this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (5 children)

Dude "celebrates" 125 years since Nabokov was born by releasing a language with the one name you associate with this famous author:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40117249

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

That guy defending the book in the comments by going 'he is 19, I also thought the same when I was 19 and only realized later that he was intended to be the bad guy'. Oof... (And double oof as his comments goes from 'I didn't get this message at 19, and now 15 years later, I get why others dislike the book, without really making it 100% clear that he himself also considers Humbert the bad guy. (In the few times I had the misfortune of talking to pedophiles, this is the type of squirrelly language they use. Not that this means the person is a pedophile, I assume he isn't and just expresses himself poorly there, he just gives off a dodgy feeling with that one comment. Anyway, think the devil has enough lawyers).

Edit: I would esp be wary of playing devils advocate for somebody who writes this in their design document:

Afterword 1

There are three kinds of beauty:

[ first kinds excluded ]

Beauty by perversion. In "The 120 Days of Sodom", the main characters liked to play weddings where the male groom was dressed up like a female bride, while the female bride was dressed up like a male groom.

That is a very odd example to pick from that book. Certainly considering everything the past few decades.

(I have no opinion on the language itself, didn't even look at it as I don't really think creating new languages is that interesting. I'm always reminded of the XKCD competing standards comic).

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

The faithful are worried that Great Sky Father Graham is not dealing with this in a timely manner

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40118778

I'm honestly perplexed that HN doesn't have any kind of string filtering facility considering its centrality in the tech ecosystem.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

wow, the fucking bitterness in that thread as the site for clever hackers gets taken down by a really basic spam attack and doesn’t have even obvious mitigations in place (like a signup queue, one of the few anti-spam measures Lemmy implements)

I keep saying this, but the only thing I’ve seen the orange site’s anti-spam mechanisms consistently do is silence marginalized folks and anyone who tries to speak up for them. those mechanisms are fucking terrible at actually handling any volume of real spam, but in spite of what dang and company claim, they’re not really meant to deal with spam at all.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

They should get some of those bayesianists on the problem, stat!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

A Plan for Spam

no no I meant a plan for making spam

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

As a Trained Rationalist Bayesianist, I thought the A Plan for Spam was easy. But turns out everybody else has the wrong definition of what Spam is, so I need to first make documents that make it possible for people to know what Spam actually is, but turns out language is imprecise ergo, we first need to develop language again from first principles. So please read my book where we construct an alphabet from first principles, The Spamquences. Soon the second book will be released, the SpamSpamquences, and we are working on a site: SpamSpamSausageEggsBaconSpamquences.com.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Can I have fries ~~with~~ instead of that? And a milkshake

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Yes sure, and can we supersize your order for one dollar extra? Great value!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

this is the fastest I’ve ever seen a project of this size (including all the specs and papers associated with it) get renamed

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

I think it's entirely gone now.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)

of course big parts of the orange site are tripping over themselves to call this language clever and… maybe I’m in a particularly bad mood, but I just don’t see it. the syntax looks like a fucking disaster (and I like ML-style languages) and the features seem to be a grab bag of features from existing languages and CS research. it’s basically the kind of testbench language you design to explore the problem space and never release, but here it is with a webpage and a name and papertrail in the docs that point to the designer being a real shithead.

it’s possible I’m being unfair to the language (its designer definitely seems like a shithead) — is there anything coherent here that I’m just missing?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

Re: alternate names based on Nabokov books

Pale Fire sounds awful and lacks any flair. That's exactly what an ordinary programmer with no taste would name their work.

As opposed to an extraordinary programmer with great taste who chooses the most easily misinterpreted novel by Nabokov instead, one that has spawned an entire seamy subculture. Got it, HN.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

the shitheadery is probably? due to the author being 19.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

probably! I was a weird shithead at 19 too, though fortunately not this particular strain of weird shithead

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

@gerikson @techtakes

Is the compiler named “Humbert”?