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.

last week’s thread

  • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
    17·
    1 day ago

    I distinctly recall a lot of people a few years ago parroting some variation of “well I don’t know about Bitcoin specifically, but blockchain itself is probably going to be important and even revolutionary as a technology” and sometimesI wish I’d collected receipts to say “I told you it’s not”.

    Here we are, year of Nakamoto 17 and the full list of use cases for blockchains is:

    • Speculative trading of toy currencies made up by private nobodies
    • Paying through the nose to execute arbitrary code on SETI@Home’s evil cousin
    • Speculative trading of arbitrary blobs of bytes made up by private nobodies

    And no, Git is not a fucking blockchain. Much like the New York City Subway is not the fucking Loop.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      14 hours ago

      year of Nakamoto 17

      so what you’re saying is, next year a whole lot of these guys are suddenly going to lose interest

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        1 day ago

        Ok, maybe cryptocurrencies made those a little bit easier than doing the same thing with MMO money or having to mail physical goods. I can even go out on a limb and credit the blockchain itself for them, even though the design kind of makes transactions inherently more traceable than some possible aleternatives do.

              • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
                7·
                20 hours ago

                No worries. I do agree ransomware industry might not have taken off or at least might have taken off a lot slower if the victims had to make a gold mule video game character or mail cash or precious metals through seedy relay addresses to pay the ransom. So I’ll habe to credit cryptocurrency, if not necessarily blockchain per se, for that dubious achievement.

                • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
                  6·
                  20 hours ago

                  Yeah good point on the blockchain tech split vs actual cryptocurrencies. Esp considering the stories some of the exchanges basically did away with the blockchain for internal trades.