Scientology survivor Jenna Miscavige tells the story of her life to the camera. Unlike similar interviews she's given over the past decade-ish, this isn't a discussion with a journalist or a generalist overview, but a deep dive from somebody who served Sea Org, Disconnected their family, and was Audited daily. Content warning for internal details of the Church of Scientology and Sea Organization; there's a lot of abuse. I figured that our newer friends might not realize the degree to which the CoS threatened the Internet and violates human rights, and her story is a complete slice of everything we dislike about the church.

Never forget Lisa McPherson.

Anthropologist Gutsick Gibbon, with guest population-geneticist Alex Hancock, dismantles professional bigot Vox Day's creationist claims and then proceeds to dismantle the rest of his history and public appearances.

Sorry if that title causes psychic damage. Content warning: math.

Just a quick little explanation of those cameras put up by Flock Safety (YC S17). Posting it here in the hopes that it'll quell the urge I feel to post it to Lobsters and make pushcx delete it.

That one SciShow knitting video was so bad that it inspired a complete remake. I figured that, with the realization that Hank Green has been chatbot-assisted for a while, it's worth remembering that one time when he (or ChatGPT) wrote a lot of misogynist stuff into a SciShow script and also compared knitting to magnets.

::: spoiler spoiler There is no spoiler. The video starts by explaining that it is a parody and then proceeds to be an incredibly sharp parody. :::

This essay attempts to explain power, responsibility, reputation, and courtesy in the context of long-distance communication-oriented relationships.

A draft of the first part of section four, "System 3", was shared previously, on Awful. I'm open to feedback.

As always, no generative chatbots were used to generate text. I used vim and pandoc.

Kevin Perjurer (not their real name) recounts the history of Disney's "Living Characters Initiative", a multi-decade attempt to create a more immersive character-driven experience.

::: spoiler spoilers

This is basically an introductory course on AI as told through the history of Disney's animatronics. There is a companion video which covers the early decades of robotics and focuses on Walt's futurism; this longer video focuses on how AI has attempted to pull money out of customer wallets delight park visitors by putting smiles onto faces. Perjurer focuses on concrete examples; there's no talk of hyperreality here, although there is a bit of theory-building which fits each example into a generic framework for understanding conversations.

The video has too many good sneers for me to choose. A common theme is guests tricking AI hosts into behaving inappropriately. There's this theme of the robots only functioning properly within controlled conditions, as if every robot were its own science experiment. This lines up with what I've seen in manufacturing and logistics; robots sure can work fast but they are inflexible, pre-programmed, and highly sensitive to unexpected variance in their environment.

No, I take it back. Listening to E.T. say "D-D-D-D-D-D-" or "lasagna, lasagna" is very funny. Skip to the interlude about Universal Studios for that.

Of course, little of this is truly new, but it's nice to see a version of this history which puts everything together to point out that Disney's goal of creating robots which imitate inhuman characters is fucked-up horror but which isn't a fucked-up horror story. Going in the other direction, an AI-skeptical viewpoint could maybe make those stories more interesting.

:::

Hi folks, I'm making another tech-stack recommendation. Previously, on Awful, I noted that below 87.5% availability, whether a service is up is effectively random chance. We've reached that point for GitHub's Platform, which includes components like Actions, Copilot, Pages, and the core API of issues and PRs. I do not have confidence in GitHub's owners or operators to remedy this situation, so I cannot recommend it professionally nor to neighbors. As a bit of nuance, note that Pages seems to have relatively decent availability and is often up even when the rest of GitHub is down, so static content hosted on Pages can be deprioritized for migration.

The thread is open on Lemmy. I'm interested in your thoughts, particularly around alternative forges, alternative paradigms for forges, community-driven plans for migration, strategies for migrating, and tools that ease the burden of maintaining many git repositories.

I'm not gonna dig up the links since I'm sure y'all're already tired of talking about quantum computing. I am going to insist that, while I professionally disagree with Filippo about plenty of things, I do not see any mistakes in their analysis here. Please start thinking about post-quantum cryptographic tooling today.

Welcome to the carnival! We've got fun and games. I asked vibecoders to complete three tasks. When folks complained about that, I offered up five more tasks. I did half of these and got average scores. How well did the community do? Scroll to the end to find out!

Okay, previously, on Awful, we established that vibecoding can't produce working compilers. Let's try some other side projects of mine. I have important stuff to work on and a deadline, so I'm not matching these projects with my own submissions. Instead, I've laid out a psuedo-objective rubric and I'm going to say that par is 10/10 points.

I’m tired of hearing about vibecoding on Lobsters, so I’ve written up three of my side tasks for coding agents. Talk is cheap; show us the code.

Happy Holiday and merry winter solstice! I'm sharing a Nix flake that I've been slowly growing in my homelab for the past few months. It incorporates this systemd feature, switches from CppNix to Lix, and disables a handful of packages. That PR inspired me, and I'm releasing this in turn to inspire you. Paying it forward and all that.

Should you use this? As-is, probably not. It will rebuild systemd at a minimum and you probably don't have enough RAM for that; building from this flake crashed my development laptop and I had to build it on a workstation instead. Also, if you have good taste in packages then this will be a no-op aside from systemd and Lix, and you can do both of those on your own.

Isn't this merely virtue-signalling? I think that the original systemd PR was definitely signalling, since it's unlikely to ever get deployed on the systems of our friends. However, I really do sleep better at night knowing that it's unlikely that jart or suckless have any code running on my machines.

Why not make a proper repository and organization? Mostly the possibility that GitHub might actually take down a repository named nixpkgs-antifa. If there's any interest then I could set up a Codeberg repo. However, up to this point, I've only used it internally and my homelab has its own internal git service.

Mods: You've indicated that you don't like it when people write code to approach our social problems. That's fine; I'm not publishing an application or service and certainly not starting a social movement, just sharing some of my internal code.

Did catgirl Riley cheat at a videogame, or is she just that good? Detective Karl Jobst is on the case. Are the critics from platform One True King (OTK), like Asmongold and Tectone, correct in their analysis of Riley's gameplay? Or are they just haters who can't stand how good she is? Bonus appearance from Tommy Tallarico.

Content warning: Quite a bit of transmisogyny. Asmongold and Tectone are both transphobes who say multiple slurs and constantly misgender Riley, and their Twitch chats also are filled with slurs. Jobst does not endorse anything that they say, but he also quotes their videos and screenshots directly.

::: spoiler too long, didn't watch

This video is a takedown of an AI slop channel, "Call of Shame". As hinted, this is something of a ROBLOX_OOF.mp3 essay, where it's not just about the cryptofascists pushing the culture war by attacking a trans person, but about one specific rabbit hole surrounding one person who has made many misleading claims. Just like how ROBLOX_OOF.mp3 permanently hobbled Tallarico's career, it seems that Call of Shame has pivoted twice and turned to evangelizing Christianity instead as a result of this video's release.

:::

A straightforward dismantling of AI fearmongering videos uploaded by Kyle "Science Thor" Hill, Sci "The Fault in our Research" Show, and Kurz "We're Sorry for Summarizing a Pop-Sci Book" Gesagt over the past few months. The author is a computer professional but their take is fully in line with what we normally post here.

I don't have any choice sneers. The author is too busy hunting for whoever is paying SciShow and Kurzgesagt for these videos. I do appreciate that they repeatedly point out that there is allegedly a lot of evidence of people harming themselves or others because of chatbots. Allegedly.

A straightforward product review of two AI therapists. Things start bad and quickly get worse. Choice quip:

Oh, so now I'm being gaslit by a frakking Tamagotchi.

The answer is no. Seth explains why not, using neuroscience and medical knowledge as a starting point. My heart was warmed when Seth asked whether anybody present believed that current generative systems are conscious and nobody in the room clapped.

Perhaps the most interesting takeaway for me was learning that — at least in terms of what we know about neuroscience — the classic thought experiment of the neuron-replacing parasite, which incrementally replaces a brain with some non-brain substrate without interrupting any computations, is biologically infeasible. This doesn't surprise me but I hadn't heard it explained so directly before.

Seth has been quoted previously, on Awful for his critique of the current AI hype. This talk is largely in line with his other public statements.

Note that the final 10min of the video are an investigation of Seth's position by somebody else. This is merely part of presenting before a group of philosophers; they want to critique and ask questions.

A complete dissection of the history of the David Woodard editing scandal as told by an Oregonian Wikipedian. The video is sectioned into multiple miniature documentaries about various bastards and can be watched piece-by-piece. Too long to watch? Read the link above.

::: spoiler too long, didn't watch, didn't read, summarize anyway

David Woodard is an ethnonationalist white supremacist whose artistic career has led to an intersection with a remarkable slice of cult leaders and serial killers throughout the past half-century. Each featured bastard has some sort of relationship to Woodard, revealing an entire facet of American Nazism which runs in parallel to Christian TREACLES, passed down through psychedelia. occult mysticism, and non-Christian cults of capitalism. :::

Cross-posting a good overview of how propaganda and public relations intersect with social media. Thanks @[email protected] for writing this up!