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"You [...]" makes pretty much anything an insult.
A positive word implies sarcasm. "You genius". "You hero".
A random noun drags out the negative aspect of the noun or implies lack of a brain. "You french fry". "You paper bag".
Adding a random adjective just strengthens the statement. "You british bathroom sink". "You beautiful parking lot".
Of couse it depends on delivery, and using random words makes some strange insults, but I rarely see "you [...]" turn into a positive compliment.
You Beautiful parking lot
This sounds like something Leslie Knope would call Ann Perkins.
I'll take "beautiful parking lot" as a compliment and there is nothing you can do about it
“You genius” sounds like a compliment to me. A “funny” compliment. Would it be taken as sarcasm in the US? It really depends the tone I guess but in Australian english I wouldnt interpret it as sarcasm.
Context and tone matters.
"Hey, I figured out a way to cut our EC2 needs and scaled down, saving us a ton of money." "You genius!"
vs.
"Ummm.... I accidentally left half a dozen m8g.16xlarge nodes running... for the last four months." "You... fucking genius."
Well there’s a “fucking” there.
I think you could use fucking in either of those contexts, and one would still be positive and one negative. The tone fo the first would be joyful, the tone of the second would be sarcastic.
Well, yeah. For fucking emphasis. "Absolute" would have worked as well.
I think that changing it to something gramatically correct would make it into a compliment. "You are a genius" would make it positively charged. However, I would expect "you genius" to be something that, for instance, someone would exclaim when someone cuts their hand when trying to open an avocado. Meanwhile I think it would be strange to exclaim "you genius" when someone solves a partial differential equation. But it probably does rely on the tone.
“you genius” is what a lad would say when you’ve found a solution to a stupid problem you got yourselves into while drunk or something. A geniune compliment, but with some humour added in.