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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    3 days ago

    For some reason it’s on brand for HN to have a discussion of different dash widths stick on the front page more than 24h

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43497719

    Extra spice and relevance for the observation that GenAI text apparently has a lot of em-dashes in it, so add that to the frequency of the word “delve”.

    • ebu@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      3 days ago

      alright, fine, i’ll do it.

      webshit weekly (2025/03/27)
      How to Use Em Dashes (—), En Dashes (–) , and Hyphens (-)

      Grammar Nazis (as opposed to the regular kind) publish a guide on how to best calibrate your printing press to 17th-century standards. Several Hackernews (some of which are the regular kind) offer their own competing, more-detailed guides in response. The concern is raised that using too many typographic dashes makes you sound like ChatGPT, to much dismay of those still diligently copying from the Google (business model: “Uber for glue pizza”) results page for “em dash”. Multiple Hackernews take the opportunity to call the group of people who do not care about the millimeter difference between the types of dashes “NPCs”.