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 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 so 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.)
Armin Ronacher, who is an experienced software dev with a fair amount of open and less open source projects under his belt, was up until fairly recently a keen user of llm coding tools. (heās also the founder of āearendilā, a pro-ai software pbc, and any company with a name from tolkienās legendarium deserves suspicion these days)
His faith in ai seems to have taken bit of a knock lately: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/
Heās not using psychosis in the sense of people who have actually developed serious mental health issues as a result of chatbot use, but software developers who seem to have lost touch with what they were originally trying to and just kind a roll around in the slop, mistaking it for productivity.
Heās still pro-ai, and seems to be vaguely hoping that improvements in tooling and dev culture will help stem the tide of worthless slop prs that are drowning every large open source project out there, but he has no actual idea if any of that can or will happen (which it wonāt, of course, but faith takes a while to fade).
As always though, the first step is to realise you have a problem.
oh look, simple sabotage as a service
Thatās an excellent summary of the product.
Improvements in Dev Culture and Other Fantastic Creatures
The Lobsters thread is likely going to centithread. As usual, donāt post over there if you werenāt in the conversation already. My reply turned out to have a Tumblr-style bit which I might end up reusing elsewhere:
Is there a public benefit corporation in existence that isnāt angling to be a kinder, gentler form of a VC grift?
Given that openai is now a precedent for removing the pb figleaf from a pbc, Iām assuming everyone will be doing it now and itāll just become another part of the regular grift.
Like that classic Žižek bit about fair trade organic coffee in Starbucks being a way of offering temptation, sin, penance and absolution all in one convenient package, you pay to absolve the guilt.
Invest in benefit corporations to wash the guilt/bad PR from social and environmental damage, and as a bonus if any of them randomly strike a vein in the hype mines, you can let go of the pbc frame and milk some profits. (they think. it remains to see how much profit can be made out of this bloated, costly software.)
and on the side of the entepreneur, start your grift as a pbc and you get some investment even if you never reach a point where profits may be made.
Sounds very much like political extremists winding each other up
what, you mean the various people who compared this to cryptocurrency and its ridiculous hype and excesses had a point? shock, horror
Ronacher is a nazi, so treat everything he touches as fashtech
Ahh. Iād seen a bunch of people pointedly avoiding things heād worked on and was working with, but no one actually said why so I was assuming it was llm related. No such luck, I guessā¦ the old missing stair strikes again.
My dude, the call is coming from inside the apartment.
At this point I think we can safely classify āGas Townā as a cognitohazard. Apparently this whole affair has proven immune to conventional parody, but has itself hit a point of such absurdity that itās breaking through the bubble.
misinformation
Wasnāt he also the guy who bullied xeiaso off lobsters or am I mistaken?Youāre thinking of friendlysock, who was banned for that following years of Catturd-style posting.
ronacher is just the dude who couldnāt understand why people call dhh a fascist after dhh wrote his fourteen-words-in-longform blog about london. (paraphrasing: sure, he said, thatās not a good blog, but why would people say such terrible words about dhh.)