Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th November 2024
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 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Folks, huge W today. I was hanging out with my parents today and my mother was scrolling her feed, commenting out loud about everything she saw when she came across some autoplag content. “This is fake!” she said, and I could not be prouder. Not just because she IDed the slop, but because it meant she at least has a better brain than my trumper family members that habitually repost trumper slop.
Cherry on top: she showed me a text chain where she was trolling a “my phone died, this is my new number” scammer.
Elon Musk, Ramaswamy land Trump admin roles
We live in the dumbest timeline
I wasn't expecting complete fascist victory to be so... cringe
Fascists were always cringe. Himmler was a weird occultist. Goering was a drug addict still high on his glorious from World War I. Hitler was a profoundly lazy man with terrible taste in art. There were normal fascists (there had to be), but the leadership was always cringe. Unfortunately, being cringe doesn't stop a movement from killing vast numbers of people.
This Adolf guy kinda had me when he was just a dude traumatized by war who liked buildings and was kinda shit at drawing them, but his political takes were full on yikes and he quickly lost me when it came to the arts as well.
skibidi purges
guantanamo rizz
hot sneer from lizzy w:
I voted for Liz in 2020 :( instead they gave me diamond joe
This is literally going to be an embezzlement op isn't it
Its gonna be the largest embezzlement scheme in US history, that much I'm certain. How much damage the pair will do to the federal gov I'm not sure, but I expect there won't be much left of it once they're done.
@BlueMonday1984 It's going to be like Alves dos Reis all over again, isn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alves_dos_Reis
Personally I'm betting on Teapot Dome: somebody in the Cabinet will be convicted of something like bribery, foreign influence, or electoral interference; and the cleanup will implicate multiple other Cabinet members. Trump needs to do this at some point anyway; he's already done all of the Nixon things like Watergate and interfering in foreign wars, and while he attempted a Teapot Dome last time with Ryan Zinke, he needs to actually have a Cabinet member removed or convicted in order to truly be a worse president than Warren G. Harding.
@corbin
How would that even happen with a Trumpist DOJ?
Because project 2025 and the mass deportations won't actually solve the problems his base is feeling, and at a certain point this kind of scandal will either be his downfall or his only option to scapegoat someone else.
Trump would have to literally kill all lawyers. Think of the DoJ as a pile of folks who all took an oath to the law itself. When pundits complain that it's being "weaponized", they're actually talking about a facet of overcriminalization where the DoJ's limited attention can be controlled somewhat; it's always going to be a full-power laser that targets what the law perceives as criminality.
In particular, the President doesn't have the authority to tell the DoJ to stop an investigation, and the DoJ usually can't tell individual prosecutors to stop filing motions. Trump wasn't able to protect Cabinet member and Teapot Dome Candidate #2 Michael Flynn from prosecution, nor can he protect Eric Adams. The worst that he can do is a Saturday Night Massacre, where he fires lawyers until the investigations stop, and the entire pattern of special counsel is purpose-designed to prevent that from actually working.
@corbin
Sweet summer child.
Such meme. Much wow. I see we’re continuing with giving dumb names to everything the Muskrat is involved in. Glad that hasn’t changed.
@BlueMonday1984 I am dead. From Fremdschämen
Kabosu didn't die for this.
https://x.com/kevinbaker/status/1816891882464800945
But Trump can't explain things, and Urbit defies explanation. So does the statement "Trump explains Urbit" represent undefined behavior in English?
What is worse? Trump explaining urbit and coming close? Or him explaining it so wrong you feel the need to set the record straight about the gravest misconceptions? ("Trump said Elon invented it, but it actually was Yarvin, also as Elon didnt invent it, he certainly didnt say 'good idea sir' to Trump").
I think in this case, the equivalent of a compiler error for undefined behavior would be a swiftly forgotten wire story entitled "Trump promotes cryptocurrency project" published on a Friday afternoon. Just one more scam among the flood, and not one that can be offered for easy monthly payments with a banner ad in the margins of an RSBN broadcast.
Yeah, everyone in the traditional media seems to be even more committed to sane-washing than they were in the lead up to the election.
Though the spike doge got today is definitely in the "laugh to avoid screaming" column.
begins invisible accordion
Then Curtis Marvin, very smart guy, went to MIT like my famous uncle, he said, "but sir, a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors"
Many such cases, I said.
masterful endofunctor, sir
saltman: no better time to be a startup
Have any of the trumps been on the red scare pod yet? Feel like that’s on the timeline.
Four Passengers Die in Burning Tesla After Electronic Doors Seemingly Won't Open
I always had a hunch Teslas were death traps but Jesus Christ
Yeah it's sad. As the article points out similar incidents have happened repeatedly. Anyone who saw the door design could have (and did!) predict something like this would happen. My coworker was trapped in his Tesla in his garage for 15 minutes (and he wasn't in a panic).
Look at the picture of the manual door release here: It's pretty well hidden, you reach in and pull up on the door buttons.
... then scroll down and look at the picture of the rear door manual release. You have to pull off some trim from inside the pocket, pull off another panel, and then pull a cable.
... but wait! There's more!
Jesus, I hope the engineers who signed off on this think about what they've done and do better. I would say I hope someone regulated bad emergency door releases out of existence but... y'know.
Imagine what other flaws these cars have if the tried to 'innovate' like this on the solved technology that is fucking doors.
The lack of a speedometer in front of your face is a pretty glaring quality issue. You have to turn your head to look at the massive touchscreen. The one that replaces all other dashboards and most tactile controls
for manufacturing cost savingsto be a cool futuristic vehicle of the future.I won't even start talking about the whole CyberStuck thing again because that's too easy; except to point out that it has turn buttons on the steering wheel instead of a turn signal stalk, a shifter on the ceiling, and the steering wheel is not round.
I only recently bought my first car and it's just old enough that it didn't even have a backup camera until I got one installed. Honestly half the reason of buying used was so I could have a car without a touchscreen haha.
I still can’t get over the design, engineering, and basic reasoning failures that must have gone into the decision to put supposedly the main way to change gears on the same type of mount that secures your rear-view mirror; a notably inconvenient and fragile place to put anything (and just like a rear-view mirror that got fucked with too intensely, a bunch of these shifters have already detached)
ofc it comes with a square wheel.
The austin allegro was far ahead of its time.
absolutely delightful
Starting off this Stubsack with a solid essay I ran across: Don't expect the tech platforms to help us this time.
A bit of an aside, but how did everyone decide to use the exact phrase "decisive victory" when congratulating president elect Trump? It keeps jumping out to me and I find it kind of weird. It has almost a militaristic tone.
IMO, coordinated media strategy. you can send all the people you want to congratulate you a prebaked message or tweet or whatever, saves them the trouble of writing something themselves. That or copy paste
I think that particular talking point also serves an exculpatory purpose: "If it was only a razor-thin victory I might understand being angry with me, but see it's a decisive victory. He has the mandate
of heavenof the people (this is a Trumpian victory! not a Democrat failure!) ! It would be wrong not to congratulate him!"after this decisive victory, I guess I have no choice but to take this mask off, what a shame...
that+ losing the popular vote in 2016 must have really hurt that ego of his.
LLM Use cases:
@sailor_sega_saturn
Maybe it's one of those cliches like “bus plunge”
Could be they are sharing a bit of a media bubble. In 2016 there was a bit of a (pre election) "he will win in a landslide" thing due to Scottbert.
Also it isn't? 50.2% to 48.1% of votes is not decisive in any sensible meaning of the word?
If you account for the turnout (around 60%) it means 30% voted for Trump and 28.9% for Harris, so "none of those" won decisively with 40%!
Losing every swing state and failing to even win the consolation trophy of the popular vote after even Hillary fucking Clinton managed that much is something I'd call getting your ass handed to you. The US election system is terrible, but it's the game they were playing and Trump won hands down.
Also, not that it's the point but I have to note that technically most election victories are decisive, in the sense that they resolve the winner with little to no ambiguity (which is usually the case, even when the margin is narrow). In that sense, the only way Trump's victory is not decisive is if you contest the legitimacy of the whole election.
This is such pedantry that you might as well say "the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines decisive as..."
considering trump has spent the last four years pretending he won the previous election I actually do wonder if part of the subtext is "we acknowledge you won for real realsies and we cannot talk shit about you as a fake president"
Yea I know, had to get that digression out of my system, especially since you said "in any sensible meaning of the word" and all. Sorry, I didn't mean to nuh-uh you on semantics, just point out something that tickled my pedantry sense.
Edit: I also brought it up because IMO "decisive" is a bit of an odd choice to describe election victory, unless referring to some grander context where the election marks a major historical turning point in national or international politics in favor of the winning side.
I see calling like Raegan's margin in 1984 "decisive"
That they are posting this on substack, and how important that platform has become in the blogosphere is already a bit of a sign.
Just a general comment on the state of things. Now that Musk has fused with the ideological flesh chimera of the next US government and is tapping others to be absorbed, any US politics will be TechTakes-adjacent. Perhaps some ground rules must be set so we aren't drowned in non-procedurally generated slop.
Either way, I'm cutting back on the musk unless it is directly sneerable.
Breaking news: "AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably"!
Or, you know, not.
More election shit, unfortunately. This time it's hot tea from SRD:
Superstonkers go surprised_pikachu.jpg
Holy shit I had no idea there was a left wing branch of the mad cryptofascist meme stock cult.
Missed opportunity in the headline: superstonkers go super bonkers
damn that is so much better
funnily enough I had posted in that thread and some neolib guy enthusiastically recommended tracingwoodgrains on David Gerard (?!) in my replies
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1go1ndu/comment/lwgrg5a/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
How cute, look at that wild rat trying to appear neutral and unbiased and not-at-all a rat and Just Leaving This Here for you to read where “this” refers to the entire fucking canon of rationalist writings.
it’s so practiced too — “so I guess you could read Wikipedia but also! this tracingwoodgrains guy might have some points worth considering!” and from there you’re meant to ping-pong off the Wikipedia article into trace’s long-winded literal horseshit and the rest of the inane crap that’s linked after that, til you can no longer remember the non-rationalist sources you’ve read because your mind’s overwhelmed with the worst shit ever written, but you feel like you thoroughly researched both sides (and that’s only part of why centrism is a fucking trap)
how do I know? because this:
is exactly how Joe Rogan fans get you listening to his stupid shit daily, til you’re no longer listening to his podcast (supposedly) “at its best” and instead you’re just listening to an overwhelming volume of right-wing horseshit with an occasional nod to both sides centrism so you don’t feel your world get smaller and darker as you embrace fascism
Just trying to be helpful! I'm definitely not trying to introduce you to this cult that was called out as a cult a few comments earlier! Which you would agree with me if you read all the things I posted and realised that we are the reasonablists.
look, they are just neutral and balanced, and pretend awful.systems and sneerclub don't exist because they don't even mention it.
See, if you just learn about this shit when you're in high school and slowly read and occasionally reread the essays over the course of a decade or so it doesn't seem overwhelming at all!
eat a dick
Words words words and more words that link to even more words (that you can ctrl-f for the relevant bits!)
I'm imagining no fewer than three fictional versions of Eris/Discord laughing at this orange-site fool:
Ok, so, some typical clueless VC mixed up atlas and sisyphus, which absolutely tracks. A VC thinks they are performing the all-important task of holding up the universe, when really they are just pushing a boulder up a hill and letting it fall down again.
VCs really think they are prometheus bringing fire to man, when really they are the eagle eating prometheus’s ever regrowing liver, where prometheus is the working class and the liver is collective wellbeing.
Google's Gemini has told a user to "please die" and that they are "a stain on the universe" without provocation: https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1gq4acr/gemini_told_my_brother_to_die_threatening/
::: spoiler The output:
I guess including 4chan in the training data was a mistake.
all the replies anthropomorphizing the LLM cause it generated something creepy and they don’t know why aren’t surprising, but for some reason this one really pisses me off:
an LLM generating absolute garbage that happens to be abusive in some way is a lottery ticket event, is it? I had no idea lottery wins happened that fucking frequently
Yeah absolutely. This is happening right on the coattails of that Character.AI suicide too so it's not like a freak impossible to predict accident. I mainly posted it because it flies in the face of all the talk of AI safety and "responsible AI practices".
Like Google says in their AI principles:
I don't even care that much if Google wants to host a chatbot, but they keep trying to imply it has safety properties it doesn't. It's like writing a web framework without any HTML or SQL sanitation support and saying "We will continue to develop and apply strong safety sand security practices..." and acting shocked when all the websites get hacked.
Considering the user is trying to cheat on a test about elder care of all things, Gemini might have a point there
Crossposting this thread from [email protected] with the fortune article "Elon Musk’s AI turns on him, labels him ‘one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X’". The article itself is nothing much, but it does have this quote:
A little delicious irony is fine as a treat.
The job site decided to recommend me an article calling for the removal of most human oversight from military AI on grounds of inefficiency, which is a pressing issue since apparently we're already living in the Culture.
The Strategic Liability of Human Oversight in AI-Driven Military Operations
Oh unknowable genie of the sketchily curated datasetsClaude, come up with an optimal ratio of civilian to enemy combatant deaths that will allow us to bomb that building with the giant red cross that you labeled an enemy stronghold.So, ethics and legality are strategic liabilities? Jesus fucking Christ, that’s not even sneer-worthy. This guy is completely fucking insane.
If you've convinced yourself that you'll mostly be fighting the AIs of a rival always-chaotic-evil alien species or their outgroup equivalent, you probably think they are.
Otherwise I hope shooting first and asking questions later will probably continue to be frowned upon in polite society even if it's automated agents doing the shooting.
This is straight up Hague material right there, all he wants is plausible deniability
Computer said so 🥺
e: that's a shit take for several reasons and we have autonomous killers already. it's called air defense (in some modes) because how many civilians are going at mach fuck with RCS of 0.1m^2, that's no civilian that's ballistic missile. also lmao at speed of decision
perun video on this topic https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tou8ahLZvP4
Honestly the most surprising and interesting part of that episode of Power(projection)Points with Perun was the idea of simple land mines as autonomous lethal systems.
Once again, the concept isn't as new as they want you to think, moral and regulatory frameworks already exist, and the biggest contribution of the AI component is doing more complicated things than existing mechanisms but doing them badly.
This is awful for sure, but thankfully low impact. Turns out that this Terminator Enjoyer is an unemployed idea guy. Maybe he's wrangling for an IDF contract?
From jobbie site:
and
Also, the image is perfect. I especially like the Joe Kucan-looking general embedded in the star trek tactical station. The Technology of Peace ain't what it used to be, is it?
human oversigh :(
and daiquiri nominations :)
Eliminating Mothman is our prime strattgic priority
Private Bbailcy! I see you back there! Cut it out with the oversighing, you're dragging down morale KPIs for this quarter!
Is that a screenshot from Command&Conquer 4?
what if C&4, but in the metaverse?
Some techbro proposes "HumaneRank" as a distribution system in the post-AI era and while HN finds it disturbingly like a global popularity system at least "it's better than Communism":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42140664
TL;DR:
What the heck did I just read?
youtube poop, apparently
Competitive college admissions and tech-industry hiring practices really have done permanent damage to these people, haven't they
Whuffie, but worse
also, I thought these guys loved The Culture...
same type of people who call everything a communist social credit score btw
The Onion: Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’
Apparently real: https://archive.is/pxmqX
Didn't have that on my bingo card for this year, but it's on brand. A big part of The Onion's MO is just riding out the insanity and inject a little of their own.
Hate to break this, but https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/elon-musk-x-corp-alex-jones-infowars-rcna180487
Seems he is now fully sold on the idea that this is his world, we’re just living in it.
Oh my god, that is right on the edge between making all of this either a lot more depressing or even funnier.
Shorter HN: wasting gigawatts of power to increase VC valuations - fine. Discarding 80k pounds of butter because of missing allergen information is the worst thing to happen since the burning of the library of Alexandria
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42150991
I was watching an old Day9 stream today and this story is bouncing off of some comments he made about the importance of degenerate players to competitive design. Like, this is a pretty dumb outcome of regulation, but at the same time if you try to define regulations to create an exception for what "everybody knows" is in something suddenly that process gets taken advantage of by self-interested manufacturers who will figure out how to convincingly argue that "everybody knows" their generic shampoo contains peanuts and shellfish or whatever. And in the context of this kind of regulation that degenerate play will get people killed.
Gasp
This is just like the fall of Rome.
E: eurgh the people arguing against regs that help people with allergies.
From the Small Mercies desk: remember Simone Collins was running for office in Pennsylvania? Well, she lost her campaign. Here's a piece about her from the Inquirer.
Oh boy an hour long video about how the trans are transing eachother as part of a trans cult!
But why aren't they concerned about kids being tricked into the life altering decision of being an "anti-woke" podcaster? 🤔
Edit -- made it through most of that video (how??) and it's a bunch of reaching and fear mongering while trying to sound like principled conservatives. The funniest part was probably them blaming anime avatars for trans people.
Edit -- just kidding the funniest part was the guy calling trans people the "priest class" of urbanism. Worship me and I shall bless you with seperated bicycle lanes and bountiful farmers markets!
holy fuck, I’ve seen anti-trans accounts on mastodon spew this same shit and I’m kind of surprised it’s a wider conservative conspiracy theory and not something local to mastodon
leftists don’t go to church on Sundays, they just trans themselves and then bikeshed about bike sheds
I think Blanchard started with this one. If you needed more proof the guy is an absolute case of brain worms. (E: Here is the source)
E: I wonder what caused the sudden public appearance of more trans people, anime? Or the change in laws about a decade ago where most of the western world stopped sterilizing and going after trans people. (it is nuts that the terfs never bring this up, so worried about trans healthcare perhaps causing some permanent changes while ignoring that very recently that sterilization was mandatory in most of the western world (A law in .nl between 1985 and 2014 for example). Fucking assholes.)
I somehow hate these losers more for trying to have their cake and eat it.
Running for office is just a stunt for these people. More unearned publicity.
I hope it's just a stunt. If they're serious the US could be in (even more) trouble
Should've probably posted this earlier, but fuck it: South Korea's ‘4B’ Movement Goes Viral in US After Trump Elected
Also, fuck it, quick sidenote:
This is mostly gut instinct, like most of the Trump predictions I've made, but I'm expecting a spike in full-blown misandry over Trump's term. Mainly because Trump managed to win over Gen Z men this election, and because the Trump administration is almost certainly going to town on abortion/women's rights.
Misandry as in something equal to misogyny? If so, then I have to disagree, since men have historically been absolute pieces of shit towards women throughout history and misandry has never really manifested significantly.
E: I noticed I have a downvote. Hello to our sole MRA lurker!
Misandry as a concrete power structure that advantages women and disadvantages men? Unlikely, though with the likely resurgence of active patriarchy we should expect to see the negative consequences this has for men, especially non-normative men. Patriarchal masculinity is a game that necessarily has more losers than winners. I'd go so far as to say that some of the more politically-minded incels and MRAs are going to get even louder because while they blame feminism the actual source of the problems they're feeling is patriarchy.
Misandry as a vague cultural meme about men being terrible and the friction that this causes, particularly for men struggling to find a healthy way to exist under patriarchal masculinity as discussed above? Very likely. At the same time while this won't feel good for men it's worth noting that these men are going to be complaining about losing a game where women are game pieces rather than players, which is pretty crappy. Like a king complaining to a pawn about how cruel it is to only move one square at a time without acknowledging that the entire game revolves around them.
I actually have no idea how to navigate this in a healthy way since I've definitely been on the losing end of patriarchal masculinity in ways that while deeply hurtful are very different in kind even if not in scope from the ways that system hurts women.
Looking back, that's definitely the kind of thing I was expecting to spike. I was just too deeply peeved about vaguely gestures at everything to see that clearly.
I wasn't going to explain my downvote, but it's been a few days and apparently everybody here is thinking about MRAs when there's more at stake.
I see Nixon in Trump: somebody who starts and prolongs wars for their own political gain. Of my three uncles who qualified to go to Vietnam, one was permanently disabled during basic training, one didn't come back home, and one fell apart before I was born. I had to "voluntarily" register as a potential servicemember in order to access various standard government services as a young man in the 2000s, while the USA was invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Under a sufficiently fascist government, the USA has shown itself capable of sending its men to death. This system is explicitly misandrist; only men are required to register and only my uncles suffered this hate.
Misandry isn't equal and opposite to misogyny. Our society was never obligated to hate men and women in ways that are nicely symmetric and amenable to analysis; indeed, critical theory suggests that society deliberately structures itself to obfuscate its hate.
Ah, gotcha. I guess I'm sensitive to people using the word "misandry" from years spent in bad corners on the internet. I can't speak for others too much but it's an loaded term for me.
…in the sense that more Gen Z men voted for him than in the last election. I am seeing this spin a lot and it honestly seems like a deliberate scapegoating ploy.
The exit poll stats seem to tell a different story.
Data from NBC News considering "key states" (apparently Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin)
Yes, young men favored Trump. So did all other men (and even Gen X women, if narrowly). Among both genders included in the data, Gen Z was the least likely to vote for Trump and the most likely to vote for Harris.
Granted, these stats are only from the aforementioned states and can't represent the full picture, but they are the only relevant statistics I have seen posted on the matter and the best data I could quickly find. If anyone can show me the data that the darn kids these days are to blame, I'd like to see sime data.
Serious data might not be available for months. For comparison, the Pew Research Center didn't come out with their numbers for the 2020 election until June 2021. Who knows? The country might burn down before next summer.
New superpredictor lore dropped on r/mapporn. If you believe in prediction markets and meet someone from Blaine MT or Essec NY, you have to do whatever they say because they are smarter and better at predicting than you.
I mean, up until this year they would both have been beat by Clallum County, WA, which had matched the National winner since Gerald Ford. So way to identify the best of the losers I guess?
big walmart is watching you.
https://old.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/1gqphel/body_cameras_for_front_end/
You know shit's about to get real when the walmart greeter turns off her body cam.
-- White Lies, I Don't Want To Go To Mars, 2022
I remember really liking it when I heard it around first release. it holds up.
You ever have that moment where you hear about a song and only then realize that you had liked 2 or 3 from the same band from radio or recommendations over the years without connecting that it was the same group? Because yeah that just hit me.
I first heard Bush’s Chemicals Between Us from a neighbours soundsystem during a party one weekend in the early 00s, and then it took me well over a decade to find it (while still hearing other Bush songs over the years)
yep I know exactly what you’re describing there
this is cool. Considering their first album was all songs about accepting death I assume they're not fans of anything tescreal adjacent
I love that album, and i'll never forget when I was dating someone who was a classical pianist, the type that closes their eyes and sways their head when listening to classical, and when I put that album on it was a few notes into the first song and she made this tortured face and said "no, no, no! those chord progressions are so depressing!" It was so strange to me to hear that, but you know how you just know when someone knows what they are talking about and she was sure it had hit some kind of melancholy brown note.
Still... that era of interpol and white lies was great. That shit made me happy
I know we're trying to cut back on the US politics for the sake of everyone's sanity, but Musk getting sneered by his own confabulator is still pretty good.
is the
sinesrtweetsfor "shitty"? because holy fuck are they shittyno part of me is surprised that every famous FOSS personality has a ridiculously bad age of consent take, but it is a real fucking problem that this keeps happening
You're being perhaps too generous to consider ESR a famous FOSS personality.
He's definitely up there, or at least used to be. The Cathedral and the Bazaar, his attempt to justify why Linux is more successful than GNU or BSD, used to be very much a part of the open source canon. He cofounded OSI. He forked some POP3 client to make his own bad and insecure one called Fetchmail, then refused to improve it.
Personally I'm happy to know he's become less relevant nowadays.
Emphasis on used to. He worked fairly hard at becoming a household name, but ultimately his fame was pretty brief. Stallman achieved meme status, love him or hate him. Torvalds actually ships shit people use. There's just no discourse around Raymond these days, good or bad.
Every once in a while someone trips over one of the pitons he's driven into the wall of FOSS to try and climb it, discovers his abysmal takes, amd everyone promptly forgets about him again.
dunno, it’s definitely up there. maybe not a recent one, and I could understand people sub-25 perhaps not knowing the name, but across a fair bit of the foss space the name is household
unfortunately
Yes, he even gets mentioned by xkcd in the same breath as Stallman or Linus. (That it turns out the latter is the least worse of the three (he actually realized that being an asshole was bad) is quite the surprise).
That was way back in 2007. Probably close to when I read his stuff... but even then he was clearly still clinging to the Halloween Letters and seemed extremely old school.
If you find yourself saying
you may already be morally diseased.
On top of the disgusting subject matter, why do these people think that even unlimited-character Twitter is a good format for posting these screeds? The site design, even on the main site, is absolutely terrible for presenting this much writing. Everything mashed into the constrained center column means way too many line breaks, meaning it's a chore to read. Same thing with that freak Ackman; whatever overwrought bullshit he was posting just made my eyes glaze over.
libertarianism.tweet
Previous thread on esr
yikes on bikes
Least insane ESR post
looks like the autoplag bullshit is causing a "fun" new frontier in the hellscape of youtube copyright fuckery
I made a sneer about moving from Twitter to yet another Jack Dorsey social network, but after looking into it he apparently left Bluesky and joined Musk's team instead, because of moderation options. Geez, maybe I should sign up. But creating and keeping track of new accounts to sites is a pain in the aaaaaaassssss.
Bluesky is backed by a cryptocurrency venture capitalists, which makes me nervous: https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a -- but in the same press release they reassure people that they're not about to go all NFT (Non-Fun Tokens) just because of their backers.
a lot of projects with crypto ties have been doing this kind of hedge — they now emphasize data sovereignty instead of web3, decentralization, and other poisoned buzzwords, but they never really answer why crypto assholes would invest in a company if not to do crypto asshole shit when the time is right
Dorsey jumping ship's about as good a reason as any to jump to Bluesky, especially considering Twitter's currently haemorrhaging users from the one-two-three punch of the AI training, the crippled blocking and THE ELECTION^tm^.
By my guess, the AI training is probably doing the most damage - that one's prompting artists to bolt for the exits, and if Tumblr's NSFW ban taught me anything, its that if the artists start leaving, they're gonna start taking their fans with them.
Yea, the artists are about half the reason for me to be on that site to begin with.
This is pure gut instinct, but I suspect Twitter's probably gonna die sometime during Trump's term - the banks which funded Musk's takeover consider it their worst deal since the Great Recession, and the rapid exodus of users is gonna further cripple Twitter's ability to attract advertising revenue.
Part of me suspects we're gonna see Twitter getting banned somewhere during Trump's term as well, a la Musk's tangle with Brazil.
that article is pure dopamine
Oh wow, Dorsey is the exact reason I didn't want to join it. Now that he jumped ship maybe I'll make an account finally
Honestly, what could he even be doing at Twitter in its current state? Besides I guess getting that bag before it goes up or down in flames
e: oh god it's a lot worse than just crypto people and Dorsey. Back to procrastinating
According to jwz the current leadership of bsky isnt much better, but I have not looked into it.
bluesky corp are literally coiners, rationalists and Vibecamp-attending neoreactionaries
they tried seeding Bluesky with our very good friends
then the queer shitposters ran the fash the fuck off lol
Another proposal for naming our militia: The Cassandra Division
Our Motto: "Sic diximus vobis"
Got recommended a video from a friend, and its a damn good sneer at the state of YouTube sponsorships:
Why YouTube Sponsors Are (Almost) Always Terrible
It amazes me how well SponsorBlock works and how bad YouTube feels without it. I guess the main downside is that it's a little harder to tell the good 'toobers with strong moral backbone who don't shill awful shit in the first place from those whose sponsor segments merely get automatically skipped.
Heads up, Zitron's gonna drop
is this a possible thing: all the AI assistant stuff being forced onto us in the next gen hardware is gonna need significant computing power bumps to support it, is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices that could time very well with an excessive skeuomorphic UI design response to the decade of bland flatness we've endured that's gonna cook the cpus on the devices of everyone else?
Haha, no. Flat UI was done for reasons of fashion, not efficiency. UI will always expand to consume the available memory and compute, regardless of how boring it looks. Exhibit A: Electron!
yeah but I didn't say that flat ui was created for efficiency. Any efficiency of a flat ui is cancelled out by the excesses of client-side JS. I know it is fashion, I was there. But I also know that there is a sense that it is efficient by the designers that design with it.
The ongoing trend of "flat UI" is largely not due to processing power though. Even inexpensive computers have CPUs and GPUs that could push very fancy graphics without problems, see what the same machines can do in game graphics (and I don't mean high-end gaming, I mean the kind of simple gaming that can run on a low-end laptop these days). Some of the early GUIs in the 1980s had "flat design" due to performance limitations, but that went away in the 1990s. Today it could still be a reason in some embedded system scenarios with simple microcontrollers, but not in a desktop or laptop computer, and also not in smartphones or tablets.
The reason we have the bland flat design is the same why we still have things like "all surfaces are ugly glossy black plastic" (luckily this one is on its way out) or "war on physical buttons" aka "touchscreens everywhere"... it's simply a design trend.
@nightsky "touchscreens everywhere" isn't an aesthetic choice, it's a cost-of-goods choice: which adds more to the cost of a physical product, a bunch of bespoke embossed buttons/keys for specific tasks, or a single mass-produced touchscreen?
It's the same reason modern electronics uses embedded microcontrollers rather than actual properly designed task-specific gate arrays.
I hear you, but I didn't say flat ui is due to processing power. My line of thought is that a sudden bump in available processing power might prompt designers to feel that elaborate uis are fine now because despite flat ui not being an efficiency thing, it is definitely perceived as one by the average designer who doesn't know how much of the css used to render it is generated client-side via js
Just chiming in to say to hell with skeuomorphism, I still want Apple Platinum back. Bonus points if it comes with an option for Dark Platinum that was only present in the early releases of OS X Server.
to the computing side, and with the proviso that in my own estimation of my skills I am at best slightly less than "dangerously clueless": unfortunately not as much as may be desired because the kind of chips being added are fairly specialised silicon
it's not impossible that people may find other uses for it over time but to the best of my knowledge as it stands right now much of this shit is dead weight the moment this bubble pops
(I don't think it will all go entirely away; there are some ML uses that are not complete trash. but that's a long different arc)
I'm not sure I follow the skeu side of your comment?
that;s exactly the catch I was hoping wouldn't be the case. When the AI shit is abandoned, is the hardware useful for regular stuff...
So, from what you're saying: Generative AI is fucking up in the past, present, and future
broad brush strokes, yes largely that
there's some extremely fucking interesting details in the weeds, but that's beyond the scope of merely a comment (and also I don't feel equipped to make a goodpost about it as yet)
My baseline understanding is that "NPUs," as such, are vector accelerators with perhaps lower precision and definitely lower peak TDP. I say this because much of the incremental ML research I've skimmed over seems to be around getting away with lower precision, dropping down to FP8 or even FP4 from FP16 when they can get away with it.
I'm still confused as to why and how this is an acceptable tradeoff to firing up an iGPU with precise power/TDP stepping. Perhaps one of those situations where the power budget and latency to fire up the whole GPU block or burst it to max power ends up costing as much as the actual calculation. I think for purposes of this discussion, we also need a source that sheds light on the architectural differences between NPUs and GPU shader/execution units.
Wired tried to put out a defence of tech and the result is incoherent drivel. See for yourself.
If you gotta conclude with, "tee hee! simulation theory!" you're not just cooked... you're seared and roasted
There's enough layers of irony here that it's a bit hard to tell if he's making a serious argument here or not; but this is one of the weirder straw-men arguments I've ever read.
"No no no, it's not all the exploitation, social ills, lack of user control, shoddy quality, and general capitalism I hate in the modern "tech" industry; it's the fact that it uses binary!"