Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
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.
Because I feel like picking on him again: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/04/02/google-podcasts
The only Google services I use are YouTube, Google Search, Gmail, YT Studio, Chrome, and Google Keep. Oh, and the Nest app.
It’s rather glorious living a nearly Google-free digital life.
I haven’t been bitten by Google killing an app or service since Google Reader, because I never again trusted them. I suppose this might be a lot more difficult for Android users, but I honestly don’t even remember the last time I added a new Google app or service to the set of tools I rely upon.
yeah he sure as fuck won’t be bitten by trusting anything Google made after Reader, like say their thermostats that are embedded into his house (which he says don’t count because ???)
also:
YouTube, Google Search, Gmail, Chrome
when your Google-free life includes all of their major products plus shit you can absolutely do without like Keep and Nest
also also, because I keep fucking looking at it and getting mad:
I suppose this might be a lot more difficult for Android users
imagine being this fucking shitty about having bought an iPhone and being above the age of 13
I have a couple of Android devices and even with Android added to my list of Google products, I’m pretty sure I use fewer than Gruber.
it’s very inconvenient but I’ve managed to mostly de-google my couple of Android devices where practical — and there is a noticeable performance benefit to running without google play services, using Firefox, and installing simpler open source odroid apps instead of ad-filled play store ones, at least for the older tablets I recycle into purpose-specific computing devices
gruber, meanwhile, goes out of his way to replace safari with chrome on his Apple devices and then brags about being google-free on his blog
While I love a good Gruber-sneer, he does qualify each existing choice extensively. I don’t find the post as hypocritical as the edited extract would imply.
His gratuitous dumping on Android users is sneer-worthy though.
I have got to be honest, the justifications in the full post are half the reason why I’m sneering so hard. it’s possible I’ve got some anger left over from how much it fucking sucks to degoogle
That’s the markdown guy, right? Goddamn what’s with these nerdbros who got popular of one thing and then becoming insufferable, if not actively reactionary shits?
the only google service i use is institutional gmail. i got myself a pixel, but it’s degoogled. he’s not even trying
Scott Aaronson: “Open Letter to Anti-Zionists on Twitter”
Posting here rather than in a separate thread because I’m probably the only one who rememembers him from the old /r/sneerclub days, but he’s an endlessly fascinating figure to me - his ability to view literally every possible scenario through the lens of “poor innocent little smol-bean Scott just wants to discuss things rationally, but is persecuted by his ontologically evil foes and their self-righteous dupes” - doesn’t matter if it’s feminists objecting to his older incel-y posts, Sneer Club dunking on him, cops arresting him for stealing from an airport store or leftists not being fans of the genocide he supports… He must always be the victim. His enemies must always be unreasonable and motivated by hatred of him, specifically.
And now, maybe, I can at last go back to happier topics, like how to prevent the destruction of the world by AI.
looks like he did a shit job in this area https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
What’s he referring to when he says he’s most famous for something about confronting radical feminists with his personal issues?
my god, you missed out on that?
here is way too much background reading!
- commenter on Shtetl-Optimized talks about the rapey “nice guys” she suffered at college
- Scott Aa takes this as a brutal personal attack on him
- Laurie Penny tries to be nice about it
- Amanda Marcotte? not so nice about it
- Scott Alexander weighs in with one zillion words, unreadable, so relentlessly awful that Scott demands readers not form an opinion of him based on a thousands of words essay he worked hard on and chose to publish
- Elizabeth Sandifer with the correct and readable opinion of this bilge (also long, but worth it)
Don’t forget how Arthur Chu wrote a response grounded in empathy, and Aaronson decided that Chu wants him dead. Really.
commenter on Shtetl-Optimized talks about the rapey “nice guys” she suffered at college
Not just that, but one of very few feminist commenters in an aggressively anti-feminist comments section on a blogpost about how it’s wrong that MIT pulled Walter Lewin’s online lecture videos after he was accused of sexually harrassing a student. Scott Aaronson, Friend To All Women, felt no need to intervene as his fans trashed the very notion of online sexual harrassment - only when a woman made an uncharitable remark about nerd men.
just looked the guy up. He’s handsome. He literally looks like Jerry Seinfeld (actually, he looks even more like Pablo Schreiber who played Nicky Sobotka in The Wire). What a god damned twat. (Not that being attractive makes any of his arguments any worse than they already are)
I feel like 90% of these weird-ass tech start-ups are just cults for cis het dudes who think emotions are logic.
So, a lesswrong suggests gathering “The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject,” where “tacit knowledge” is defined as “knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction”. The low-hanging fruit is that the recommendations under “Finance” are Keith “Roaring Kitty” Gill of GameStop fame… and Martin Shkreli.
The higher-hanging fruit is the seeming conviction that just because a lesswrong saw somebody drone on about a thing in a YouTube video, it can’t be explained in written words.
it strikes me that there’s quite a similarity in how the lesswrongs have this continuous drive for so-called “secret knowledge” to how others are about sacred geometry and “hidden universe secrets”. anyone else pick up on something like that?
oh god what is this
Surely an April Fools’ thing?
Still, if it’s just a parody someone seems to have gone above and beyond in generating content for it.
with good coverage in all the major categories: sub, masochist, and victim
…
…
these people truly are the worst
(e: I want to be very clear here: this isn’t meant to be kinkshaming, but as a particular highlight of their specific focuses being of a really particular slant)