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dgerard@awful.systems

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026 (awful.systems)

submitted 6 days ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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 - 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 so 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 edition

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Debian has a new general resolution to ban LLM use in Debian packaging: https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002

[–] peteorrall@mastodon.bsd.cafe 3 points 23 hours ago

@dgerard Wow, this is awesome.

[–] Gyroplast@furry.engineer 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@dgerard

Coincidentally, the second proposal in favor of conditional LLM use in Debian verily reads as generated to me. :)

Not to mention its singular argument literally is "many Debian contributors find AI tools helpful", right after "recognizing that AI-assisted contributions raise many concerns".

Concerns that were clearly laid out in the counter-proposal.

The "conditions" listed to address these concerns are hilariously toothless. Contributors should (sic!) stay accountable and responsible for any legal, functional, and procedural fuck-ups, and, like, really not be one of those thousands of dicks who are the reason for this discussion in the first place, and things will be fine! It's so simple!

Yeah, cool. I'm sure every contributor thoroughly checks if any of the generated output violates any existing license or infringes on someone's copyright. I'm sure you can just prompt an LLM to check that for you, though!

Is this naïveté, or deliberate disregard? I don't know, and that makes me mad.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 1 points 5 hours ago

Coincidentally, the second proposal in favor of conditional LLM use in Debian verily reads as generated to me. :)

Bingo

I used AI tools to improve my initial draft, and (7.) was actually suggested by an AI tool.

[–] djb@social.shirow.net 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@dgerard @cstross wonderful! So happy

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

@djb @dgerard It' could be undermined by Linus's tolerance of AI slop in the kernel, and by other upstream projects accepting LLM code, notably (to me) vim and pandoc.

The unknown original provenance of code generated by LLMs means that many open source projects may soon be in violation of their own license terms.

[–] chopsstephens@mastodon.nzoss.nz 2 points 14 hours ago

@cstross @djb @dgerard the proposal starting with copyright was such a welcome change, I find it wild how many projects just have their head on the sand over the copyright status of LLM generated code. You can be unethical as you like generating code, open source licences permit that, but they are all about copyright, they are built on it.

[–] djb@social.shirow.net 4 points 1 day ago

@cstross @dgerard 😮‍💨 yea. It’s all getting to be a bit too much.

[–] nielsTFranck@mastodon.nu 3 points 1 day ago

@dgerard I knew I choose right with Debian as my distro.

[–] simon@tutut.delire.party 3 points 1 day ago

@dgerard if i read this correctly there are two opposite proposals still in discussion?