this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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TechTakes

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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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Also the hivemind seems to have taken against ~~tweets~~Xeets, a stunning reversal from last year when St. Elon was gonna usher in a new Dawn of civilized discourse.

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[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

it’s very frankly well worth stepping out of the Y Combinator bubble. I dropped the site for anything other than as a target for sneering years ago because I started to see a lot of dangerous patterns emerge in the community (general scientific illiteracy is one thing, as you mentioned; for me, the site’s general undercurrent of thinly veiled racism got very hard to stomach).

on a more personal note, not being immersed in HN’s bad ideas did wonders for my mental health. the only thing I feel I really lost was the ability to easily get an audience for my open source projects, but there are other outlets for that.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

yeah similar. I only skim the link source as a semi-aggregator of stuff (because it's where a lot of people will share shit), but even that needs significant filtering.

otherwise a strict policy of Don't Read The Comments

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Allow me to sum up my relationship with the orange site with a lightly edited quote of Dennis Ritchie from The UNIX-HATERS Handbook:

Here is my metaphor: your ~~book~~ website is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain ~~life for some~~ interest to computerniks like me. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of ~~contempt and of envy~~ silicon valley chauvinism.

[–] Evinceo@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago
[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] self@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

mostly Nix code lately: a flake that turns any desktop into an old Lisp machine, another flake that turns any desktop into a new Lisp machine (a Lisp-based workbench that enables system-wide recursive self-improvement), a module that mostly auto-configures a high performance windows gaming VM with dedicated hardware (one of the non-proton ways to game on Linux), and a flake that implements an efficient technique for templating/static website generation

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That stuff is guaranteed karma bait on lobste.rs, just fyi

[–] self@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago

maybe… mostly I’m looking for non-toxic contributors, since these are all projects that do best with community input

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nix sounds very interesting tbh.

[–] self@awful.systems 3 points 1 year ago

I recommend it! this notawfultech post links to a gentle introduction to Nix if you’d like to give it a try. awful.systems also runs on and is deployed by plain NixOS, mostly because it’s a lot of fun to work with in a way devops almost always isn’t