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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I think the common ground is a fear of loss of authority to which they feel entitled. They learned the āoldā ways of SysV RC, X11, etc. etc. and that is their domain of expertise, in which they fear being surpassed or obsoleted. From there, itās easy to combine that fear with the fears stoked by adjacent white/male supremacist identity politics and queerphobia, plus the resentment already present from stupid baby slapfights like vi vs emacs or systemd vs everything else, and generate a new asshole identity in which they feel temporarily secure. Fear of loss of status drives all of this.
Except my feeling is itās mostly people who have grown up with Linux as a settled fact of computing life, not Unix greybeards.
Absolutely. Take the reverence for āSysVā init* to the point where the init system has all but eclipsed the AT&T Unix release as the primary meaning of āSystem Vā. The BSDs (at least the Net/Open branch, not sure about FreeBSD) adopted a simplified BSD init/rc model ages ago and Solaris switched to systemd-esque SMF with little uproar. Personally I even prefer SMF over its Linux equivalents, despite the cumbersome XML configuration.
I somewhat understand the terminalchud mindset, a longing for a supposed simpler time where a nerd could keep a holistic grasp of oneās computing system in their head. Combine that with the tech industryās pervasive male chauvinism and dogmatic adherence to a law of āsimplify and reduce weightā (usually a useful rule of thumb) and you end up with terrible social circles making bad software believing theyāre great on both fronts.
* Rather, the Linux implementation of the concept