Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)
@V0ldek @cstross I couldn’t even read the whole list after seeing “CNC Programmers” on it. That may not be the most absurd, but the idea of “here’s a robot with a sharp blade spinning at high RPM that we’re using to make a physical object with extreme precision, so we fired the human who knows how it works and gave their job to the hallucination box” makes Willy’s Chocolate Experience seem like a warmup. I just hope there’s video. Lots of video. Ideally from behind safety glass.
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross
Safety glass Hell: I’d insist on remote cameras and several feet of reinforced concrete.
Meanwhile, I’m lookin at the list and amazed by the number of “jobs” I have apparently had (which never paid me in the first place). Certainly, any time I was invited to deejay on the radio, it was never paid. Moreover, even in the 1990s I knew a fellow radio DJ who was more or less replaced by a CD jukebox with song choices dictated from on high and he was basically the voice in between tunes and ads to make it seem as if it wasn’t evil overlords. Maybe, he got paid? I have my doubts.
CC: @V0ldek@awful.systems @cstross@wandering.shop
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross
That and we’re literally giving it the means of production. Hopefully they’ve all ingested Das Capital…
@geeksam
Can confirm. Inbetween me being a self-taught coder in my youth to getting a degree in Software Engineering I also took a detour and got a degree as a Mechanical Engineer.
That involved CAD/CAM and running the output on CNC machines. Which involved hitting the metal piece with the head too far down and metal being flung around at ludicrous speed.
@V0ldek @cstross
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross I came across a machining YouTuber that was asking Grok for feeds and speeds a while ago. Was immediately terrified. Haven’t checked their channel lately. Wonder if they are still intact…
@geeksam
*Leaded* glass, I hope! It’s only a matter of time before someone in the Hegseth DoD decides this will be excellent for machining plutonium pits.
@V0ldek @cstross
@geeksam
@V0ldek @cstross Don’t worry, any video not shot from behind safety glass will suffer from rapid existence failure
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross
Production CNC machines are beyond safety glass and sheet metal already.
Sometimes even in work cell cages!
Programming CNC has been done by opening up the print or CAD model and telling the CAM package to generate the tool paths for many years already.
Sometimes programmers edit the generated code a little bit to adapt it, but there’s little zero risk in trying machine models on this. The worst that can happen is a crash that scraps a $50k spindle.
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross The original poster of this story can’t read. Somebody in the Bluesky thread found the original paper. The research looked at people in these professions using LLM assistance in their workflow.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935
“Can’t read” is the kind of insult we don’t need in this context.
@blakestacey Redundant?
Pointlessly insulting, cruel, assumes total incompetence at life rather than a momentary mistake in managing the information overflow, juvenile in the bad sense of the word.