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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 6 October 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 2 months ago by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
317 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Did you ever see that A16z funded startup that was making a web browser that streamed the web for an intermediary server? It was fucken wild

Edit, I guess it was yc funded? https://jacobhrussell.com/blog/mighty

[-] self@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago

Mighty comes in at $30 with a 9% discount with a 12 month prepayment. I don’t think Mighty is for everyone. […] However, for people who use resource intensive applications regularly and either prefer or don’t mind using web apps it seems like a no-brainer. I think there is also a legitimate argument for corporations to provide Mighty for their employees purely based on the productivity boost, especially for tech employees.

It might be hard to get purists to buy into the “browser = OS” value proposition, but in the meantime I’ll be enjoying my 40 GB of RAM.

oh it’s the web operating system again! things that make a web browser an operating system:

  • it’s extremely expensive every month
  • it rehashes the awful cloud rendering browser shit Amazon tried and gave up on for their underpowered Kindle tablets
  • it bundles a bunch of basic shit you can do in ordinary browser plugins
  • 40GB of RAM and 8 virtual cores! (that’s all? my current work machine unfortunately has 64GB, and my desktop from 2020 is a 32+32GB split between native and a VM. 8 KVM cores is also not fantastic. none of this should be required for a fucking web browser though but here we are)
  • it’s using a data center’s fantastic internet connection which is probably why it’s quick, but it of course requires a perfectly stable connection on your end or it’s gonna suck
[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago

One other thing, also correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it a giant key logger as well?

[-] self@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago

…huh, that is true! so another bullet point and this one’s shared by more than one “web operating system”:

  • it irrevocably breaks the browser’s security model implementing pointless functionality

in this case it’s pretty bad, cause it’s got the same issue as all hosted VMs in that if the host or hypervisor is compromised so are all the VMs, but also effectively anyone on Mighty’s side with access to the event stream would have enough data to compromise your entire existence

[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago

Haha no way! Turns out the founder pivoted to AI 5 months after that article was published https://xcancel.com/suhail/status/1591813110230568963

this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
41 points (100.0% liked)

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