Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025
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.)
Sailor Sega Saturn
in reply to BlueMonday1984 • • •The USA plans to migrate SSA's code away from COBOL in months: wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-s…
... show moreSSN's pre-DOGE
The USA plans to migrate SSA's code away from COBOL in months: wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-s…
SSN's pre-DOGE modernization plan from 2017 is 96 pages and includes quotes like:
What could possibly go wrong? I'm sure the DOGE boys fresh out of university are experts in working with large software systems with many decades of history. But no no, surely they just need the right prompt. Maybe something like this:
Bonus -- Also check out the screenshots of the SSN website in this post: bsky.app/profile/enragedaposta…
corbin
in reply to Sailor Sega Saturn • • •Anecdote: I gave up on COBOL as a career after beginning to learn it. The breaking point was learning that not only does most legacy COBOL code use go-to statements but that there is a dedicated verb which rewrites go-to statements at runtime and is still supported on e.g. the IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS platform that SSA is likely using: ALTER.
When I last looked into this a decade ago, there was a small personal website last updated in the 1990s that had advice about how to rewrite COBOL to remove GOTO and ALTER verbs; if anybody has a link, I'd appreciate it, as I can no longer find it. It turns out that the best ways of removing these spaghetti constructions involve multiple rounds of incremental changes which are each unlikely to alter the code's behavior. Translations to a new language are doomed to failure; even Java is far too structured to directly encode COBOL control flow, and the time would be better spent on abstract specification of the system so that it can be rebuilt from that specification instead. This is also why IBM makes bank selling COBOL emulators.
pejorative phrase for source code that has a complex and tangled control structure reminiscent of spaghetti
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)gerikson
in reply to BlueMonday1984 • • •Stackslobber posts evidence that transhumanism is a literal cult, HN crowd is not having it
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…
The Tranhumanist Cult Test | Hacker News
news.ycombinator.comV0ldek
in reply to gerikson • • •In my head transhumanism is this cool idea where I'd get to have a zoom function in my eye
But of course none of that could exist in our capitalist hellscape because of just all the reasons the ruling class would use it to opress the working class.
And then you find out what transhumanists actually advocate for and it's just eugenics. Like without even a tiny bit of plausible deniability. They're proud it's eugenics.