Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th September 2026 (awful.systems)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by BlueMonday1984@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.

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

(OT: 🎶 Do you remember...)

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[-] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

This is a plausible explanation, but I am surprised that this git behavior is not more well-known as there have been multiple discussion about "supply-chain attacks" even before LLMs became widespread.

[-] rmf@awful.systems 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Fwiw a similar problem is well-known in e.g. GitHub Actions even without this confusion.

You can have your GHA scripts use "actions" written by other people, and the way you refer to them is user/repo@commit, where the commit can be a commit ID or a branch name or a tag name. The docs actually recommend pinning to commit IDs, but in practice most people actually pin to tags, like bob/doit@v1 because that will auto-update if bob fixes some bug and updates v1 to point to that. But if bob goes rogue, or gets compromised, the attacker could change the tag v1 to point to a malicious commit, though, hence the recommendation to use commit IDs for all actions that you didn't write yourself. I don't know if this ref/ID confusion can be exploited on GHA, but I would expect the answer is no, because GitHub Actions doesn't launch git shell commands like a savage, but idk

this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026

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