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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24177 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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imagine the smell

If any of you are on the tech/ai/startup side of x (which I imagine is everybody here), you probably saw the following exchange:

  1. A guy working as 'head of AI' for a company called Cline commented "Imagine the smell" under a photo of a hackathon.

  2. Indians assumed that somebody commenting on the smellyness of a hackathon (I've been to many hackathons, and nerds smell) must be commenting on Indians, and thus freaked out.

  3. The guy who made the comment replied to some of them saying that no, actually, he was just making a common internetism, and generally speaking to the smell of a bunch of guys in a packed room.

  4. The guy's boss gets involved, surely due to the campaign by online Indians to get him fired, saying that he wouldn't be firing anybody.

  5. Enough pressure happened that the guy's boss recanted, and fired the guy.

  6. Now the internet is imagining a lot of smells, cline has earned a ton of bad will, and the general dislike of Indians in the tech community has grown.

Here are some thoughts on this:

  • I'm increasingly of the opinion that people should be able to filter the internet by country. I don't care what people from 9000 miles away, from a totally different culture, who have no investment or stake in my society have to say about it. I don't want to interact with these people. My life and my world is not a place for them to wage petty dramas and entertain themselves by harassing people here.

  • Indians specifically (and I say this as somebody who has spent a considerable amount of time in India, consuming indian culturalisms, and interacting with Indians) seem to have a particular penchant for online drama. There seems to be a particular focus on people saving or losing some form of "face", although that isn't exactly it. It's similar to honor culture you find in other societies, but maybe just its own Indian brand of it. I think what we're seeing here are two cultures which should be separated by 10,000 miles of ocean running into each other on the internet; the clash should not be unexpected.

  • "Imagine the smell" is not an anti-Indian slur, or at least it wasn't. It comes from image boards, and gets said under almost any moderately interesting photo of people. However, I think the massive freak out over this has turned it into one. Interdesting.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that people should be able to filter the internet by country. I don't care what people from 9000 miles away, from a totally different culture, who have no investment or stake in my society have to say about it. I don't want to interact with these people. My life and my world is not a place for them to wage petty dramas and entertain themselves by harassing people here.

You already can filter the internet by county. Just go to a German-language forum, it'll be almost purely Germans, Austrians and the Swiss posting there.

Oh, wait, English. Yeah.

A guy working as 'head of AI' for a company called Cline

Based on priors, that sounds like a bullshit job. Charitably, it means "this company needs investors who want some technobabble about AI", less charitably, it could also reflect on the company as a whole.

Now, there are some jobs with the title 'head of AI' which are possibly not bullshit. FAANG-level companies can have serious AI departments without being AI companies. Given that Cline does not have a WP page, I am inclined to believe they are probably slightly smaller than Google.

Basically, if your job is to be the poster boy for some startup which needs to fool investors into thinking they are innovating AI stuff, you probably want to be careful about what you say online under your real name, because you are easily replaced.

By contrast, if you are an engineer who is deeply involved in what the company is doing, your company likely has some reason to not fire you when the first angry mail comes in -- always depending on the size and culture, of course.

Important context that OP did not include and relevant for this comment: Cline's product is an AI coding assistant, similar to Microsoft's Github Copilot. My understanding is they don't develop any AI models themselves, their bot is a layer on top of various other AI models. I'm not entirely sure what "head of AI" means at a company like Cline but I doubt it is a trivial role, given the product.

Head of AI will mean developing lots of smaller models that are needed to accurately make the base LLMs work - smaller agents for interrogating the codebase, embedding models for condensing the code in a vector database, etc. Plus of course prompting experimentation to make the base LLM maximally correct while using minimal tokens.

Some time ago I posted about the absurd arrest of Graham Linehan upon his return to the UK from the states. One of the tweets which prompted his arrest was a photo of a trans activist protest accompanied by the caption "a photo you can smell".

I think national identification should be opt-in. This seems to me to be straightforwardly the best possible world. It would protect online anonymity for those who want to preserve it at maximum capacity, short-circuit bad faith "doxxing" objections, and allow those who wish to pass themselves off as belonging to a particular nationality to prove it.

If someone want to present themselves as American, I'm pretty sure replying to their post with "nationality kept private" on their profile would pack about 90% of the same rhetorical punch as the actual information being there, while carrying almost 0% of the downsides.

Sure, my country might have been founded by anonpoasters, but due to technological limitations, those reading The Federalist could at least be reasonably certain that they were American anonpoasters.

None of this would ever have happened in a non-At Will jurisdiction. The mob could howl as much as they wanted and the boss would just go "Sorry, the laws of this country prevent me from firing this person without good cause, if you don't like it vote to change things" and this would suddenly blow over.

There's a reason all this "firing" people for saying bad things stuff seems to be localized to the US (on both sides of the aisle).

  • -14

Having just this year had to squeeze two maliciously incompetent employees out of my department, I have a new and deep appreciation for at-will employment. Like most of our worst laws, we have at-will employment because the worst 5% of the population ruins it for everyone.

Anecdote: The unionized civil-engineering office in which I worked had a complement of around half a dozen surveyors. Most of them were industrious, but one was lazy and a troublemaker.

  • The survey coordinator (engineer in charge of the surveyors) had to constantly check on this surveyor to make sure that she was actually doing her assigned work in an industrious manner.

  • One of my engineer coworkers warned me that I should never trust this surveyor because the surveyor once told the coworker that getting in a minor crash with an office car was an easy way to get out of work.

  • After the survey coordinator gave her a bad performance review, she filed an HR complaint accusing him of threatening her with violence during the performance review's closed-door face-to-face meeting. It was totally frivolous, since the boss of the office was in the same meeting and could vouch for the survey coordinator's innocence! But the investigation still dragged on for many months. IIRC, I once overheard the survey coordinator discussing with the office boss how the surveyor's union-assigned lawyer would even commiserate over the phone with the survey coordinator about how the surveyor couldn't even keep her story straight.

  • She had a reputation for treating her two subordinate surveyors poorly. I wasn't too aware of the details, but I overheard the survey coordinator discussing with the office boss how he would look out the office window into the parking lot and see her subordinate surveyors running to the survey van in order to avoid being late.

  • Once I even overheard her loudly joke in the office's coffee area, "I like my coffee like I like my men—hot and black", which I as a nigger easily could have reported her to HR for (and maybe should have).

She was finally forced to resign (not even fired!) when, during the pandemic, she coughed into her hand and intentionally used the same hand to smack one of her subordinate surveyors on the back, after which the subordinate (who IIRC had a wife with a compromised immune system of some kind) filed an HR complaint and threatened to report her assault to the police on top of that.

which I as a nigger

TIL.

Americans do not want to end at will employment because they quite reasonably think it will make it harder to get hired.

They also don’t want to take up the slack of the inevitable abuses.

There are reasonable pros and cons. The reason Americans are paid more than the French (size of the economy, labor pool, lower taxes, more natural resources, bigger domestic market, more capital, better entrepreneurial culture, despite the origin of that word) isn’t primarily due to labor laws. The Scandinavian countries have very restrictive labor laws and low unemployment, for example, while other countries have high unemployment even with loose laws.

I can't speak for continental Europe, but a public communication like that would be easy grounds for gross misconduct in the UK, so wouldn't make much difference

The process in the UK would be very different and there would be an investigation during a suspension and then likely a tribunal. The defendant could make the very reasonable case that this was a joke about 24 hour hackathons being sweaty and that no offense to Indians was plausibly implied, nor was this in any way a malicious or specifically targeted communication, and might well win. Unless they were contractually prohibited from any comment on social media (and even then it’s very unclear that that kind of thing would be enforceable in most cases) they would have an OK case.

Sure, if there's some sort of clause in the contract or disciplinary policy saying you must not do anything bringing the company into disrepute (which yes, most well drafted contracts and disciplinary policies will contain). Equally, even if so the requirement for procedural fairness will mean the person would first have to be suspended then a hearing would have to be arranged and held which all takes time during which the mob will move onto the next issue du jour meaning they won't get their blood when they are baying for it regardless which acts as a factor discouraging such mobs from forming in the first place.

The idea of having to run to the state and make my case for why I don’t want to work professionally with someone anymore is bizarre to me. For it to be illegal by default to simply cease sending paychecks to someone unless I write down magic words so the bureaucrats won’t come after me is so offensive I can’t but sputter when confronted by the fact that this is not only law in much of Europe, but a popular law, apparently.

Yes this was a horseshit firing but it should absolutely not be a matter of government policy no matter the political valence. It would have blown over anyway.

If you want that in Europe, you hire a contractor. If you are unhappy with your plumber or gardener or sex worker, you can just hire a different company for the next job. Likewise, if you want to lease your property to tenants without being bound by too many legal safeguards, lease office space to companies.

But where humans are concerned, most societies recognize that just allowing total freedom of contract will lead to bad outcomes, because very often one human party will have a significant disadvantage during negotiations. In most places, selling your kidney or signing a contract which will put you into debt slavery if certain conditions are met is simply legally void, because if it was not there would be desperate people signing such contracts and ending up enslaved. Likewise, it is very rare that a prospective tenant can write the terms of a rental contract, because the landlord likely has a dozen alternatives lined up, while the tenant does not. The same goes for employment contracts.

And it is not like the US is some anarcho-libertarian utopia for employment, either. There are plenty of rules and regulations. You can't just put into contract that higher exposure limits for carbon monoxide will apply. You can't -- at least in theory -- fire an employee for not giving you a blowjob. Or fire all of your employees matching some protected characteristic. I imagine many states would forbid you from firing women for becoming pregnant, too.

The main difference is the burden of proof. In Europe, we have a whitelist of reasons to fire someone, while the US has a blacklist blocklist of reasons for which you can not be fired.

Now, I am sympathetic to arguments that these rules have adverse side effects. But simply arguing how unfair it is that you have some obligations towards someone with whom you have traded paychecks for labor for a decade is not going to convince anyone.

It's all perspective, right? Your right to stop sending paychecks to someone at will == their right to be thrown away like garbage by their liege whenever convenient.

Appeal to the majority is a logical fallacy but nevertheless I think it says something that in almost all societies those higher in society have obligations of loyalty to their underlings (which must be reciprocated of course).

You can either have freedom of association or you can have the State.

For a while. In the end, there is only the State.

Order and Chaos continue their eternal dance as mutual progenitors.

There's a reason all this "firing" people for saying bad things stuff seems to be localized to the US (on both sides of the aisle).

Yeah, in Europe we just arrest them.

A wrongful arrest can be expunged and removed from your record quite quickly and if handled fast can have much less of an impact on your life and career trajectory than a wrongful firing.

  • -14

And if the law is so restrictive that the arrest isn't legally wrongful?

England would jail you for that comment.

Just checked, I'm still not in jail. I'll update tomorrow and let you know if I've been detained.

EDIT: Still not detained, the bobbies really need to up their game...

Do you live in the UK?

He does, but he's on the proper tier.

Yes he does

The guy's boss gets involved, surely due to the campaign by online Indians to get him fired, saying that he wouldn't be firing anybody.

Enough pressure happened that the guy's boss recanted, and fired the guy.

Very curious what specifically happened for the boss, who this deep into the phenomenon of Twitter cancel culture and it's inherent ephemeral nature (i.e. we all know in 2 weeks this will be forgotten) actually cracked. Weak move tbh. Why stand up then fold? Lame.

Many people view themselves highly until they actually have to do something.

Now we can't even joke (and it's ha-ha-only-serious) about the smell of a room of presumably-unwashed nerds? That joke is older than image boards, and older than the era of infinite Indians.

The CS building on my college campus genuinely smelled of unwashed nerds, and was semi-infamous for it. This is "a thing" if ever there was a thing.

Me think she doth protest too much.

Indians specifically seem to have a particular penchant for online drama.

This is wild speculation on my part, but I would hasard a guess that it might be because Indians on average don't particularly look big or imposing compared to others, and thus feel like they are often disrespected in person. But online, theoretically, no one knows what you look like, so they inflate their online egos to compensate.

It could also be that when Arjuna was on the battlefront of Kurukshetra, facing his own kin on the other side, and thus began to question his moral duty, it was at this very moment that Lord Krishna lowered his disguise and revealed himself as an incarnation of Vishnu, and lectured him specifically that his dharmic duty was indeed not to back down from the battlefield, but rather to stand and fight, which was in fact a manifestation of his divine duty and even of the selfless love (karma yoga) that he was incarnated to embody, and that Arjuna, upon hearing this and understanding the truth of the eternal nature of existence, took up his bow and began to fight.

  • -10

That's definitely a possibility too!

I'm increasingly of the opinion that people should be able to filter the internet by country. I don't care what people from 9000 miles away, from a totally different culture, who have no investment or stake in my society have to say about it. I don't want to interact with these people. My life and my world is not a place for them to wage petty dramas and entertain themselves by harassing people here.

I feel that way not infrequently on the internet. There are times when I really don't want to hear the opinions of people who aren't American about American politics, or even the opinions from those outside of Pennsylvania. I feel like I'm getting opinions from a low-level LLM, foreigners have half-absorbed cliches about party primary politics from reading reddit, but have never actually voted in an American primary election. People who have never been to my town feel confident to tell me what life in my town is like.

I'm increasingly blackpilled about what actual internet discourse would look like if we excluded all the foreigners from talking about American elections. But would there be any internet left?

There are times when I really don't want to hear the opinions of people who aren't American about American politics

Those times are days ending in Y.

Okay, perhaps not quite that extreme. But there are an awful lot of conversations where I want to turn into a Rock Flag and Eagle hyper-caricature when being lectured by someone who's never lived in flyover America.

or even the opinions from those outside of Pennsylvania.

You stay on yours side of the Mason-Dixon IHOP-Waffle House line, and I'll stay on mine, you damn Yankee.

I live in Denver, and we have both IHOP and Waffle House. What does that mean for me?

Means I don't trust trans-Mississippi uplanders.

Y'all are just some hippy-dippy Horse Mormons as far as I'm concerned.

The unending torture of being surrounded by wannabe wonks who need to have an opinion on everything.

... or even the opinions from those outside of Pennsylvania.

Time for the Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch subforum. It's the only way to be sure. I assume, of course, that a LLM will slip into Hochdeutsch if you let them go on long enough, since that probably dominates the training sample.

People who have never been to my town feel confident to tell me what life in my town is like.

Oh, very much so. Perhaps Americans can also deign to stop trying to talk about how bad things are like in the UK without having a shred of lived experience (much as I dislike that phrase) of the place. Saying that the UK is a country where people regularly get arrested for saying mean things online is like saying the US is a country where schools regularly get shot up. It's misleading at best and outright false at worst.

  • -14

What is the quantitative amount of UK lived experience required to be permitted to talk about how bad things are in the UK?

Is there a recency requirement or any sort of continuing education requirements?

I have a non-rhetorical question:

Suppose that

(1) a person in the UK posts an anti-immigration statement on social media, something like "I'm sick and tired of our government letting in people from third-world sh*tholes, they tend to commit a lot of crime, consume lots of welfare benefits, and don't add much of value to the country."; and

(2) another person complains about this post to the local authorities.

What is likely to happen?

And by the way, as an American I don't object to non-Americans commenting on our politics provided they make it clear that they are outsiders.

Based on what I read in the newspapers lately:

  • If that literal tweet were reported to the police, probably nothing.
  • If reported to their employer, maybe they would be disciplined or fired, depending on their job.
  • If the tweet were different and contained a slur or a call to action, then arrested, especially if the authorities are feeling sensitive. For example, an ex-Royal Marine was arrested and held for 20 days in jail for making a video two days after the knife murder of three little girls by Axel Rudakabana:

He told GB News that his duty solicitor informed him he “would have been fine” had he said the same thing a few months prior.

The revelation left him exasperated as he questioned “what’s the difference?” because the laws surrounding free speech had not changed.

The 46-year-old posted the 12-minute video in which he said illegal immigrants have “the numbers to take over” the country.

He also used the words “scumbags” and “psychopaths” and warned the country was “under attack”.

Michael said on GB News that words had been scrutinised in isolation and the targets for his criticism had been Rudakubana and “illegal, unchecked or radicalised immigrants”.

He was found 'not guilty' by a jury after 17 minutes but he was up on terror charges with a maximum sentence of 7 years.

A nurse who tweeted that she didn't care if people burned down the asylum hotels was advised to plead guilty and got several years in jail.

I agree with @Crowstep:

for most people, most of the time, the state is nothing to be feared. But that's also true in literal dictatorships.

Saying that the UK is a country where people regularly get arrested for saying mean things online is like saying the US is a country where schools regularly get shot up. It's misleading at best and outright false at worst.

I kind of agree with you, in the sense that for most people, most of the time, the state is nothing to be feared. But that's also true in literal dictatorships.

At the same time, we can't base our model of the world on what we experience ourselves. If I did that, I would assume that everyone in the UK is gainfully employed (because these are the people I associate with). But I also know that something like 25% of the working age population are on unemployment/disability/sickness benefits.

In terms of speech crimes, there were about 12,000 arrested last year (only 8% leading to convictions). For comparison, there were about 15,000 arrests for robbery.

Am I the only one who thinks 80% as many arrests for speech crimes as there are for robbery is less than ideal?

It’s also worth taking into account the other poster by his own admission hates white people and is from the subcontinent. The free speech debate is directly tied to the immigrant debate. OP benefits from quashing the immigrant debate but knows free speech is broadly popular and therefore prefers to downplay the assault on free speech.

The OP also confuses state actors with private actors; one is stochastic and the other systemic. Even if the rate of being arrested is similar to the rate of being at a school with a shooting, it doesn’t mean the felt effect of the two would be similar.

Your "lived experience" of the UK is also a tremendously narrow sliver, and trying to style on the burgers with it is unimpressive.

As I'm sure you're painfully aware, we Americans are almost categorically unashamed to boldly declare our nationality to anyone who will listen. It's a complaint I hear a lot of.

So, per the original complaint, you're unlikely to have unidentified foreign influence contaminating your information space, at least from Americans.

Oh, I agree it's not unidentified. It's loud and proud foreign influence...

Well, the good news is that if you'd like to stop hearing what Americans think of you, you'll have no problems curating an accurate block list. What's stopping you?

I want to stop hearing what Americans think in certain but not all areas, much like how I might like to listen to a rock band during a concert but not if they're playing at full blast at 11PM on a Wednesday in my neighboring apartment while I am trying to go to sleep.

Americans are not a curated performance designed for the consumption of a particular audience. I've heard this isn't a flaw unique to my people.

Neither are thunderstorms, but I find them quite welcome when they're part of the monsoon after two months of the hot season and very unwelcome when I have to bike through them in January in the UK.

More comments

outright false at worst.

Are you saying that people in the UK don't get arrsted for sending mean tweets? Can you explain it more clearly?

The mean tweets definitely play a part in people getting arrested but almost always there's more to the story and when there's not in the unlikely event of an arrest it (eventually) gets classed as a miscarriage of justice (see how Northamtonshire Police was recently forced to pay a £50k fine for a wrongful arrest of someone for just "mean tweets", not to mention their legal costs and damages to the person who was wrongfully arrested).

  • -18

see how Northamtonshire Police was recently forced to pay a £50k fine for a wrongful arrest of someone for just "mean tweets"

Are you referring to this? If so, that’s a completely false description of the incident. The police were forced to pay the fine for repeatedly and deliberately failing to hand over video clips of the arrest despite several court orders, after the detainee alleged officers physically assaulted her during her arrest. The fine was not because the arrest itself was deemed unlawful.

Yep, I'm talking about that. I would say that's not a completely false description, the whole reason this kerfuffle started in the first place was that the claimant got arrested for saying mean things online about some people who had said mean things about her online and she took the force to court over the wrongful arrest and then the force started prevaricating and delaying but now the truth has come out about how this was indeed a wrongful arrest where unnecessary physical force was used.

  • -11

As far as I can tell, your expanded description still isn’t accurate, as no court has ruled that the arrest itself was wrongful. The only thing the police are in trouble for is repeatedly defying court orders requiring them to hand over evidence of physical abuse during the arrest. Certainly the arrest itself has not been ruled as a miscarriage of justice, as your original comment claimed.

The mean tweets definitely play a part in people getting arrested but almost always there's more to the story

We've just been through this conversation...

Ok, fine. The UK isn't a place where people get arrested for saying perfectly innocent things online. It's a place where underage girls are regularly raped by gangs of Pakistanis who kidnap and imprison them. Is that acceptable? Or would you say that is misleading, as well?

Don't play games with language. If something that shouldn't happens happens with a frequency of more than once per year, it's fine to call it 'regularly'. If I came to your house and shot your in the foot on your birthday every year, people would say that it is a regular occurrence, and wouldn't equivocate to 'misleading' or 'outright false'. I either shot your foot, or I didn't. It's not something you can smear with a narrative slight of hand.

It's a place where underage girls are regularly raped by gangs of Pakistanis who kidnap and imprison them. Is that acceptable?

Nope, that's misleading as well, in the same sense that saying the US is a place where innocent Black people regularly get killed by the police is misleading. That also happens more than once a year in the US.

  • -17

Would you tell me your date of birth and your real life location, so I may mislead and deceive the public into the regular occurance of me shooting your foot?

Yes, I know you're being sarcastic, but don't test "How close can I get to actually threatening people?"

This is an obvious rhetorical flourish, nowhere even close to an actual threat.

Yes, I am aware that crushedoranges was not literally threatening to shoot BC in the foot. If I said I would like to come to your house and punch you in the face as a "rhetorical flourish," you'd be the first to report it.

Birthday: October 9, 1,830,656 BC

Location: Just behind the third cobweb after you turn right down the landing of the entrance of the CvC castle.

What are you doing to that cobweb?

Hey, we all have our needs you know...

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