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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out itās 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 āweird.ā
You can see the full diff from last version if you click āJan 8, 2025ā and yeah itās 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 couldnāt really concentrate on work. Itās hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isnāt 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 Iām not sure fascists know how to use words right.
It is very disturbing and scary.
Theyāre 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.
Iāve been around the internet a long time, and even back then when throwing slurs at each other and āmaking funā of marginalized groups was, if not accepted, at least tolerated because it was considered some poor attempt at humor, I donāt remember ever seeing a rule or passage in any netiquette stating it that explicitly.
It was always āwe donāt censor speech but donāt be an assholeā with a giant asterisk about what both censoring and being an asshole meant, but I donāt think Iāve ever seen even the worst places say, āwe explicitly allow hate speech, go aheadā.
Holy fucking shitballs.
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 itās gonna be like 5 hours tops.
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 weāve seen far too much of how fascism operates and spreads online. this is an antifascist place; itās so core to the mission that we donāt 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 canāt be ignored. so seeing the first or second (I donāt 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 āthis 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.
as usual, Nina said it more coherently than I did
Now the new language merely bans āunsupported comparisonsā between protected groupsā on the basis of their āinherent 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.
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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.
yud, a technofascist, recently forming opinions against seed oils forms a poop ouroboros with the wellness to fascism pipeline.
Its Yud I think. As someone from Canola-land this shit really grinds my gears.
Ah, hereās the post I was thinking of; I missed it somehow.
Does anyone else get tired of āread 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. āBy default, we summon Cthulhu on Tuesdays and Thursdays if the variable
summon_octopus_guyis unset.ā Itās a fucking config file, my friends, can we just be explicit?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, Iāve 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.
Surely itās better to specify those defaults in the config file and have the system just fail if the necessary flags arenāt 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 isnāt in place.
Surely itās better to specify those defaults in the config file and have the system just fail if the necessary flags arenāt present.
Completely agree. I think this may just be an extension of the āyou gotta know what youāre doing to code correctly in Cā old school bullshit.
This is my biggest gripe with that nonsense. If you make it hard to do something well, you wonāt end up with an elite series of uber-coders because there arenāt enough of those people to do all the programming that people want to be done. Instead youāll 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.
Whatās great is even the very best ājust use valgrind lol, lmaoā folks make these errors all the time. Itās basically impossible to write correct C code generally ā the best we can do is verify subsets of code (c.f. Rustās
unsafekeyword). 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 Tsāo.
Personally I think itās fine to have implicit defaults if you can make them sensible. Maybe ideally have a system-wide config like
/etc/someapp.confwith all the options included and set to defaults out of the box and then allow overrides in~/.config/someapp/someapp.confwhere you only need to specify whatever you want to differ from the system conf file.I personally disagree. I think in the era of āa 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 itās 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
I dunno, MPV has like a million config options and Iāve 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 donāt 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?
At the end of the day you shouldnāt have to maintain anything in order to use a program, in my opinion (at least ideally). I think a āeverything must be present in the fileā type of config would require
lessno extra maintenance (assuming devs donāt 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:- multiple config files (I think mpv already supports this)
- semver style config (idk if this would be practical)
- 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] programās 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
define a meta-format for specifying the variables, default values, allowed values, etc., for an arbitrary[0] programās config file, and create a program that reads a meta-format file and presents a GUI for editing the config.
Iād kinda love this even if Iām 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 donāt get trampled by the UI, and vice versa)
I need an excuse to learn Rust and have wanted to do a āparse, donāt validate / make invalid states unrepresentableā project for a while. I will definitely share it if I get anything done.
definitely! that sounds like a great first Rust project.
Just want to share this great term & definition āhyperkludgeā coined by Jonathan Korman (@miniver on bsky and masto)
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 itās an accepted standard. The web couldnāt 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 isnāt 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.
Iām surprised that alphabetical lists are included. Maybe my brain has completely rotten, but keeping the data sorted is pretty neat for efficient processing
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?
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 didnāt have any ones in common (though I considered including MS Excel).
- 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
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
this rules <3
oh thatās pretty great
25475 O Jan 08 Duke University ( 42K) Help Us Evaluate New Personalized AI Learning Tool
groan
put an article in mdpi and youāll get 70 of these per month
For a fun 20 minutes or so, I recommend going through the recent enron ārevivalā. (Itās all satire)
Zuck wants to get back to his roots
Itās time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Hereās what weāre going to do: [ā¦] 5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
Narrator: this announcement did not, in fact, ease concerns about bias.
Is that a comedy account? The announcement surely reads as if it wasā¦
To add an insult to the injury meta renames pride themed skins in chat https://labyrinth.zone/objects/e129982d-997e-489b-985a-3ef547b66bf3
Fascist virtue signalling aside, candy floss should not exist. Thatās like the exact opposite of dental care.
Edit: I have been made aware that Candy Floss is another name for cotton candy, which is delicious. Though my point kind of still stands.
Itās not. Surprise! All of Silicon Valley has gone mask off in preparation for the new administration in Washington!
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Ah i recall somebody got mad when I mentioned traditionally capitalists will team up with fascists.
Maybe I was naive, but I didnāt expect all this to go that fast and that blatantā¦
No, Iām with you. Bad feeling about where this is going.
a few people have been posting along the lines of āwe all knew Facebook was evil, why are you surprisedā which seems to miss the point ā this is happening so fast and blatant that weāre almost definitely seeing the early stages of a playbook being executed. and even if not: Facebook was already the fash pipeline targeting mom, dad, and grandma. should I feel good that the pipeline is getting much more efficient and pervasive? none of them are ever gonna be on something like the fediverse.
the worst Nix project has finally been announced: behold crypto NixOS
Iām starting a paradigm shifting, open and new human / computer interface system that is global, multi device and privacy focused.
[ā¦]
DISCLAIMER: You are not my exit liquidity, I have the best performing long term spot crypto portfolio in the world - Iām a early adopter with 100% hit rate on geniuses. So, I donāt have to work, Iām not building this to become rich. I want to build something paradigm changing - truly mind-blowing, because now we have the tech and Iām annoyed how computer work. It is a lot of work, but it will reward us all.
my āthis isnāt a grift and Iām not a grifterā disclaimer is prompting a lot of questions already answered by the disclaimer. but speaking of prompting, what goes with crypto?
ChatGPT-1o thinks, after some reinforced asking, that the MC of such a coin can reach 300-1000M; I think it could easily go higher - it solves so fundamental problems in a much more elegant way. In my opinion, it will be the same step as the command line to the windowed systems was. Or dump phone to smart phone. It will just span devices and span users while keeping the data under control and of companies.
of course. after some reinforced asking, gpt told me youāre all haters if you donāt think Iām as important as Xerox PARC!
thereās lots more in the OP to sneer at, but hereās the worst part of the thread:
Mod note: Iām glad to see doubt and scepticism about crypto-based claims. However, that point has now been made; please avoid any further posts in that vein to avoid a pile-on dunkfest, and leave the thread for any potential on-topic discussion.
thanks for nothing as usual NixOS discourse!
e: via mastodon, archive
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i forced chatgpt to say that my idea will make you a billion dollars but i think it can go higher
after some reinforced asking
Shit chatgpt is self aware, it did the āif I agree with you will you shut the fuck upā thing.
E: while I shouldnāt speak on that subject, weird typos.
Must be rich indeed, the disclaimer is pure gold.
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Reading through announcements of new hardware from CES and the endless series of products containing āAIā is so tiring. Not suprising, but stillā¦ ugh. Claims of AI in everything.
My favourite so far: USB controller with āAI enhancementsā becauseā¦ uuhā¦ if I understand it right, you could theoretically use it to connect an external GPU and use that for AI, so thatās why āAIā is in the marketing for the USB controllerā¦?
Starting off with a weapons-grade sneer: How to Dehumanize Accessibility with AI
I just want to harp on this one:
āExisting methods for testing are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for developers nor for users.ā
Wtf, can you imagine saying something like this about literally any other profession than software engineering? āExisting methods for checking brake pressure are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for mechanics nor for usersā. āExisting methods for sterilising surgical equipment are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for surgeons nor for patientsā. āExisting methods for checking voltage are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for electricians nor for usersā.
The lack of any fucking standards that devs are held to is insane, so the excuse for accessibility in the web being shit is that itās TOO TECHNICAL and kinda annoying for web devs??? Again, can you fucking imagine saying this about anything else, āye, cars kinda suck because making sure they donāt is all technical and kinda boring for mechanics to doā.
Itās YOUR JOB. Literally YOUR PROFESSION. PROFESSIONALS ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE STANDARDS you fucking piece of shit, have you no honour, not a single care in the world for your craft, you fucking babies. āOh but itās very technicalā YOUāRE A TECH SPECIALIST. THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU GET YOUR SALARY FOR???
The worst bit is, the devs who arenāt like this are basically forced to comply anyway. Whenever I justify a delay in some release with that testing/bugfixing takes time, I get slapped with release it anyway, you can patch it later, and although I am lucky to be in a privileged position where I can fight this for some amount of time, every young programmer who comes into a job with a good mindset is not and has to bend over or face shit like negative performance reviews because theyāre too slow.
This is so fucking infuriating. I donāt want to release shit software, I want to make sure the stuff I ship works. Back when patching meant you had to ship a physical medium to a non-trivial amount of users, that was how things worked, but apparently only because IT HAD TO and not because itās good fucking work ethics to have. Now that you can just zero-day patch everything itās apparently okay to ship unfinished shit and use your customers as beta testers.
I hate this so much and I try to avoid doing this as much as I can professionally. And whenever I canāt I actually feel bad and want to apologize to everyone who has to use that shit release.
A great example of āwe are bad at our jobs and if you rely on us everybody will dieā
Thanks, that was infuriating to read.
Whenever techbros use the word āstorytellingā, some disaster followsā¦
Maybe EAs should ditch malaria nets and start subsidizing bum ticklers
disclaimer
(not a claim made by linked OP)
su;dr
(saw URL; didnāt read)
Re: disclaimer
Not OP indeed, butt ā¦
The comments are something else alright:
The part about kids is wrong. Per Aellaās survey, many people report having masturbated well before puberty. Breeding and pregnancy were actually one of my earliest kinks when I was 7.
Oof ouch
Im going ro pretend i never saw that.
just when you think youāre at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the rationalists take you lower
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
yeah I wasnāt sure about what to post either but this about gets it
feels bad when āPer Aellaās surveyā is the high point of a post
Iām sure her surveys are immune to sampling bias and therefore perfectly represent the general population. /s
There even is a SSC post talking about how even professionally ran surveys have a 5% rate of bullshit (the lizardman constant, mentioned by Scott in 2013, and now in a lot more places (I think the idea is fine, just that Scott seems to draw a few to generalizing conclusions (in the article, not the conclusion) about classifying people as trolls/malicious vs 'sometimes people give a trollish/malicious answer. I also donāt think the percentage is constant)). (Yes, SSC style Rationalists not internalizing the SSC lore is one of my pet peeves). And as Amoeba_girl said, this is the highlight of the post.
E: and as the LC was written in 2013, I really donāt want to know how often Rationalists/LWers/etc have referred to a poll after that as being important. (And how often they have used the LC to dismiss polls used as arguments by others).
The New Antitrust is so goddamn meta, deep writing from the 2025 authors
