Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024 - eviltoast

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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      My heuristic is basically: until we can easily control the environment of earth, terraforming will not be on the horizon. Given that we are hell-bent on driving off of as many cliffs as we can, Iā€™m pretty happy to continue thinking that weā€™ll never get off this rock proper within the olā€™ lifespan

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      this is a fun read

      another I ran into earlier (via an outfit from these parts) is this piece from The Conversation. I wish I could get as irked about linear extrapolation as I usually do, but in lieu of guardrails arresting (and clawing back!) all that shit from all these ghoulsā€¦

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      2 months ago

      (Edit: I based parts of this post on misremembered/misinterpreted tweet from musk, so reader beware, Iā€™m being wrong about Musks stated plans here, see my later reply in the thread. Not sure if I should leave the post up, edit it (eurgh effort), or just delete)

      Made a decision for the donā€™t waste time common good.

      • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
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        2 months ago

        @Soyweiser Youā€™re assuming the first Starship to Mars has a cargo of canned primates. Rest assured, it canā€™t and it wonā€™t. (Also, I doubt Starship will be ready for Marsā€”extended duration in space, rememberā€”in time for the 2026 launch window. Although a robot probe as a payload launched atop Starship is entirely possible in that time frame: you donā€™t need reusability, just a bloody big payload bay and the ability to reach orbit once, which Starship achieved as of OFT-3.)