Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

    • blakestacey@awful.systems
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      I think it could be very valuable to alignment-pill these people.

      Zoom and enhance!

      alignment-pill

      The inability to hear what their own words sound like is terminal. At this stage, we can only provide palliative care, i.e., shoving into lockers.

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      Lmaou. ā€œWe need to alignment pill the Russian youth.ā€ Fast forward to the year 20XX and the haunted alignment pilled adults are now ā€˜aligningā€™ their bots to the worldā€™s top nuclear armed despot.

      tony_soprano_how_could_this_happen.jpg (for some reason awful systems wonā€™t let me upload pictures anymore (惎ą² ē›Šą² )惎)

      Holy Moses in heaven, iirc both Sam and Dario have said that their urge to build the torment nexus came from being inspired by online RAT forums. Maybe alignment ā€˜pillingā€™ youths is counterproductive to human flourishing? As the LWers say, ā€œupdate your priors fuckheadsā€

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      people in the Russian-speaking EA community are all busy with other things.

      i.e. working for Putin, running from Putin, or dying for Putin

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    Apparently, the OpenMandriva folk (the inheritors of the venerable mandrake/mandriva Linux distro) are now best buddies with Bryan Lunduke (right wing tech grifter and q-anon fan) are decrying the left wing bias of Linux projects with a hilarious ā€œwokeOS shellā€

    Archive of openmandriva forum post: https://archive.is/2025.01.11-001057/https://forum.openmandriva.org/t/came-here-from-lunduke/5516/1

    Lovely juxtaposition of ā€œletā€™s stick it to the gay fagsā€ and ā€œweā€™re accepting of everyone and thereā€™s no hate hereā€. Seems like a classy community all round. Itā€™s a little sad to see how mandrake ended up, but there you go.

    WokeOS here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250110234818/https://lindev.ch/wokeos.cpp

    Itā€™s pretty tedious and unimaginative. No idea who lindev are.

    (eta: wasnā€™t me who originally found this, but Iā€™m never quite sure whether itā€™s ok to include sources for this sort of thing given the subject. on the other hand, the op has it as public post thatā€™s been boosted a bunch of times, so here it is: https://tech.lgbt/@GeopJr/113807022917800887)

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      Bryan Lunduke

      Holy shit, the Linux Action Show guy? I remember listening to that podcast occasionally fifteen years ago and found it quite entertaining.

      I had no idea he was even still around, let alone going techfash.

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      Thanks for the heads-up. I couldnā€™t finish reading through all postings in that forum thread, itā€™s all just making me so tiredā€¦ always the same shit.

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      It still has to go through peer review, so I fully expect one (1) accepted paper with the title ā€œLarge Generative AI Models in Telecommunications - What? No. Why? No!ā€

      Hit me up if you want to collaborate on one lol

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        Hereā€™s a start:

        Given their enormous environmental cost and their foundation upon exploited labor, justifying the use of Large Generative AI Models in telecommunications is an uphill task. Since their output is, in the technical sense of the term, bullshit, climbing that hill has no merit.

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          Since their output is, in the technical sense of the term, bullshit [1],

          == References

          [1] Frankfurt H. On Bullshit. Raritan Quarterly Review 1986; 6:81-100.

          Letā€™s start collecting a bibliography

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          I love the leaves and gold meme and I use it constantly even though quite literally no one ever understands it, so, thank you, now I know thereā€™s two of us.

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            Zapisz obrazek jako ahgsfds doesnā€™t translate well, i think thatā€™s why

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        eyelid twitching

        sure, we barely understand all applicable bio systems, letā€™s have some shitty model dream up answers on how things work! itā€™ll go great

        Much as a chatbot can discern style and perhaps even meaning from huge volumes of written language,

        going to have to add this author to the List, arenā€™t I

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          they are gonna bridge gaps in fundamental knowledge of cell biology using innovative approach of making shit up

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      To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, Iā€™m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.

      The passive-aggressive language and the pettyness is such a combination.

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      [The] SEO space, an industry known for making the web better.

      end_me_now.jpg

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        SEOs match quality websites to those users trying to find them. As much as Google and Bing like to pretend that theyā€™re perfect there are very real indexing issues that crop up and need experts to debug, mitigate, and prevent; so in a very real way the SEOs do make the web better for users.

        [comment continues below the ad]

        For example letā€™s say there was a user who wanted to read a website full of LLM written articles and ads but they keep stumbling across low quality websites with poor SEO practices like Wikipedia instead, why that would be terrible. In order to prevent this terrible possiblity it is the noble duty of SEOs to buy well respected high ranking domain names so that users get a brand they can trust. Like Forbes. Or Radioshack.

        [comment continues below the ad]

        Sincerely, the myseonews.now ā€œstaffā€.

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        the sheer amount and rapidity of times it goes from ā€œfucking wot m8ā€ to moments where you can just see him cackling to himself, ā€œhee heeeeeeā€¦ thatā€™ll teach 'em!ā€, just constant whiplash

        my neck hurts and I shouldā€™ve stretched

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      Eurgh. Iā€™m now feeling angry at the thought of someone who is doing a degree in global health but gets persuaded that AI safety is more important.

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        evil regulators prevent sv megaminds from unrestricted access to adderall probably

        idk what specifically, there has been a thing with anti-cavity bacteria that didnā€™t work or maybe thatā€™s about some transhumanist bs

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          I remember from my misspent youth reading Scottā€™s ramblings a fair bit of antipathy towards FDA regulations in particular. What I can only attribute to ignorance of history makes them fall prey to the standard libertarian talking points about slowing down drugs that could improve peopleā€™s lives, never mind the fact that in the absence of those regulations everybody who could hypothetically benefit from psychedelic nootropics or whatever would have been too busy dealing with phocomelia to care.

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            they think they can reason from first principles out of this problem and obviously all these pitfalls wonā€™t happen to them, theyā€™re too smart for this. they arenā€™t like these filthy obstructionists of progress that actually know what theyā€™re doing, you see

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              Even if that was true, they have to understand that other people exist and may take advantage of this, right? Like, even if you believe you and your friends are paragons of moral and intellectual virtue, the same law applies to villains and dumbasses.

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                i donā€™t think that they think that everyone else has as much agency as they do (and itā€™s kinda true, but not because of npc world, but because theyā€™re rich fucks with too much time to waste)

                also, if they had a way theyā€™d make carveouts iq-dependent

      • self@awful.systems
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        holy shit you really werenā€™t kidding about how lazy it gets. thereā€™s a bunch of frames that are just text Iā€™m not gonna read on a black background???

        • self@awful.systems
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          • has money in crypto
          • skin is actively melting
          • will keep monologuing even when unconscious, like a broken video game cutscene
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      Sir, this is a Wendyā€™s, also

      There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.

      did you get sucked up your ass so deep you forgot whoā€™s on the reactionary side?

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        Depends on your perspective I guess, like if you imagine there are really ā€˜we should destroy the internet and go back to the imaginary golden age before the internetā€™ people those would be reactionary on that subject. I have never seen anybody honestly like that however.

        On his reactionary side: I donā€™t get how his allies, he can stand them. I mean he must know they will come after him next. We know what they think of lgbt people.

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          i think itā€™s reasonable to say that his influence campaigns and wealth will keep him safe for at least some time. guilty until proven rich and all that

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          I mean he must know they will come after him next

          big piles of money, and all the power bases heā€™s accrued

          thereā€™s long precedent of collaborators who were instrumental in the projects of harm and suppression still being able to flourish throughout selfsame projects

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      i donā€™t know how much experience thiel has in actual politics, but chances are that heā€™ll be given dead in the water projects that will just keep him busy and distracted enough to not do anything, should trump admin choose so, like this https://youtu.be/xxVsS9ZNUOU?t=193 (start from beginning for nuclear grade sneer on musk)

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      i hope thiel keeps writing these, because every minute he does he doesnā€™t spend on horrible shit like implementing them

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      for someone that runs a surveillance company he sure as fuck canā€™t help yapping about his plans

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        theyā€™re all just so fucking ā€¦ smug

        it appears they donā€™t think anything can possibly go wrong

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          Well, all tech shit is inevitable after all. (In their minds) see how they talk about the slop generators. (Or that ā€˜if I donā€™t steal the home somebody else willā€™ guy).

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          i also like that implied statement that no other country than us has any agency at all, and internal affairs of a couple mentioned countries were really result of american activities

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      the amount of doublethink and newspeak this is attempting to push is remarkable

      also afaik thiel isnā€™t one to regularly demean himself to writing tidbits such as this, is he? I donā€™t recall seeing nearly as many words from mr likes-it-private as I have from andreesen et al

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        Dindt he write a book on how democracy is over? Or incompatible with the modern world or something.

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    ā€œThe Publisher of the Journal ā€œNatureā€ Is Emailing Authors of Scientific Papers, Offering to Sell Them AI Summaries of Their Own Workā€, by Maggie Harrison DuprĆ© at Futurism:

    Springer Nature, the stalwart publisher of scientific journals including the prestigious Nature as well as the nearly 200-year-old magazine Scientific American, is approaching the authors of papers in its journals with AI-generated ā€œMedia Kitsā€ to summarize and promote their research.

    In an email to journal authors obtained by Futurism, Springer told the scientists that its AI tool will ā€œmaximize the impactā€ of their research, saying the $49 package will return ā€œhigh-qualityā€ outputs for marketing and communication purposes. The publisherā€™s sell for the package hinges on the argument that boiling down complex, jargon-laden research into digestible soundbites for press releases and social media copy can be difficult and time-consuming ā€” making it, Springer asserts, a task worth automating.

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      ah yeah exactly what i needed: a button that burns a square km of rainforest with every press, that might generate an abstract (that iā€™ve already wrote) but wrong, or fake press release that goes nowhere and also is wrong, while at the same time sending what might be restricted data fuck knows where with pinky promise that they wonā€™t blend it and force feed their imagined machine god

      Earlier this week, for instance, the massive publishing body announced in a press release that it would be deploying a ā€œnew AI-driven toolā€ crafted to automate ā€œeditorial quality checksā€ and notify editors to ā€œpotentially unsuitable manuscriptsā€. The announcement adds that manuscripts may be held back from peer review if the AI tool deems them editorially unfit.

      watch this to be used as a bludgeon against ESL authors. oh noes poor country people, go somewhere else because Computer Says No. then they decrease acceptance rate on their website

      A Guy in India (specialist) approach to detection of slop will still work, but itā€™s not resistant to office politics of complaining that itā€™s not web scale and such. i canā€™t wait for collapse of this bubble

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    OT: I remember linux on the desktop as a meme, but like, when did this actually happen? I donā€™t think ai noticed.

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      At some point in the last years, playing games on Linux turned from fiddling three hours with a Wine config to maybe get an hour of 30fps before the next crash into a legit better experience than Windows that works out of the box in most cases. That did sell a lot of people on giving it a try.

      I guess it happened when Valve went all-in on Proton. And Microsoft first adding ads into Windows and now forcing their autoplag on everyone helped a bit, too.

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      With betting markets I often think, so they have all just forgotten the idea of assassination markets?

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    My favorite quote from flipping through LessWrong to find something passingly entertaining:

    You only multiply the SAT z-score by 0.8 if youā€™re selecting people on high SAT score and estimating the IQ of that subpopulation, making a correction for regressional Goodhart. Rationalists are more likely selected for high g which causes both SAT and IQ

    (From the comments for ā€œThe average rationalist IQ is about 122ā€.)

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      <insert rant about lizardman constant here again>, and I say that as a person with a sat score of 1650!

      E: ow god the first comments are ā€˜actually you and scott underestimate the derived IQā€™

      E: in other related new turns out Cephalopods have a higher IQ that the people on themotte. Article unrelated, just thought it was neat.

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      I bet if they restricted the survey entrants to people who actually write on LW, the score would have been far lower. Has a single article on there contained even a twinge of a useful idea?

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        Yes it has had good ideas. As rationalwiki said. The good ideas are not new, and the new ideas are not good.

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          even some of their bad ideas arenā€™t original

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    An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out itā€™s much worse:

    https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/

    [Do not post} Insults, including those about [ā€¦] Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ā€œweird.ā€

    You can see the full diff from last version if you click ā€œJan 8, 2025ā€ and yeah itā€™s a doozy.

    Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day. I couldnā€™t really concentrate on work. Itā€™s hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isnā€™t dunking on them for it.

    On the bright side the policy technically lets you go around calling people insane for being straight or cisgender* if anyone is still on there and wants to get banned from that platform in a blaze of glory.

    * or indeed simply having a gender and Iā€™m not sure fascists know how to use words right.

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      Iā€™m pretty confident of a significant backlash against queer communities in North America in the near term.

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        The backlash already happened - itā€™s been a few years of far right protests against drag shows and prides. Not that it canā€™t get worse!

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      It is very disturbing and scary.

      Theyā€™re explicitly carving out an exception to target sexual/gender minorities. And I wonder, given how they are often among the first groups being targeted, and then other groups follow, how long until they add more exceptions? How long until Meta modifies the rules further to e.g. explicitly allow racism too?

      Meta/Facebook has never been a good company. But the path they have actively chosen now is so much more evil than before.

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      Iā€™ve been around the internet a long time, and even back then when throwing slurs at each other and ā€œmaking funā€ of marginalized groups was, if not accepted, at least tolerated because it was considered some poor attempt at humor, I donā€™t remember ever seeing a rule or passage in any netiquette stating it that explicitly.

      It was always ā€œwe donā€™t censor speech but donā€™t be an assholeā€ with a giant asterisk about what both censoring and being an asshole meant, but I donā€™t think Iā€™ve ever seen even the worst places say, ā€œwe explicitly allow hate speech, go aheadā€.

      Holy fucking shitballs.

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      Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day.

      same here. the thing is, I think a lot of us are on awful.systems because weā€™ve seen far too much of how fascism operates and spreads online. this is an antifascist place; itā€™s so core to the mission that we donā€™t publish it as a policy (because a policy can be argued against and twisted and the fash kids love doing that), we just demonstrate it in a way that canā€™t be ignored. so seeing the first or second (I donā€™t keep track of these things) most popular social media platform publish a policy whose only purpose is to be used as a weapon against marginalized people, for it to be written in a matter-of-fact ā€œthis is just how it isā€ way, and for essentially nobody outside of the fediverse to push back on it in any real way ā€” that is shocking.

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          Now the new language merely bans ā€œunsupported comparisonsā€ between protected groupsā€™ on the basis of their ā€œinherent intellectual capacityā€

          Im sure we all noticed that this is also exactly one of those things which was allowed in the Rationalist places. And one of the reasons that it took them forever to get rid of slurinnameO on the ssc subreddit (E: He now moved to twitter where he has a terrifying 200k followers (cremieuxrecueil if you want to block the shithead)).

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      See this is why I try to do my reading here at night, because now when I feel sad and angry for the rest of the day itā€™s gonna be like 5 hours tops.

    • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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      4 days ago

      After reading some of the counterpoints here, I began thinking about how I considered Excel a hyperkludge if you qualify it enough. I realized the qualifications apply to every programming language (good olā€™ Turing Completeness). I think, in my case, the common scenario of

      1. this tool[1] is just a proof of concept/prototype
      2. it costs less to maintain our tool than to write a more appropriate solution from scratch
      3. our infrastructure is now the tool

      had me erroneously criticizing the tool instead of its application[2]. In the case of Excel, I worked a few jobs where the spreadsheets used when the company was small led to an absolute nightmare after the company grew.

      I appreciate the thoughtful responses from everyone. <3


      1: Usually a spreadsheet, in my experience.

      2: Noting that, while ā€œitā€™s not the tool, itā€™s the applicationā€ is a common refrain from people using tools in shitty ways, there is a distinction between ā€œthis is the wrong tool for the jobā€ and ā€œthis tool will hurt peopleā€.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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      ehh. even in the original text it rapidly decays into anything that annoys him is a hyperkludge. Successful things have problems that are only problems of success.

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        Saying that Excel is not and never was a good solution for any problem feels like a rather blinkered, programmer-brained technique.

        • Steve@awful.systems
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          4 days ago

          I love the word, the definition, but I agree with so few of his examples.

          I latched on to it because it fit so well with my regular criticisms of tech products, particularly saas shit

    • bitofhope@awful.systems
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      Examples off the top of my head:

      • Almost everything about TCP/IP stack
      • NETCONF
      • YAML
      • Most things related to cars and car infrastructure
      • Alcohol
      • Chiclet keyboards
      • Unicode Han unification
      • Layer 2 SDN
      • Kubernetes
      • JavaScript
      • Disk partitioning
      • UEFI
      • Public transit fares

      Edit: checked the link and was surprised our lists didnā€™t have any ones in common (though I considered including MS Excel).

      • self@awful.systems
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        • MS-DOS and Windows, of courseā€¦
        • but, and this will get some boos, Unix as a workstation OS compared with every other non-windows workstation OS
        • istewart@awful.systems
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          If you step back and think about it, it is rather absurd that a time-sharing multi-user OS essentially took over for personal devices

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      Counterpoint: to what extent are hyperkludges actually a unique thing versus an aspect of how technologies and tools are integrated into human context? Like, one of the original examples is the TCP/IP stack, but as anyone who has had to wrangle multiple vendors can attest a lot of the value in that standardization necessarily comes from the network effects - the fact that itā€™s an accepted standard. The web couldnā€™t function if you had a bespoke protocol stack hand-made to elegantly handle the specific problems of a given application not just because of the difficulty in building that much software (i.e. network effects on the design and construction side) but because of how unwieldy and impractical it would be to get any of those applications in front of people. The fit of those tools for a given application is secondary to how much more cleanly the entire ecosystem can operate because they are more limited in number.

      The OP also talks about how embedded the history of a given problem is in the solution which feels like the central explanation for this trend. In that sense a hyperkludge isnā€™t a unique pattern that some things fall into and more a way of indicating a particularly noteworthy whorl in the fractal infinikludge that is all human endeavors.

    • mlen@awful.systems
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      Iā€™m surprised that alphabetical lists are included. Maybe my brain has completely rotten, but keeping the data sorted is pretty neat for efficient processing

      • Steve@awful.systems
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        yeah that is an interesting example. I immediately applied the term to commercial products. Like Notion for example - funny because I always say Notion takes wikis which are well established in their usefulness and just slaps them into saas product with other things like docs and spreadsheets (also well established in their usefulness) - but he calls wikis themselves a hyperkludge but what superior thing did wikis kill by network effects?

  • blakestacey@awful.systems
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    Yud is against seed oils, right? Or was that Siskind? I have a vague memory of the topic coming up but was unable to substantiate it in the 22 seconds of archive-searching that I was willing to do.

  • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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    Does anyone else get tired of ā€œread documentation and edit this text file to configure your appā€ Unix shit? I have no problem with the underlying configuration being a text-file (makes for a straightforward API), but do I really need to navigate to https://mpv.io/manual/master/#configuration-files and go through the rigamarole of figuring out which options I need to edit/include[0] because I misplaced (read: sudo rm -rf /) my config file?


    [0]: And there is always so much implicit bullshit. ā€œBy default, we summon Cthulhu on Tuesdays and Thursdays if the variable summon_octopus_guy is unset.ā€ Itā€™s a fucking config file, my friends, can we just be explicit?

    • nightsky@awful.systems
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      Oh yeah. I recently wanted to configure something in pipewireā€¦ the idea was simple: just creating a boot-persistent audio loopback, i.e. connecting an audio input to an output. I gave up for now after looking at the config examples for that in the documentation. How can such a simple thing need such complex configuration?

      As for losing configs, Iā€™ve started to put all my hand-edited config files in a git repo on my NAS so at least I only have to figure out things once.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      Surely itā€™s better to specify those defaults in the config file and have the system just fail if the necessary flags arenā€™t present. Having worked in support I can vouch for the amount of suffering that could be avoided if more systems actually failed if some important configuration isnā€™t in place.

      • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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        Surely itā€™s better to specify those defaults in the config file and have the system just fail if the necessary flags arenā€™t present.

        Completely agree. I think this may just be an extension of the ā€œyou gotta know what youā€™re doing to code correctly in Cā€ old school bullshit.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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          This is my biggest gripe with that nonsense. If you make it hard to do something well, you wonā€™t end up with an elite series of uber-coders because there arenā€™t enough of those people to do all the programming that people want to be done. Instead youā€™ll see that much more software engineering done really goddamned badly and despite appearances at the time it turns out there is a maximum amount of shitty software the world can endure.

          • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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            Whatā€™s great is even the very best ā€œjust use valgrind lol, lmaoā€ folks make these errors all the time. Itā€™s basically impossible to write correct C code generally ā€” the best we can do is verify subsets of code (c.f. Rustā€™s unsafe keyword). The memory-safety CVEs in EXT3/4 are proof of this, IMO, as if there were anyone able to write correct C code today, it would be Ted Tsā€™o.

    • bitofhope@awful.systems
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      Personally I think itā€™s fine to have implicit defaults if you can make them sensible. Maybe ideally have a system-wide config like /etc/someapp.conf with all the options included and set to defaults out of the box and then allow overrides in ~/.config/someapp/someapp.conf where you only need to specify whatever you want to differ from the system conf file.

      • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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        I personally disagree. I think in the era of ā€œa megabyte is big,ā€ this made sense, but in my opinion after parsing a config file with missing config data, we should print something indicating they are missing then error out. The existence of a reference config file with all options included would definitely help, but I think itā€™s no coincidence that there is no such config for mpv ā€” why bother creating and maintaining one if the program will use the default value anyway?

        tl;dr explicit is better than implicit

        • bitofhope@awful.systems
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          I dunno, MPV has like a million config options and Iā€™ve set like three of them in my config. I would not prefer to maintain an enormous config file where I need to include a bajillion options I donā€™t care about just to play a video. Would I have to update my config every single time MPV adds, removes or renames an option, too?

          • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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            At the end of the day you shouldnā€™t have to maintain anything in order to use a program, in my opinion (at least ideally). I think a ā€œeverything must be present in the fileā€ type of config would require less no extra maintenance (assuming devs donā€™t do anything too silly). Additionally, while noting that my primary programming language is TeX and also that I am a dipshit, this just strikes me as an API-design problem. Alternative solutions could be:

            1. multiple config files (I think mpv already supports this)
            2. semver style config (idk if this would be practical)
            3. a config-editing tool (i.e., what the overwhelming majority of applications do, by hiding the implementation details from the user)

            I have thought about doing #3 for Sway (a sort of Sway-config editor). This does give me an idea, though: define a meta-format for specifying the variables, default values, allowed values, etc., for an arbitrary[0] programā€™s config file, and create a program that reads a meta-format file and presents a GUI for editing the config.

            tbh i just lost my config file, forgot what i changed, and now i have to read documentation (and figure out which file the mpv flatpak uses for config)


            [0]: maybe not too arbitrary

            • self@awful.systems
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              define a meta-format for specifying the variables, default values, allowed values, etc., for an arbitrary[0] programā€™s config file, and create a program that reads a meta-format file and presents a GUI for editing the config.

              Iā€™d kinda love this even if Iā€™m editing config files in a text editor. emacs could use this with a major-mode or LSP to provide suggestions, validity checking, various rendered versions of the config, and guarantee interoperability with graphical tools (so that changes you make in an editor donā€™t get trampled by the UI, and vice versa)

              • khalid_salad@awful.systems
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                I need an excuse to learn Rust and have wanted to do a ā€œparse, donā€™t validate / make invalid states unrepresentableā€ project for a while. I will definitely share it if I get anything done.

    • skillissuer
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      put an article in mdpi and youā€™ll get 70 of these per month