SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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"The Best Essay" by Paul Graham (paulgraham.com)

submitted 8 months ago by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

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In which a man disappearing up his own asshole somehow fails to be interesting.

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[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

also, I don’t remember paully’s blog looking this ugly:

it actually took my eyes a while to see the header at all, and the weird janky “Read More”…. thing? he does on every page will lose your scroll position every time the tab reloads, plus it appears even on pages that don’t have any More to Read

is that a fucking shopping cart in the corner?

how reassuring. I legitimately can’t figure out what this is for; I don’t think you can buy any of paully boy’s books direct (and why would you?) and unless I’m missing something in the mess that is the sidebar there’s no swag he’s selling (but again, why would you buy that?)

so questions:

is my industry finally done pretending hacker news is ugly and broken as fuck on purpose?
is Paul fucking Graham’s blog hosted on Shopify? I’m not near a computer to check what javascript’s being loaded but this shit is seriously making me flash back to the last time I had to do a godawful Shopify theme for a client

e: yep, I did a tiny amount of digging. if you send paully’s blog a mobile user-agent, it sends a version of his blog that’s (for some fucking reason) hosted on Yahoo Small Business/Yahoo Stores (now Turbify) which is a preconfigured e-commerce site. this lazy asshole fucked up building a mobile site so bad (and his desktop site isn’t much less ugly) that he decided he’d go off the fucking deep end and shove all his writing into a barely customized online storefront instead. this is seriously the type of shit that some of my less computer-savvy clients would demand I do back when I was working through college

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

you gotta admit, putting forth one thing while trying to convince you it's some other thing (and that there totally isn't a business side associated to it.... right....) is extremely on brand for him and basically everything he puts his money behind

so this is delightfully poignant

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 8 months ago

to be fair, his desktop site has wrapped around to being charmingly retro

[–] Evinceo@awful.systems 4 points 8 months ago

The shopping cart is presumably because he did E Commerce when he did an actual job.