this post was submitted on 20 Jul 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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For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.

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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (4 children)

The guy who thinks it's important to communicate clearly (https://awful.systems/comment/7904956) wants to flip the number order around

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXr8ys8PYppKXgGWj/english-writes-numbers-backwards

I'll consider that when the Yanks abandon middle-endian date formatting.

Edit it's now tagged as "Humor" on LW. Cowards. Own your cranks.

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

Okay what the fuck, this is completely deranged. How can anyone's intuitions about reading be this wrong? Is he secretly illiterate, did he dictate the article?

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

damn, a clanker pretending to be a human. humans read entire words at once, and this includes numbers, length and first digit already give some indication of magnitude

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 1 points 9 hours ago

i like how on lw there's a comment saying exactly the same thing but 5x more verbose

[–] bigfondue@lemmy.world 5 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Yes, and largest place value is literally called the most significant digit. It makes perfect sense that it comes first.

[–] flaviat@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (2 children)

Computers use both big endian and little endian and it doesn't seem to matter much. Yet humans should switch their entire number system?

E: this guy can't grasp the concept that left-to-right is arbitrary, which is really ironic given his point. Ok so in arabic it's exactly how this guy wants it, except no, the universally correct reading direction is left-to-right and arabic does it backwards just to be quirky🙄, and humans, just like programs, flip a bit to read it left-to-right, where it's the opposite of how you should be reading it! of course.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Ok so in arabic it’s exactly how this guy wants it

reminded me of this

text of image/tweet@amasad. Apr 22

Silicon Valley will rediscover Islam:

  • fasting for clarity and focus
  • mindfulness 5 times a day
  • no alcohol that ruins the soul & body
  • long-term faithful relationships for a fulfilling happy family life
  • effective altruism by giving zakat directly to the poor
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

The argument would be stronger (not strong, but stronger) if he could point to an existing numbering system that is little-endian and somehow show it's better

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago

Starting this fight and not 'stop counting at zero you damn computer nerds!' is a choice. DIJKSTRAAAAAAAA shakes fist

(There is more to it in a way, as he is trying to be a Dijkstra, and changing an ingrained system which would confuse everybody and cause so many problems down the line. See all the off by one errors made by programmers. Damn DIJKSTRAAAAAA!).