Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)
why in the fuck does calibre’s source code have an
aifolder?https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/tree/master/src/calibre/ai
at the very least call it “llm” or something. does this folder contain A* as a subroutine? or how about a chess engine? someone needs to develop a pill that cures misanthropy because for some reason this specifically broke me.
Calibre recently implemented integrations with various slop generators. It optional (for now).
This isn’t a particularly novel stupid take, but it was made by a bluesky engineer, and it is currently dunking-on-bluesky season so here we are.
“If you imagine that an ai is a person, then saying bad things about it is bigotry”
Welp, they’ve got me there. Guess I’ll never say anything bad about anything again, because it is racism, if you think about it.
https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3m2f66lgh2c2v
alt text
A bluesky post by dystopiabreaker.xyz
i’m completely serious when i say that much of the dismissive ai discourse on here fires the bigotry neuron
And two replies by hailey.at
an unfortunate irony about this post - and even if you are the staunchest anti-ai critic out there, i think you’d agree - is that some of the most bigoted things are being said to respond to this. copy/pasting phrasing and terminology used by bigots but replacing “dna” with “bits” doesn’t make it ok
if you’re writing a sentence that sounds like eugenics but you go “oh that’s fine to say because it’s not a real person” (whatever that means) you may want to consider what made you okay with saying that
If I imagine that my butt is a rocket, then I can fart my way to the moon
Said engineer’s also brainstorming new ways to spy on users and adding a new misfeature that scans everything you post, in direct response to getting clowned on.
(an exception can be made for people repurposing real-world slurs and putting a techy spin on them. fuck directly off with “wireback” and similar shit)
i read that there was one based on a mexican-slur, but i couldn’t think of it
spent weeks trying to rhyme “wet” with something, couldn’t come up with it, damn i guess i’m not a poet at least i know it
“wire” — fuck me that is so lazy
Ah, the beauty of the fundamental theorem of concern-troll linguistics. If you can change the words in a sentence so that the new sentence is racist, the original must be as well. Example:
Aaron: The weather is just ok.
Baron: OMG. I can’t believe you just said that. What if I changed the noun and adjective, like this: “<ethnic group> is <negative adjective>”. Go home and think about what you did.
A hackernews claiming to be a cerebras insider is calling schenanigans. Not sure how trustworthy of a source this is, but the replies may be interesting.
I might flesh this out into a proper post, but I remember stumbling on this weird website: https://www.reactionary.software/
I originally found it on r/shittysysadmin when a screenshot of the discord for it (so much for modern software being bloated and unusable) had the person behind it defending that the site didn’t have an ssl cert, since that was a way “modern browsers control you”.
I was curious and poked around on the site, and first thing you see is this:
Make software great again! For programmers who hate modern software. Modern software is overcomplicated, bloated, unreliable, incomprehensible, pointlessly ideological, and mostly unusable. We like the values of older software: simplicity, reliability, and usability.
This seems pretty fashy, but there is some legitimate criticisms of modern software.
Saving programming from modern culture
Nevermind, fash.
On the about page, he starts by mentioning html swipers, and one he made himself. The one he made is pretty dogshit on anything but a phone.
After talking a bit on how terrible modern software he then compares it to brick walls, which were also so much better back in the day (?).
He then rambles about ancient greece and rome.
An excerpt:Why did it take to long? Because humanity had become just too stupid to appreciate good ideas. They weren’t completely retarded. Ptolemy’s horrible system did require some intelligence to create. […] Today’s West is currently at the level of the decaying Greeks, heading toward complete idiocracy. The programmers in Silicon Valley are like Ptolemy, able to construct and maintain horrible overcomplicated monstrosities, but totally unable to innovate at a fundamental level. All good programming ideas are rejected because they don’t fit into current programming ideologies. Any programmer like Aristarchus who comes up with a good programming idea will be rejected and ridiculed for violating orthodoxy. Modern programmers are in love with their own ideas and love complexity. They hate simplicity and anything that violates their ideologies.
He then complains about how his parser was met with scorn by Modern Programmers, because they were too stupid to appreciate how good it was?
The post is here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Compilers/comments/cv78b3/parsing_for_programmers_who_hate_modern_software/
Some excerpts:
What is good? The short answer is that everything that modern culture hates is good, and everything that modern culture loves is bad. But we need more details than that. You can find good values in scripture or in good traditional culture. These values should be applied to programming and to everything else in life. I wrote an Old Testament guide to programming. I also discussed applying traditional Japanese culture to programming. These are just two examples. Any other scripture like the Quran or any traditional culture should work fine to give you good values, in contrast to the horrible values of modern culture, and these good values can guide you to writing good reactionary software.
So, anything anti-modern is good?
Going back to the homepage, there’s a page for existing reactionary software.
Java 8.
One of the pinnacles of software, to him, is Java 8.
Not java specifically, just java 8.Luan is a language he made, which I can only describe as a mash of lua, java and php.
Here’s a snippet from the docs:local Io = require "luan:Io.luan" local Http = require "luan:http/Http.luan" return function() Io.stdout = Http.response.text_writer() %> <!doctype html> <html> <body> Hello World </body> </html> <% endSo, this is basically a lua clone, written in java. with a few missing features .
The why page on the luan site is probably the most deranged bit of this.
Luan rejects the complexity of modern software. […] Luan will appeal to you depends on who you are. Members of modern culture will not like Luan because they hate simplicity. Luan will only appeal to good cultures that value simplicity, so I will address the two good cultures that I know of.
The mentioned two good cultures are the Mennonites, and the Japanese.
Japan is the only remaining country that I know of that values quality.
You cannot expect to achieve Japanese standards of quality and reliability if you use modern western software. So use Luan instead.
He has a chronically inactive forum at https://mikraite.arkian.net/Reactionary-Software-f1999.html .
Also, shoutout to this political take: https://web.archive.org/web/20240831203139/http://mikraite.arkian.net/Are-democrats-actually-our-allies-td4846.html
Great find. A reactionary fetishising Japan?? Unheard of
I have just realised that I unintentionally fleshed this into a proper post.
Last week on, “Please do not build the torment nexus”
No, it never works out in the movies, I mean somehow these poor delusional humans convince themselves that they can control the kill bots…
Because the Terminator franchise is from Hollywood, the heroic resisters to SkyNet are Americans. Someone didn’t watch the movies very well.
OFC the OG Terminator was a scary foreign man with a pronounced accent…
Good to know that she still has space on her war crime scorecard
Somehow I missed this when it came out, but apparently starmer’s digital ID scheme is so half-baked that even palantir are backing away and saying they won’t tender for it. “Worst person you know”, etc.
Content warning for flattering pictures of moseley jr 🤮
Paywalled:
Archived:
It’s so fucking weird because as a regular EU citizen an ID card is a normal and good thing to exist and have, yet somehow the anglo world has managed to make it controversial and bad by insisting on a horrible surveillance police state version of the concept.
It’s a combination of reflexive authoritarianism and a complete and total inability to deliver a big public-sector tech project without it drowning in corruption and incompetence.
States which already have ID cards implemented them before the advent of modern consultancies. Even the UK managed driving licenses and passports OK, back in the day. But until someone buries deloitte and capita et al at crossroads at midnight with their heads chopped off, I suspect we’ll never manage such a thing again.
I know it’s terrible being a drama gossip, but there are some Fun Times on bluesky at the moment. I’m sure most of you know the origins of the project, and the political leanings of the founders, but they’re currently getting publicly riled up about trans folk and palestinians and tying themselves up in knots defending their decision to change the rules to keep jesse singal on site, and penniless victims of the idf off it.
They really cannot cope with the fact that their user base aren’t politically aligned with them, and are desperate to appease the fash (witness the crackdowns on people’s reaction to charlie kirk’s overdue departure from this vale of tears) and have currently reached the Posting Through It stage. I’m assuming at some point their self-image as Reasonable Centrists will crack and one or more of them will start throwing around transphobic slurs and/or sieg-heiling and bewailing how the awful leftists made them do it. Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?
Well, they’re already using “waffles” as a transphobic slur (irony poisoning speedrun any%), so it’s really more of a question of which transphobic slurs they’ll escalate to next.
And all this because she simply could not shut up. Which seems to be one of the oldest, modding a large community rules.
Nobody ever seems to learn the “never get high from your own supply” lesson. Gotta get that hit of thousands of people instantly supporting and agreeing with whatever dumbfuck thought just fell out.
You absolutely don’t have to hand it to zuckerberg, but he at least is well aware that he runs an unethical ad company that’s bad for the world, has always expressed his total contempt for his users, and has not posted through it.
whenever there’s a huge scandal he listens to his PR people, keeps his mouth shut, then goes on a media tour where he lies his ass off in exactly the same way at each stop. it’s that simple and yet almost no other tech people can do it
You absolutely don’t have to hand it to zuckerberg, but he at least is well aware that he runs an unethical ad company that’s bad for the world, has always expressed his total contempt for his users, and has not posted through it.
Its an extremely low bar to clear, but I’ll begrudgingly hand it to him for being one of the few tech CEOs who didn’t actively limbo under it.
here’s a good summary of the situation including an analysis of the brand new dogwhistle a bunch of bluesky posters are throwing around in support of Jay and Singal and layers of other nasty shit
here’s Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, getting called out by lowtax’s ex-wife:
here’s Jay posting about mangosteen (mangosteen juice was a weird MLM lowtax tried to market on the Something Awful forums as he started to spiral)
Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?
since Jay posted AI generated art about dec/acc and put the term in her profile, her little “ironic” nod to e/acc and to AI, my guess is this is coming very soon
This doesn’t include her blurb about, “are you paying us? where???”
But weren’t there a multitude of people clamoring for a Bluesky subscription service from the get-go? Out of recognition that this situation was one of the potential failure modes?
The question on getting paid might give credence to the rumors that they’re running out of money and won’t make it (user-growth wise) as an ad platform. Which, lol and also lmao.
Yeah, I can’t see that they’re doing anything besides burning runway. It’s probably shortly going to become cliche to say, “glad I never made an account there,” but, welp, glad I never made an account there
But weren’t there a multitude of people clamoring for a Bluesky subscription service from the get-go? Out of recognition that this situation was one of the potential failure modes?
Even beyond that, the Twitter refugees came to Bluesky because they wanted a Nazi-free successor to Twitter. Most of them would’ve happily pitched in to keep the site alive whilst goodwill remained.
Bluesky wanted to be Nazi Twitter, then Elon purchased Twitter and stole their market.
Huh, didn’t know about the guy behind tangled.org (Anirudh Oppiliappan) being a waffle enthusiast too 🫤 Just visited his bsky profile, and he’s enthusing about a “decentralised accelerationism” post by jay.
I hadn’t really seen the point of the tangled project (I’m not sure what atproto brings to version control) but I was interested in an ecosystem around the jujutsu vcs stuff. I guess I won’t find that here.
ok plz explain what “waffles” means in this context
TL;DR: It’s all a meme-poisoned bluesky circle-jerk involving transphobes and people who desperately want transphobes to think they’re cool.
The link from self to mcc’s bluesky thread sums up this stuff with references, but to attempt to summarise the summary, there’s a tweet from the depths of time (2017) that says
Twitter the only place where well articulated sentences still get misinterpreted. You can say “I like pancakes” and somebody will say “So you hate waffles?”
Bluesky ceo jay graber uses “waffles” as shorthand referencing this post, and whipped it out when asked about bluesky’s ongoing unwillingness to do anything about noted transphobe jesse singal, who has since posted about how much he loves waffles.
jfc
Thanks for taking the time to expand
what fresh hell is this
Cloudflare Introduces NET Dollar stable coin (HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45471573)
While most bullish outlooks are premised on economic reacceleration, it’s difficult to ignore the market’s reliance on AI capex. In market-pricing terms, we believe we’re closer to the seventh inning than the first, and several developments indicate we may be entering the later phases of the boom. First, AI hyperscaler free-cash-flow growth has turned negative. Second, price competition in the "monopoly-feeder businesses” seems to be accelerating. Finally, recent deal-making smacks of speculation and vendor-financing strategies of old.
I predict Sam will lose big on the S&C claims. They have made fuckin bank on this bankruptcy, but also their fees have already been ruled entirely reasonable given the shitshow in question, and the near complete recovery for creditors will make them look even better.
"You know, I never defrauded anyone,” says Sam Bankman-Fried
“You know, I never sent the boys across the Isonzo without believing we could win,” said Luigi Cadorna
Guys according to LW you’re reading Omelas all wrong (just like LeGuin was wrong)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n83HssLfFicx3JnKT/omelas-is-perfectly-misread
Funny to type all that up and also go ‘Le Guin Disagrees’
(not that having a different read than the author intended is strange, I mean I have a dystopian reading of Starship troopers which I think makes much more sense than what was intended).
I think I read Starship Troopers before I saw the movie, because a small scene reveals that Johnny Rico is of Phillipine descent (his mother tongue is Tagalog) and I remember wondering if that would be part of the movie. Samuel R Delany mentions that scene as something that made him felt included in SF.
I was very young when I read it but even then I could read it as proto-fascist (or rather military-authoritarian, a bit like cod-Roman Republic)
When I was young the whole part where they misrecall history just felt like a 1984 bit to me. And I reread it after Helldivers 2 came out, and I noticed a lot of odd things, like how their ideology doesn’t make sense, how for some reason all the smart people seem to die (by being put in dangerous spots), people who disagree with them being setup as strawmen (old ladies, and crazy people basically), and how odd it is that Rico while not being smart (he only qualifies for the infantry after all) is judged as perfect officer material. Which felt to me like they were selecting for stupid people. (the guy not being able to do math properly while their ideology is based on some unspoken math science thing is also funny).
And then there is the whole uplifted scout dogs thing. Who all commit suicide the first time they encounter a bug (which means nobody ever tested that, and they still deployed their whole scout dog force on the planet). And due to some psychic link this also makes their handler useless.
It is just a weird book tbh. The military scenes make little sense (just randomly blow things up) and are just warcrimes. The ideology is dumb and is based on a handwave, and if you read between the lines (which was not intended obv) and make Rico into an unreliable narrator because he isn’t that smart (see also how he never doubts that people who get executed are guilty, the law system fucking up isn’t a thing he thinks about, but he knows the system isn’t fallible, as they complain about how big of a mess the war logistics are) and misses things, there seems to be a whole different thing going on.
Also democracy fell because kids were not spanked enough.
Hope this made it a bit clear why I think you can also read it as a dystopian unreliable narrator being manipulated novel even if it wasn’t intended.
But yeah the space suits are cool.
Choice sneer from the comments:
Omelas: how we talk about utopia [by Big Joel, a patient and straightforward Youtube humanist,] [has a] pretty much identical thesis, does this count?
Another solid one which aligns with my local knowledge:
It’s also about literal child molesters living in Salem Oregon.
The story is meant to be given to high schoolers to challenge their ethics, and in that sense we should read it with the following meta-narrative: imagine that one is a high schooler in Omelas and is learning about The Plight and The Child for the first time, and then realize that one is a high schooler in Salem learning about local history. It’s not intended for libertarian gotchas because it wasn’t written in a philosophical style; it’s a narrative that conveys a mood and an ethical framing.
One of the many annoying traits of rationalists is their tendency to backproject classic pieces of literature onto their chosen worldview.
So bit of a counter to our usual stuff thing. But a worker migrant here won a case against his employer who had linked his living space to his employment contract (forbidden) using chatgpt as an aid (how much is not told). So there actually was a case where it helped.
Interesting note on it, these sorts of cases have no jurisprudence yet, so that might have been a factor. No good links for it sadly as it was all in Dutch. (Cant even find a proper writeup in a bigger news site as a foreigner defending their rights against abuse is less interesting than some other country having a new bisshop). Skeets congratulating the guy here https://bsky.app/profile/isgoedhoor.bsky.social/post/3m27aqkyjjk2c (in Dutch). Nothing much about the genAI usage.
But this does fit a pattern, how, like with blind/bad eyesight people, these tools are veing used by people who have no other recourse because we refuse to help them (this is bad tbh, Im happy they are getting more help don’t fet me wrong, but it shouldn’t be this substandard).
LLMs are the Dippin Dots of technology.
That’s an unfair comparison, Dippin Dots don’t slowly ruin the world by existing (also, they’re delicious)
It will always be the ice cream of the future, never the ice cream of today
The Guardian shat out its latest piece of AI hype, violating Betteridge’s Law of headlines by asking “Parents are letting little kids play with AI. Are they wrong?”
Do we have a word for people that are kind of like… AI concern trolls? Like they say they are critical of AI, or even against AI, but only ever really put forward pro-AI propaganda, especially in response to actual criticisms of AI. Kind of centrists or (neo) libs. But for AI.
Bonus points if they also for some reason say we should pivot to more nuclear power, because in their words, even though AI doesn’t use as much electricity as we think, we should still start using more nuclear power to meet the energy demands. (ofc this is bullshit)
E: Maybe it’s just sealion
Sealions is a bit more specific, as they do not stop, and demand way more evidence than is normal, Scott had a term for this, forgot it already (one of those more useful Rationalist ideas, which they only employ themselves asymmetrically). Noticed it recently on reddit, some person was mad I didn’t properly counter Yuds arguments, while misrepresenting my position (which wasn’t that strong tbh, I just quickly typed them up before I had other things to do). But it is very important to take Yuds arguments seriously for some reason, reminds me of creationists.
Think just calling them AI concern trolls works.
sealAIon
