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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
A full timeline on the RubyGems takeover has been put together - looks like the entire situation’s been caused by pressure from Shopify.
Who’s left to do actual work? Who would start a new project that depends on these institutions? Does ruby just die now?
Also:
When the Advanced Custom Fields plugin was stolen by WordPress, DHH said “This is totally crazy. Like if the operators of rubygems dot org just decided to expropriate the official Rails gems, hand over control to a new team, and lock the core team out of it. We’re in uncharted and dangerous territory for open source now. What a sad sight."
lol
I’m curious whether you or @BlueMonday1984@awful.systems are familiar with the concept of MINASWAN. The only time it’s appeared in the discussion is in one of the apologies posted by one of the Ruby Central board members, as their signoff line. Quoting a 2016 analysis of MINASWAN in which it is argued that Ruby’s central tenet is not MINASWAN, but wa (和):
Just for the record, MINASWAN is at least half true. Matz is nice. … I would not call DHH nice. … So if MINASWAN is really a basic truth about the Ruby culture, then how does DHH fit in at all? … MINASWAN is garbage. It’d be more accurate to say, “Ruby showcases the Japanese value of 和, but we are arrogant Americans, so we reduce this to a really basic American idea, harshly compressing it in the process to a state where it cannot possibly mean anything any more, instead of bothering to learn something about the outside world for once.” But MINASWAN was already a long acronym, so I guess they had to draw the line at RSTJVO和BWAAASWRTTARBAIHCIITPTASWICPMAAMIOBTLSATOWFO.
Also, I really think it’s worth understanding that Ruby is not at risk here. Ever since the release of RPG Maker XP in 2005, Ruby has been a staple of embedded scripting for game engines. Really, what we’re seeing here is the demise of Rails.
Today’s related news: the tailwind css guy is a big fan of dhh and the rubygems takeover.
https://bsky.app/profile/jaredwhite.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy/post/3lzofv4wi4yz2
I miss the days when being publicly fashy was considered poor pr, but on the other hand it does make it a lot easier to avoid their companies and products.
Tailwind is pointless, incidentally.
They put ‘environmental impact of AI’ on the front of the student newspaper (below the fold, but still), then you flip and see this
kinda feeling two steps forward, three steps back rn on top of all the other drama on campus
Cloudflare sponsors Ladybird and Omarchy, techfash workfare
why the hell are they sponsoring omarchy
how is a customized hyprland config “helping the open web”TIL about Omarchy.
Of course it uses Hyprland. Of course the demo video on the website shows using Grok in it.
Still can’t believe that choosing a Linux distribution now involves decision-making factors like “what’s their take on fascism”. But I guess the real problem is that such questions weren’t asked for way too long before.
Remind me: why is Hyprland bad? I don’t doubt it is, I just need it to add to my mental list of stuff to avoid.
https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html
tl;dr: incredibly toxic transphobic community enabled by the devs
Damn, I was kinda hoping the Ladybird guy wouldn’t turn out awful but nah, can’t have shit in IT.
has there been more indication of him being a bit fashy since that one github issue? haven’t been following it that much.
The lobsters thread linked in a sibling comment has more examples, but here’s him eulogizing Charlie Kirk in a nazi bar https://nitter.net/awesomekling/status/1966456391146606806
as a bonus here he does a “i’m not usually political, but the left is evil” https://nitter.net/awesomekling/status/1967493595545682220 great, just great
he keeps hanging out with fascists and receiving money from organizations that support fascists and something about his personal brand in interviews being wearing “Big Tech is gangstalking me” t-shirts also very much rubs me the wrong way
ladybird is a ridiculously unserious project (last I heard they were considering a rewrite in Swift and ignoring everyone who told them why that’s a terrible idea, maybe they’ve given up on that by now) and I frankly have no idea why it’s being hyped over Servo as an independent browser project other than a general willingness in tech to play ball with weird little fascists
e: also this lobste.rs subthread
House Democrats have dripped more details from Epstein files and we have surprise guests! They released an un-OCR’d PDF; I’ll transcribe the mentions of our favorite people:
Sat[urday] Dec[ember] 6, 2014 ZORRO … Reminder: Elon Musk to island Dec[ember] 6 (is this still happening?)
Zorro is a ranch in New Mexico that Epstein owned; Epstein was scheduled to be there from December 5-8, so that Musk and Epstein would not be at the island together. Combined with the parenthetical uncertainty about happenstance, did Epstein want to perhaps grant Musk some plausible deniability by not being present?
Mon[day] Nov[ember] 27, 2017 NY … 12:00pm LUNCH w/ Peter Thiel [REDACTED]
From the rest of the schedule formatting, the redacted block following Thiel’s name is probably not a topic; it might be a name. Lunch between two rich financiers is not especially interesting but lunch between a blackmail-gathering Mossad asset and an influencer-funding accelerationist could be.
Sat[urday] Feb[ruary] 16, 2019 NY-LSJ 7:00am BREAKFAST w/ Steve Bannon
Well now, this is the most interesting one to me. This isn’t Epstein’s only breakfast of the day; at 9 AM he meets with Reid Weingarten, one of his attorneys, about some redacted topic. Bannon’s not exactly what I think of as a morning person or somebody who is ready to go at a moment’s notice, so what could drag him out of bed so early? (Edit: This vexed me so I looked it up and sunrise was 6:48 AM that morning at sea level. It would have been the crack of dawn!) Epstein’s Friday evening had had two haircuts, too, with plenty of redacted info; was he worried about appearing nice for Bannon? (The haircuts might not have been for Epstein, given context.) This was a busy day for Epstein; he had a redacted lunch date, and he also had somebody flying in/out that morning via JFK connecting to Saint Thomas and staying in a hotel room there. He then flew out of Newark in the evening to visit the infamous island itself, Little Saint James. The redaction doesn’t quite tell us who this guest is, but it can’t be Bannon because the Dems fucked up the redaction! I can see the edges of the descenders on the name, including a ‘g’ and ‘j’/‘q’, but Bannon’s name doesn’t have any descenders.
Also Prince Andrew’s in there, I guess?
They banned the guy that wrote the theil antichrist notes.
https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/23/spilled-peter-thiel-s-antichrist-secrets-now-s-banned-lectures/
Stephens and Thiel did not respond to requests for comment. Kulkarni declined to answer questions about the lectures, citing the off-the-record policy.
legal threats?
Cloudflare seems to be trying to make a shitcoin https://netdollar.cloudflare.com/
Okay, let’s see what the dumbshits are trying to sell this time
(This took longer than I’d liked, because copy-paste is pretty laggy on Cloudflare’s shit-ass page)
Built for the rise of agents and machines, NET Dollar will enable seamless, automated transactions without human intervention.
“Agents” are automatic data breach machines, letting them repeat that time they stole vibe-coders’ crypto on a larger scale is a terrible idea
The rise of autonomous agents and connected devices is creating a new economic paradigm
Autonomous agents don’t exist, and the only “new economic paradigm” being made is one where tech is completely unmoored from reality
These systems need a reliable medium of exchange that can handle high-frequency, automated transactions without human intervention.
See my previous point
Rules, triggers, and workflows can be embedded directly into payments, making them smarter and adaptable.
Went so well for Wolf Game, didn’t it?
NET Dollar will work across networks and ecosystems, enabling frictionless, global commerce.
And by “frictionless, global commerce”, I presume they mean “sanctions evasion and ransomware”
Every coin will be fully collateralized by a U.S. dollar, ensuring transparency, reliability, and price stability.
NET Dollar will be made available soon.
How about never.
personal vent: at my job yesterday i had to come up with a few fake book titles/author combinations for a project. a fun little task and opportunity to hide some cheeky easter eggs. so, i came up with a few and then asked my coworkers to share in the fun. one of them though just couldn’t come up with anything at all, and eventually just resorted to “asking chat gpt”.
mind you, i work a creative job, and so do my coworkers. this is a minor thing i guess, but it just made me very sad. how could you just outsource your creative joy to some mindless word salad machine?
