this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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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.

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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.

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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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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 3 days ago (21 children)

one of the most annoying things about writing for a US audience is they're fucking illiterate and alluding to books confuses them

wanna grab editors by the throat and go "JUST WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU PEOPLE EVEN DOING IN HIGH SCHOOL"

actual example from today: "who the hell is Fagin never heard of him"

[–] khalid_salad@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

Some highlights from my high school AP (Advanced Placement) English class:

  1. teacher insisting that you can't split an infinitive in English, but can't explain why this bullshit rule was made up in the first place
    • also something about "up with which I will not put" because god forbid you know what you're talking about
  2. some inappropriate discussions about abortion
  3. we watched the 1931 frankenstein movie after "reading" shelley's novel, but didn't relate it to the book in any way^1^
  4. we read some shitty short story, which turned into a shitty movie, and then the teacher kept relating back to the film when discussing the themes of the book
  5. at some point they were like "choose your own novel to read and analyze" and we didn't really do analysis, and the novel selection was
    • dan brown's shitty novels about the dude who deciphers symbols or whatever (it was the one with anti-matter)
    • one of ayn rand's pieces of shit
    • i don't remember what else, but there were definitely no classics
  6. we had to write college entry essays for the teacher to "critique." i wrote mine about how math fucking rules. the teacher decided it was too technical (despite there being no actual math in it), so they gave it to their partner (an engineer) to read

I doubt this was legal


and came back to tell me how well-written it was^2^

my high school education was probably considered decent. don't even get me started on "whole language learning" and "new math" and the insipid pseudoscience plaguing our certification programs while our populace treats our teachers like shit


1: Also, this movie was nearly a century old when we watched it and my class got mad at me for spoiling it.
2: it wasn't written well

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

don’t even get me started on “whole language learning” and “new math”

I don't know what "whole language learning" is, and I'm way too young to have experience it, but wasn't the curriculum before "new math" like arithmetic and nothing else? In other words, not math at all?

I didn't read much into it but from what I did it seems like they started teaching children actual math like algebra and logic and parents got frustrated because they were too stupid to help with homework anymore. Brings into my mind the whole "math was cool before they involved letters" thing that makes me want to throw a book at someone.

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