Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
as one of the two non-computer scientists here, every time I check in there seems to be some load bearing open source project I’ve never heard of that’s gone fash. “GreenBlox is refusing to kick out a contributor who said the jewish question should be on the table??” “PipeLinux official account is posting that pronouns don’t exist?” open source people, are you ok?
CS has a huge number of people who think you can derive the solutions to social problems from first principles. It’s impossible to reason with them.
it seems to me that bigger problem is that they also think that software can solve these problems
open source people, are you ok?
No.
Think this about narrows it down. I was thinking about a longer post on all the bad dynamics and other weird things cs people and esp open source people have to deal with but you did it better.
For the most part, the sudden rash of people deciding that their bigotry is now publicly acceptable is mostly around non-loadbearing things, because aggrieved entitled nerds aren’t great at working in a team (hyprland has definitely suffered from alienating people and missing out on fixes and compatibility work).
The rubygems stuff was a special case, because it was a hostile takeover of some important infrastructure by a shitty company, but most of the rest are unexciting projects that have found that giving it the old H-H is good publicity and more importantly: there are some rich folk throwing money around. Not a lot of cash in open source under normal circumstances.
Not that I want to minimise the problems that open source and tech in general very definitely have, but in this specific case it is a small number of people who are very loud and/or very rich, and sometimes both.
Hello other non-cs person!
Bluesky going to bad for that poor, downtrodden, victimised and underrepresented demographic, uh, ai slop posters?
https://bsky.app/profile/carrion.bsky.social/post/3m2kf3rottc2h
alt text
A screenshot of an email sent to a bluesky user, reading
Hi there, Your Bluesky account (@carrion.bsky.social) has created a list called “Al Slop Posters” that may violate our Community Guidelines. We’ve temporarily hidden this list from other users because it contains one or more of these issues.
- Harmful language such as insults or slurs
- Unverified claims
- Appears intended to shame or abuse users
There are ‘user uses AI/has AI profile’ lists to they really are objecting to the word ‘slop’.
‘slop is a slur’ discourse incoming in T minus -100.
“In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer,” [Peter Thiel] said, referring to Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky
I am going outside to smoke something. I don’t care what, just… something
“The Antichrist wants to stop all science”, says the motherfucker who pays people to drop out of universities.
Damn, when you get kicked off the Thiel grifter pipeline, you get straight punted. Not even the callous disregard and abandonment practiced by a certain outer-borough real estate hustler, instead it’s reverse apotheosis
Tired: breaking up face to face, like a normal person
Wired: breaking up via text
Inspired: breaking up via the mirror-universe version of a fundamentalist revival sermon
Give it a year or so and they’ll both pretend that this never happened.
Come on, give Greta a chance, she’s deserved it.
Just revenge for Yud banning NRx from lw.
In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science.
As opposed to the current administration that is destroying science by cutting the NSF’s funding. An administration that Peter Thiel supports. He might want to look into that.
Guy who looks exactly like the antichrist wearing Groucho glasses with a fake nose and moustache pointing at other people in the room and accusing them of being the antichrist.
You know, idealistic autistic young woman world leader doesn’t sound that bad.
Lemme hit that shit too.
That makes ol pete sound crazier than anyone he referenced
Oh my god, The Guardian with the sneer:
Take a look at Sam Altman. I mean, actually do it. Go to Google images, where you can find countless photos of the OpenAI boss smiling in a kind of wan genius way, the humble lost puppy of Silicon Valley. But I urge you to simply cover the bottom half of his face in any of these pictures, and you will immediately clock that Sam has the sad-psycho eyes of the lost woman’s boyfriend who the police have asked to front the missing person’s appeal. Please come home, Sheila – we’re all worried sick and we just want you back.
I’ve always said that he looks like a horse who, upon foaling, was promptly kicked in the face by another horse
He’s Evil Dale Cooper, but drained of all charisma.
I just wanted to lob a sneer at this article fawning over Sora 2: https://spyglass.org/soras-slop-hits-different/
And again, a lot of this stuff — slop or not — is funny. Really, truly funny. Sora is scaling comedy in a way that we’ve never seen.
did this motherfucker just try to say “scaling comedy”? If you ever wondered why techbros are so unfunny, here’s something to point at.
Scaling comedy, it is when you pick bigger and bigger objects for ‘your mom’ jokes.
Future Elephant Graveyard target?
Isn’t that how the Zizians got going? Or was that uni-hemispheric partial sleep or some such thing
(or, more realistically in both cases, simply escalating quantities of amphetamines)
Polyphasic sleep was a thing for a while. Was that it?
e/acc-elerating doses of amphetamines
i’m pretty sure that there’s an obscure stimulant that is some kind of giga-meth that lasts for 2d or more, that’d be more suitable for them
i looked up and it’s not one but at least two, but anticholinergics will keep them more grounded
I’m not sleeping on the job, I’m solving problems by lucid dreaming.
first read as lucid screaming
Is there a general term for the type of experimental or vaporware tech whose main function is creating FUD and FOMO which slows down the adoption and development of more mature conventional solutions? In the case of public transit these are collectively known as gadgetbahns. Examples from other fields include SMRs, direct air carbon capture, various embrace-extend-extinguish schemes in the software world, extraterrestrial colonies and a host of consumer IoT gadgets.
if there isn’t, I’m calling it muskware, its conceptually close enough to vaporware.
hmm I’m not aware of one beyond general “obstructionism” but that probably is a thing that needs a word
If there isn’t a term, maybe you get to invent one! Just exploring the concept a bit here to try to generate leads, in case you wanted them.
To rephrase your concept, you have A) things that are collective attention thieves/time sinks for a particular field or industry, and B) this vaporware appears to have a good profit-to-opportunity cost ratio, but in reality, it does not.
You could focus on just A), with a direct naming of “collective attention thief”. You can substitute “collective” with “industry” and “attention thief” with “time sink”, etc. Or something like “kleptoware” or “sinkware”, “holetech”, etc.
Focusing on just B), you might come up with something like “bubbleware”, “bubble” indicating that the vaporware has inflated value.
Combining the two, you might name it after a scam. Maybe “pigeonware” after the pigeon drop scam, or “fawneyware” or “fiddleware” etc., there are many scams you could use.
I’d describe it as parasitic disruption. The scam analogies are on point and fine for rhetorical purposes, but they imply a degree of intentionality which is not necessary for some tech to be parasitic.
Say you invent a new type of electical power line that’s more durable and power efficient than the existing type. The materials are also ten times more expensive than for the same length of normal power line and the only factory making this type of power line can only make enough to fill the needs of a few small customers with special needs. Meanwhile local government in Eriador is planning the electrification of the Shire community when the well-meaning councilor Brandybuck mentions this new type of power line he read about in a magazine. Perhaps the council should wait and see how that develops before committing to building power lines that might be obsolete the moment they’re put up.
Neither you nor the councilor are deliberately using your invention as a tool to stall electrification of the Shire, but the same effect happens anyway.
You point about property B is a pretty good one. My hunch is that tech follies like these are related to economic bubbles and share similarities with them. I’ll postulate that most parasitic disruptions go hand in hand with economic bubbles, but not necessarily all of them.
Another, a little more snide name I came up with while writing that: “free drinks tomorrow” tech, after a popular sign seen on the walls of bars around the world.
Fair! Since you’re coming in with lotr references, maybe pumpkinware. Named after the pumpkin in one of the endings of PJ’s RotK where the hobbits are in a pub and everyone else is impressed with the large pumpkin, oblivious to what the present could have been.
Also, in order to grow a large pumpkin, you probably gotta ignore/prune all other pumpkins and just feed the one growing. So there’s that too.
I think pumpkinware is catchy but that a more saleable story for the term is cinderella’s stagecoach turning out to be a pumpkin
Parasitic Disruption is a great name for the overall structure. I think another way of framing it in economic terms would be to talk about the opportunity cost of innovation. Even if we take hucksters and monorail salesmen out of the picture (which is exceptionally generous steelmanning imo) we’re looking at the fact that the “disruptive” option has a whole lot of unknowns on the cost side of the sheet in terms of timeline, monetary costs, downsides and tradeoffs, etc. The upsides are also unknown, but are usually assumed to be “perfectly solves the problem”. On the other hand, the boring, well-understood option is going to have very specific answers to those questions. That skews the discussion strongly against actually doing anything, and creates a lot of room for the aforementioned grifters to work.
I think this framing also gives us some tools to fight back. You can easily turn those unknowns into horror stories of boondoggles past, and focus on the major advantage of being able to start today. The opposite of state-of-the-art is rarely “unusably antiquated” and the cost of leaving the problem - be it energy independence, mass rapid transit, or whatever - unsolved and festering is something we can push.
Ye it’s called a “grift”
I mean sure, all gatgetbahns are grifts, but not all grifts are gadgetbahns you know
A quick OT post, to lighten the mood: https://mastodon.online/@danirabbit/115344203384433517
A new psychology preprint argues that “contemporary AI is research misconduct”.
While I like it, I wish there were more people pushing back and it not just being people involved with van Rooij. Makes it to easy to dismiss the concerns as just her being a crank. (Which I don’t think she is obviously, just wish there were more people in academia pushing harder back).
Bluesky’s found another set of rakes to step on - after a user complained of ableism from the mods, Trust and Safety head Aaron Rodericks used the automated systems as an accountability sink, then let slip that users’ work was being uploaded to AI slop service thehive.ai, seemingly contradicting Bluesky’s promise to not dump artists’ work into the slop machine.
All those comments replying to how they use hive are missing the explicit corpo speak going on.
Bluesky said they wouldn’t use images uploaded to train AI. And Bluesky isn’t. They never said shit about partners or third party systems they use. And of course it’s in a post, not any sort of official terms or the like.
shot:
chaser:
(thread)
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phgn posts: Nice!! The Vercel CEO recently posed for pictures with Netanyahu, so I’m looking for an alternative actually!
aziaziazi replies: I’d be glad if you can share a source of that.
ardren replies: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vercel-ceo-takes-selfie-israe…
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phgn’s comment is flagged and removed
an additional reply by baobun with the links https://www.middleeasteye.net/trending/developers-drop-vercel-call-boycott-after-ceo-posts-selfie-netanyahu, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45416353, and https://old.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/1nueacb/vercel_controversy_ethics_backlash_and_a/
I’d wanted to mention this when I read about Cloudflare doing it, but, seriously, what the hell is up with Omarchy?
It’s not even a full distribution, just a fucking Arch config. Some shell scripts and dotfiles you can run to set up a system … like tons of nerds have on their git and have been using for decades. Why is this shit getting sponsorships?
The answer probably looks a lot like “here’s how to install omarchy on your laptop in 14 easy steps! And 88 great apps you can install afterwards!”
Is it time yet to begin accepting that Arch is kind of ass anyway? I had a bad experience with updates crapping out on Manjaro, the original Arch-plus distro, and then somebody told me that Arch developers build all the packages on their local machines, not a secured build server??? Maybe that was just the AUR stuff, but still. And you need to update all packages in lock-step. I’ll take the flexibility of Gentoo every time, where I can easily keep a stable base system and experiment with less-stable upstream packages around the edge, and still have it all make sense.
Having a bunch of out-and-proud fascists and bigots maintaining one of your most popular frontends is the kind of shit that kills projects. It’s not just Framework, Arch needs to get out ahead of this if they don’t want to get passed up. Not too long before having Valve downstream is the only thing they’ve got going for them, and that’s not guaranteed to be a happy relationship forever.
Foxboron (arch maintainer dude) seems pretty good about rejecting fascism, he’s in the framework thread linked from the post above expressing discontent.
I am being a bit unfair, it’s good to see project principals getting out ahead of this. A lot of people glom onto Arch because of some perceived elitism, and it’s a hop skip and a jump from that to convincing yourself you’re part of the “master race”
Genuinely, arch linux is just like any other distro once you have it installed, aside from having the AUR.
YAY!
Manjaro’s package update delay thing does tend to fuck stuff up, EndeavourOS been behaving quite fine for me.
bongrip Manjaro is a psyop to make Arch look less competently maintained than it really is
second bongrip Manjaro is an indoctrination program to load up Linux newbies with stupid questions before sending them to Gentoo forums~
third bongrip oh shit im the couch
fourth bongrip
The computer was a mistake
I guess one of the main attractions of Arch is the AUR plus the rolling-release update model. Personally, I’ve had Arch as my daily driver for over 5 years and I haven’t run into any system-breaking issues with updates (there have been small hiccups, like my custom keyboard layout stopping working), which is a better record than I had with for example Ubuntu. But I suppose it’s very dependent on the particular hardware and software one uses and Lenovo laptops are generally well-supported.
Lenovo Thinkpad laptops are generally well-supported (at least the mainstream business oriented product lines). The Linux support for Lenovo’s consumer oriented budget laptops is just as much of a crapshoot as other manufacturers’.
Because Omarchy is an open endorsement of fascism disguised as a Linux distro - like the takeovers of NixOS and RubyGems, its success would help to further entrench fascists in the FOSS ecosystem.
Well at least I can now stop being angry at them for fucking up the Laptop 12 keyboard, because now they are on my “do not buy, ever” list anyway.
Between this and the relatively disappointing GPU refresh for their Framework 16 (Nvidia 5070 8GB? That’s it?! 🤮 ), doesn’t look like they’ll be getting my money anytime soon either. Seems like the used Thinkpad + LibreBoot crowd stays winning
this bums me out so much
deleted by creator
a lobsters is mad that a middling Perl project gets upvotes just because it’s “braincoded”
https://lobste.rs/s/bu1a84/i_brain_coded_static_image_gallery_few#c_um9usd
Apparently the red site couldn’t handle this one. Tags were changed from the descriptive perl to “vibecoding” and “satire”!
A major Australian university used artificial intelligence technology to accuse about 6,000 students of academic misconduct last year.
The most common offence was using AI to cheat, but many of the students had done nothing wrong.
Man, I hope it doesn’t become good advice to suggest that students screen record all their classwork to avoid this sort of shit, but I have a sinking feeling.
Well, now the students have incentive to record all the stages of their progress. And the professors have incentive to assign projects in stages, each one of which has a tangible output. It’s the golden age of the index card, baby! Fill out one for each idea or claim you want to use from a book you read, wrap the stack with a rubber band… This oddly dovetails with the professors’ obligations, since now we have to teach how to do research all over again.
Also, reading up on the recent nix community mess (more fun interpersonal steering committee member conflict!), I’ve come to one conclusion:
One day someone will make a stage play out of this whole thing and the play will suck.
What if the stage play is a more tightly-scripted pro-wrestling show? Whether consciously or not, that would probably accurately capture the mindset of most of the original participants
On the one hand, it would capture their mindset quite well, on the other hand, I’m not sure how you’d adapt the “sports entertainment” mold of wrestling to Internet arguments
I think you could only really faithfully adapt the really dramatic arguments. Like ones with real world consequences. Closest thing I can think of is probably the saga of Nicole Shanahan, Musk, and Brin. RFK Jr also shows up in this story.
Otherwise you’d just make gimmicks based off of internet archetypes. Keyboard Warrior, White Knight, etc.
