saved me timeā. Also, as I assume the friend still is unhoused, and they didnāt actually use the printout yet, he doesnāt know if this actually helped. Atwood isnāt a āhelping the unhousedā expert. He just assumed it was a good source. The story ends when he hands over the paper.
Also very funny that he is also going āyou just need to know how to ask questions the right way, which I learned by building stackoverflowā. Yeah euh, that is not a path a lot of people can follow up in.
Its even worse when I read the whole thread, Atwood claims to have $140 million, and the best he can do for āa friendā who is homeless is handing out some printouts with a few sections highlighted? And he thinks this makes him look good because he promises to give away half his wealth one day?
Like Clinton starting a go fund me for a coworker with cancer, the rich and their money are not voluntarily parted.
This also shows problems with the āeffective altruistā approach. Donating to the local theater or āto raise awareness of $badThingā might not be the best way of using funds, but when a friend needs help now, you have the resources to help them, and you say āno, that might not be as efficient as creating a giant charity to help strangers one dayā something is wrong.
so I got angry
I really hope atwoodās unhoused friend got the actual infrastructural support you mentioned (a temporary mailing address and an introduction letter emailed to an employer is only slightly more effort than generating slop, jeff, please) but from direct experience with philanthropists like him, Iām fairly sure Jeff now considers the matter solved forever
Thanks for this.
A bit odd to start out throwing shade at the Segway considering that the concept has been somewhat redeemed with e-bikes and e-scooters.
The āunhoused friendā story is about as likely to be true as the proverbial Canadian girlfriend story. āYou wouldnāt know her.ā
jeffās follow-up after the backlash clarifies: you wouldnāt know her because he donated right under the limit to incur a taxable event and didnāt establish a trust like a normal millionaire and also the LLM printout only came pointlessly after months of research and financially supporting the unhoused friend and also youāre no longer allowed to ask publicly about the person he brought up in public, take it to email
Alex, Iāll take āThings that never happenedā for $1000.
thereās been something thatās really been rubbed me the wrong way about jeff in the last few years. he was annoying before and had some insights but lately Iāve been using him as a sort of a jim crameresque tech-take-barometer.
What really soured me was after he started picking fights with some python people a few years back because someone dared post that a web framework? (couldnāt dig up the link) was a greater contribution to the world than S/O? His response was pretty horrid to the point where various python leaders were telling to stop being a massive dick because he was trying to be a bully with this ādo you know who I amā attitude because he personally had not heard of the framework so it wasnāt acshually at all that relevant compared to S/O.
and now this combined with his stupid teehee I am giving away my wealth guise look how altruistic I am really is a bit eugh