Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
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 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
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AGI is coming, we're already at the "dumb guy who doesn't understand math but thinks he's smart" level
I asked ChatGPT, the modern apotheosis of unjustified self-confidence, to prove that .999… is less than 1. Its reply began “Here is a proof that .999… is less than 1.” It then proceeded to show (using familiar arguments) that .999… is equal to 1, before majestically concluding “But our goal was to show that .999… is less than 1. Hence the proof is complete.” This reply, as an example of brazen mathematical non sequitur, can scarcely be improved upon.
I’ve said it before a few times: this shit is a tunguska-level event on society today
that there’s now even retroactive contamination fallout is sickening :|
tunguska incident only wiped out local squirrel population and its fallout was inert. this is more like leaded gasoline: introduced for profit, polluting for decades, makes people dumber during entire duration of it, entrenches techbros and makes them responsible for development of infrastructure going forward
Sooner or later the only remaining source of reliable digital information will be 1990s multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedias.
brb, saving copies of physics and math books before they go offline
I don’t even have an optical drive anymore jesus.
Encarta 96 btw
As a fan of physical media, I recently bought another drive as a spare, currently is IMO a good time for that. They still make really good drives in large enough quantities so they're cheap, but that could end any time. Once production stops, they will vanish silently. Learned that lesson back then when floppy drives were suddendly gone... kinda wish I had stocked up a few new ones (for retro computing purposes) when they were still available.
Yeah production of consumer writeable CDs / DVDs / BDs has basically stopped already. The end is in sight.
Also I'm not sure how much of a problem this is for newer CD drives, but older ones tend to give out sooner or later.
My Sega Saturn*'s drive still works, but I also installed a Satiator** drive emulator in case that changes.
* My username is serious business after all
** Had to go with this option since it's the only non-destructive one
expensive archival write-once BDs
Whats your fav saturn game?
Nights into Dreams. I'd have dreams about that game as a kid.
There's always overpriced audiophile gear...
This seems like an apt point to share Maxwell Neely-Cohen's "Century-Scale Storage".
I knew there was a reason I couldnt part with my CD tower.
I'm the weirdo who installs blu-ray drives in all my computers. I'm also the weirdo who has multiple computers. There are currently three or four (I've lost count) blu-ray drives in my house.
It's great being able to buy and own movies without dealing with the horrors of streaming. Unfortunately discs are becoming less and less popular commercially, so a lot of stuff nowadays is streaming only.
Also my car can play MP3 CDs so of course I need to be able to create those from a computer disregard the fact that my car also supports USB which I neglect since it's less retro.
Yeah, wanted to get the new seasons of Futurama on bluray as a gift, turns out that they only are on streaming. Of course.
My father-in-law is a hoarder of both physical and digital things. His house is filled with hard drives where he has like stored copies of every movie ever made as mp4s and then he sends the drives to us because he has no physical space for them since he has junk from like 30 years ago piling up in the living room. So now my house is filled with random ass hard drives of (definitely not pirated) movies.
That one hurts :(