Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st November 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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. Happy Halloween, fellow sneerers!)

Welcome to November, and 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.)

  • jaschopEnglish
    6·
    7 hours ago

    A tragedy in 3 acts.

    2026-03-05 Why I Don’t Vibe Code

    Like many developers, I have a whole folder of draft hobby projects that have never been finished. […] From the LLM perspective, these are folders of failures and I could indeed use LLM to make an app a day or whatever challenge I want. However, the process was far more important than the product (again!). Not every whimsy needs to become a reality. Often, I get more from the fun of brainstorming and the process of learning enough to know that I don’t need to continue and finish the job.

    2026-04-29 The LLM Is Not a Junior Engineer

    Contrary to how I might seem at times, I do think there could be a place for LLM models in modern software development. I do understand why some developers are entranced with the ability to create applications in hours and turn prototypes into products. I see how it could be highly useful for home hobbyists, back-office bureaucrats and expert engineers to build the low-stakes software they’ve never had the time or skill for.

    2026-10-25 My Local LLM Stack

    And yet, as a developer, I do feel like I need to work with these tools to understand their potential for augmenting my own software development work. There are some cases (basically as a limited coding assistant) where a LLM can be useful. Some recent examples I have used across several projects:

    • Look through this codebase and find all the areas where I have # FIXME comments. Collect them in a report and analyze if any no longer apply.
    • Improve the test coverage for this file to be above 90%
    • Update the openapi spec for this project in the repo to match what the API actually implements today […]
    • Look through the data here and find all cases where there are likely errors. For instance, if a person has an end date before their start date.
    tangential sneer

    Now that I had a machine, the next step was finding an ethical model for coding purposes.

    Apparently IBM Granite is the most ethical model out there (read “ethical” as “least likely to get you in legal trouble by using its output”.) With all this agentic power at our fingertips, what are we going to use it for?

    The 8B model can do many simple programming tasks (like searching through syntax trees or renaming functions).

    Who needs birdshot, when we can aim 16-inch cannons at every sparrow?

    This reminded me of @rhamph’s post last week. Is this an archetype of guy that is concious of the harms of LLMs, but cannot trust his own gut enough to see they are fundamentally wrong? So they try to come up with their own super-ethical spin on the beast and try to change the rotting carcass from within. But was anything gained here? I feel that an ideal of simple, elegant, and empowering code was lost.