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.)
a couple weeks back, I was (bc reasons) looking around to see how to turn off goog’s annoying gemini bullshit in an account, and you can!
except then even after doing that, accounts in that org still got prompts (in the form of in-app banners, and sparklebuttons in shit like gmail) to Try The Model
it looks like people aren’t biting enough, because now you get it whether you like it or not, for the low low price of pushing up your base account fee! and I checked in one org - “Gemini App” is disabled org-wide, but the fucking prompt is immediately in the UI (and you get a modal popover opening gmail)
fuck these people so much
Oh well. Nothing screams healthy business like force-feeding your product to every customer who can’t hammer the conveniently hidden opt-out button fast enough. I’m sure Gemini is doing great.
Google+ but worse
little known historical fact: G+ was actually the mark that service got on its popularity exam
oh, no no
nooooo no no no
there isn’t an opt-out button
there is only:
- “Continue”,
- “Learn More”
Im gonna build a special circle in hell for these people, together with the ‘yes’ or ‘ask me again later’ people. On this circle all the software your stack depends on will break your build and releases a new release every friday at 5. Whohahhahah
some of the first research science on promptfondlers and model-affine dipshits is starting to see the light of day and, in what will surprise probably 0% of our regulars, it confirms some things
(I have grumped about their desire for outsourced thinking in the past myself)
Thanks for sharing this. Also
using your own head must weigh far too heavy
absolute chef’s kiss
haha thanks
being absolutely incensed at blithely rambunctious imbeciles seems to be (one of?) my wordsmithing balmer peaks
(I have mixed feelings about that)
Some news on the people who own/run protonmail. They are pro Trump
mv protonmail protrumpmail
fucking hell. well i guess moving all my shit elsewhere has become my midweek project instead of my procrastinate-project.
EDIT: [rereads and comprehends the tuta addendum] well. cool. i think i’m going to reschedule that “move everything” to after my “scream and cry into a pillow”. anyone have any other recs?I am also in the “scream and cry” phase of this. However, I have already decided on the following replacements for non-email:
- Mullvad VPN
- Ente for photos and photo backup
2a. their authenticator also slaps - Filen for cloud storage[1]
- Bitwarden for password management
4a. Keyguard is great if you are on Android. I am looking into[2] other (non CLI) Bitwarden-compatible password managers for Desktop
edit: Should mention that I am also looking into a calendar replacement.
edit2: maybe mailbox.org? They are recommended on PrivacyGuides.org.
1: This is more like a stopgap for me until I confirm they are worth sticking with or find someone better. The 29.99€ 100GB lifetime storage may be worthwhile for this (though I cannot say whether I am confident they will be around in 5 years, this can at least serve as a short-term solution).
2: lassitudeThis might be a good basis for a sticky post in NotAwfulTech!
I’m all for stickying a post if one appears!
Thanks! I actually plan on putting a couple of things on Mataroa:
- “Here is a list of shit you can do to make your computer suck less (would contain the above)”
- “Here is how to make your Pixel phone less frustrating in 2024 (basically, how to use user profiles to create a dumb phone without the massive security issues or headache of ‘oh, actually I do need that app occasionally’)”
(Aside: if anyone can recommend a better blogging platform, I would appreciate it. I like Mataroa for its privacy focus, minimalism, and low cost-of-leaving. The only issue I have is lack of KaTeX/MathML/however-the-fuck-omg-why-is-TeX-still-trying-to-hurt-me-in-2025 support.)Aside: if anyone can recommend a better blogging platform, I would appreciate it.
so I can’t promise better, but you’re eligible for an account on the awful.systems blogging platform if you want one. it has MathML! it has jank! you can modify the frontend by PRing into a repo!
it hasn’t seen much use yet, but I was planning on posting a short story I’m writing there when it’s done. I can also say that as much as I don’t like WriteFreely on the web, its phone app is surprisingly ok
Filen does photos too, so you could consolidate 2 and 3 into one. I went and bought 500 GB lifetime storage on their Black Friday offer. Let’s see if they stick around. So far the experience has been smooth.
And if you mention mailbox.org, let me throw Posteo.com into the mix. Basically the same offer, but where mailbox presents itself a bit more business-like, Posteo seems to market itself towards individuals. I moved my mails there and are quite happy with it, but you have to roll encryption yourself. No auto solutions like Proton or Tuta.
Last time this came up, I considered Posteo but decided to hold off (I think it was actually you who suggested it ❤). There was a concern I had about deleting an account due to inactivity, but I think I just misunderstood or misremembered something on PrivacyGuides. This might be a good choice.
As far as Filen for photos, I am reasonably confident that Ente will stick around (they seem to take sustainability seriously). Stuff like this worries me about Filen (emphasis mine):
What else is planned for Black Friday this year?
As every year, we’ve planned a special surprise to give back to our loyal users this Black Friday. Just like in previous years, we won’t be revealing any details just yet. All I can suggest is to check in with us around November 18th—you won’t want to miss it!Are lifetime plans stackable?
Yes, we’d like to emphasize once again that all types of our plans can be easily combined. Subscription plans only expire based on their individual purchase dates.
proton’s ceo is, at this moment, trying to post through it on multiple official company accounts
thank fuck I switched to tuta
[I hold up a hand to my earpiece and make a horrified face]
a second milkshake has hit the duck (cw: fetishized racism, you know the one)
I’m waiting to hear back from tuta about what the fuck but this might be the reason why I hop providers again
image description (but see cw)
so somebody at tuta had the idea to write this post on their official account on Twitter:
Don’t get cucked by Big Tech’s invasive policies. Keep your private data safe and secure with state of the art end-to-end encryption with Tutanota.
and then the image attached to the post is a cuckold porn meme I started to describe here but won’t??? because describing the image put me in a really terrible mood??? it’s SFW but trust me you don’t want it. the Black men in the picture have had their faces covered by logos for Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook in that order. the white woman in the picture does not have her face covered. impact font bottom text: “YOUR PERSONAL DATA”
Here is their response:
@mav Yes, this was bad. I did not take a screenshot back then (the post was deleted after 30 minutes), but I scrolled all my way through Mastodon to find our apology:
https://mastodon.social/@Tutanota/108910936764865962
https://mastodon.social/@Tutanota/108910937813834878
This was a mistake, we apologized & we made sure that we would never post something similar again.
At Tuta, we foster honesty, respect & diversity.
We are here to fight for privacy & against Big Tech surveillance. We want everyone to get the respect they deserve.and this:
@shalf We set up guidelines that all team members on social media duty need to adhere to. We also created a social media review group where we post & discuss every proposal before actually publishing. And it has worked fine ever since. :)
Content of Apology
Dear Privacy Fans,
Last week, on Friday, a post was made on our social media profiles which goes against our core values as team members and as a company. This post was made in poor judgement, without stopping and examining the underlying racist and sexist problems posed by this meme template, and it does not represent the culture and environment of the Tutanota Team. After a period of approximately 30 minutes the offensive post was removed from all platforms and a “brief” apology was posted.
This brief apology does not go far enough to address this mistake and we would like to update everyone on how we are working to address this issue internally and how we will make sure that this does not happen again. As a company we are working with all of our team members to foster a culture that respects diversity in all forms. This is both on a personal level between colleagues, but also at an institutional level by working to create structures which allow diversity to flourish.
I mean… it’s an apology, I don’t know what I was expecting. this still feels like a bigger, redder flag than the one cop who called them a honeypot (and at the same time didn’t seem to know what tuta is) — is this really a service I feel safe recommending marginalized people use? probably not, they should use signal. is it even suitable for the “grandma & drug dealer” use case? that question’s a bit more difficult.
could they really have said or done anything to fix this? shit, I don’t know. maybe I need to dig a lot more into who and what tuta actually is. I ran into one of their (former?) developers on mastodon and they seem to outwardly be marginalized and antifascist. if that’s what tuta’s composed of internally, then I’m a lot more able to trust them. until I do that checking though, I don’t think I’ll recommend tuta to anyone who might need it — the opsec risk of trusting your keypair to a company run by assholes is very high, especially in the current climate.
jfc
Someone should write a dissertation about that porn video and the memes.
Shit’s so diseased its a sequel to Tuskegee. They cooked this cack with CIA-grade crack.
(I have no rational way to respond to this - I’m just trying some Dracula Flow-type shit and hoping it lands.)
Scooter pulls out Richard Lynn’s national IQ figures. https://archive.is/BJ6bd
Only got a paragraph in because of the cheerful citation of aporia (the big Nazi website)
I love how he goes on and on about how it actually totally makes sense for the average IQ in Malawi to be 60 because most people don’t graduate school, ignoring that Lynn’s methodology wasn’t up to any basic standard
And by love I mean I fucking hate it
oh my god i didn’t catch that this was astro slate star and thought i was reading some overtly racist piece of shit instead of a covert racist piece of shit. i haven’t kept up with him lately but this this seems very fucked up even by scott’s standards.
isn’t it racist / dumb to say they have 60 IQ?
no according to Kirkegaard
Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu (pause to catch breath) uh.
A well at least the mask is totally off now.
E: and a thing that has been bothering me, it is quite fucked up for somebody with Scotts education to go along with this argument about disabled people that easily.
content warning for this paragraph
(Not that this is the first time he forgets he has an official education, and cant just ignore that (yes im still mad about the time he said “well she had mental health issues and was a liar” or something about the woman who tragically ended her life after accusing parts of the community of sexual abuse, and didnt mention that a reputation like that would increase the risk of abuse)).
“Isn’t this a racist thing to say? Not according to Hitler!”
jesus fucking christ
bonus steve sailer in the comments
That isn’t a bonus. He is always in the comments. <include OkayButThatsWorseYouDoGetHowThatsWorseRight.gif>
This is what I get for not following these people!
It remains one of those small !!fun!! facts that while Marxbro got permad for being annoying and correct about Marx, Sailer only got a temp ban while being wrong, racist but nice (he has been banned at least once, but racists play by the Tusken Raider rules if not permad)
new developments in things understanding by promptfondlers https://feddit.uk/post/22751391
Underlying original post: a Twitter bluecheck says,
Sometimes in the process of writing a good enough prompt for ChatGPT, I end up solving my own problem, without even needing to submit it.
Matt Novak on Bluesky screenshots this and comments,
AI folks have now discovered “thinking”
Possibly I’m the last to hear about this one, but seeing as proton mail has come up here a few times before: the founder and ceo Andy Yen is apparently a Trump fan.
Great pick by @realDonaldTrump. 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned. People forget that the current antitrust actions against Big Tech were started under the first Trump admin.
(from the beginning of december, on the nomination of trump staffer Gail Slater to antitrust post at the doj)
Free SFnal short story idea, came to me literally in a dream:
Dude is living his best life, beatiful house, beatiful wife, gets a job doing computer stuff “improving the world”. But his big fancy work computer is wasting a lot of space so he reformats it/installs Nix, and suddenly everythings gone, all grey wireframe, no way out. Turns out he was given root to his own simulation and there’s no backup.
Feels I should have read this somehwere but haven’t read short SF in ages so…
Did my regular check in of a q-pilled family member’s facebook page. Zuckerberg’s new fash turn is not being received well as he is being read as the worm that he is. i.e. they are still mad about the anti-vax fact checking.
I am sorry you have this family member.
It’s ok, it’s not your fault!
Looks like LW/Lightcone managed to convince enough people to give then $2M, which will totally not be used to settle sexual assault lawsuits in the future.
It will instead be used to purchase another castle in which to perform SA
Don’t confuse the Conference Castle with the (Non)Consent Castle!
Crying in LW
It was a stately home goddammit! Stop weakmanning meeeeeeeeee
But how are we supposed to grift our absurd ideology into respectability without having a stately English manor to entertain people in??
Like every other ‘charity’, rent a room at some super expensive hotel, hire the most expensive cooks and give all your potential donors a free invite, and massive gifts.
With risk of falling into the ‘classify people into two binary groups’ thing which I have often criticized the Rationalist for. Move over jock vs nerd. There is Jock vs Creep.
The opening statement is also quite silly already (and makes me belief in a companion to the dead internet theory, the dementia internet theory, as I was sure we have had conversations like this as ‘the internet’ already, Zuck turning manospherian all of a sudden also makes me thing this (same with the fight over H-1B on the US right, they had that in 2018 already, Trump likes H-1B)).
We had the whole ‘they act like they are morally superior’ discussion already a lot, and that was about vegans. Only one problem, they are morally superior on almost all ethical/moral/ideological systems you can think of. Sure hedonists, stoics (who are not allowed to complain), sadists, accelerationist extinctionists, ironic nihilistic status quo pushing postmodernists, all disagree they are superior morally but who cares about the opinion of those people. Sure some of them might be annoying to people, but annoying people can be morally superior.
His statements about how politically correctness comes from the 80’s is also wrong (it predates that, and has quite a complex history of being used by various different groups for different meanings), but at that moment I knew I was going to be wasting my time reading this as I would disagree with every paragraph. (as I have seen these types of articles before, they were popular a decade ago or so).
E2: Whoops that edit should have been on a different post. E3: bonus content: Two articles sneering at Paul, Paul Graham and the Cult of the Founder and Paul Graham, proto-techbro..
Paul I am begging you to actually write out a fucking timeline. Apparently woke started in the 80s in universities when the (white) civil rights protestors of the 70s got tenure in the 60s, as an inevitable and predictable extension of political correctness in the 90s. From the title you’re obviously going to indulge the conservative fantasy that “wokeness” is a coherent thing rather than a political tool to dismiss calls for action to actually address blatant injustice. But if you’re going to bullshit me, at least do it competently and have an internally consistent narrative that allows for the natural passage of time.
Man wrote nearly 5k words of pure unfiltered cap:
I’m not sure how someone can read all this without capping themselves. We could sneer this all fucking day.
If you can’t get through two short paragraphs without equating Stalinism and “social justice”, you may be a cockwomble.
I’m not reading that shit but for the masochists out there who like to read HN licking VC boots, here ya go
I’ve been a big fan of HN comments lately
As many writers (perhaps most eloquently George Orwell) have observed, women seem more attracted than men to the idea of being moral enforcers.
Ah, thanks Paul for validating my disdain for Orwell at least.
Considering popes, priests in general, politicians etc are usually male (historically) i have a feeling these quotes also exclude some groups from being moral enforcers.
It also neatly ignores social pressures, which provides good reasons for women being into certain types of ‘moral enforcement’. Either because ‘it is their duty to protect the kids’ or the revolutionary idea that people are all people and should have equal rites, bodily autonomy, a political voice etc.
But nope: “me and the boys agree, this wokeness stuff is for girls”.
This all makes me wonder, we know he has proofreaders who help him. Did he either get rid of all the people who disagree with him, or did they give up, as some people dont want understand the other side they just want to argue their forever cause they believe they are correct (so disagreement is a massive waste of time).
E:
Thanks to Sam Altman, Ben Miller, Daniel Gackle, Robin Hanson, Jessica Livingston, Greg Lukianoff, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan, and Tim Urban for reading drafts of this. [emph mine, the names that really jumped out to me]
Ah. Also 1 name which jumps out to me as prob a woman. Let me google her. Ah right. His wife, and co-founder.
George was writing his stories in the 40s, so at least has “product of his time” as an excuse.
Paul’s just a flat out piece of shit to be writing this nearly 100 years later.
Fair, though in Orwell’s case the misogyny is not accidental either, but an essential aspect of the mostly conservative ideology he adopted for 1984 (contempt for the working class, linguistic purism, just really being a little too enamoured with his perfect crystal of unending oppression etc).
linguistic purism
That must have been really subtle, all I remember is a concern specifically about how a sufficiently totalitarian regime may try to weaponize language as a further means of subjugation, not that language evolving is bad in principle.
I think the premise of total control through language is in itself silly, though that can be excused by the book being satire. But Orwell, for good or ill, was undeniably a linguistic purist, as one can gather from a close reading of “Politics and the English Language”.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable.
Huh.
I guess it stands to reason that the guy who made such a fuss about abusing language as a means to nefarious ends would himself have ideas about how it could be abused ethically.
I’ve never heard of anyone describing 1984 that way, could you elaborate on your points or link to some analysis?
I read it in high school. Iirc, the main character in 1984 deeply hates a woman he works with and his violent fantasies about her are tied up in his desire to rebel against the regime. He later overcomes his desire to commit violence against her by having sex with her. His contempt for her fairly leapt off the page when I read it. I’m sure it’s arguable what Orwell meant or intended.
In another scene, the middle-class protagonists watch a working-class woman hanging out washing and tell themselves that if there was any hope for freedom, it lay in “the proles” (members of the mass underclass, like that woman). But the way they look at her and talk about her is dehumanizing.
It’s probably easier to just read 1984 yourself and make up your own mind. it’s not a very long book.
Isn’t Julia a member of some sort of anti-sex league, meaning there’s a lot of bad faith involved in their relationship from the get go?
Also with respect to the attitudes on women and proles, although I don’t think it’s entirely written in the character’s point of view it feels like there’s a lot of unreliable narration going on, or at least you get a lot of stuff from the perspective of a person who grew up in one of the most absurdly totalitarian regimes in literature. Which is to say, it didn’t feel prescriptive most of the time to me.
See also: “proles”, as in the contempt is baked in to the language, which we know the regime is actively trying to hold in a tight leash.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the only viewpoint you get is that of a middle class bureaucrat. It’s the assumed audience, and it’s where Orwell would place himself as well. The narrative loses a lot of impact if you align yourself with the proles. Winston could live a real life if he really wanted to. I don’t think this point is intended by the novel.
Isn’t Julia a member of some sort of anti-sex league, meaning there’s a lot of bad faith involved in their relationship from the get go?
That’s a problem in itself, don’t you think? It’s all very “Feminists hate sex and they want to erase the differences between the genders”. Julia gets a taste of freedom and her right place in the world by putting on makeup and girly clothes and having a lot of sex.
Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes to make them brighter. It was not very skillfully done, but Winston’s standards in such matters were not high. He had never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was startling. With just a few dabs of color in the right places she had become not only very much prettier, but, above, all, far more feminine.
Also she’s a flighty moron.
I have not read it in ages, but did hear somebody has written something (not sure if book or play or etc) of the book from Julias perspective.
Read a rumor that zuck’s marriage is falling apart, which scans.
A second divorced man is about to hit the tower.
I wish that men would go to therapy instead of going full fascist. Fuck this whole society. The West cannot fall sooner.
i wonder where his roman empire fascination fits the pattern? also, who’s next, maybe thiel?
Does creating a cover of Get Low called “Z-Pain” for your wife, or commissioning the creation of a giant green statue for your wife strike you as the sorts of things someone in an unhealthy marriage would do? I think not!
my first thought on hearing the same was “if this is what he’s like in public, imagine what it’s like at home”
He has two sisters, and one of them wrote a book about the manosphere/redpill (from a non rw way) shit in 2018. So fam gatherings will be wild.
This does have “Divorced Dad” vibes tbh
MDN has fucking ads now???
(also, image uploads are back, weird how pict-rs sometimes just shits the bed)
image description
a fucking “ads by Mozilla” banner at the top of mdn web docs advertising mongodb’s LLM of all fucking things
xD oh what a delight, the one thing missing from the complete gobshite of a “database” that Mongo is was an AI to mangle your queries
that tracks
it’s one of their best places to start boiling the frog
mdn’s only job is to be better than w3schools but here comes Mozilla removing the value from another one of their own projects
also not pictured: there was a fucking side banner ad I didn’t feel like screenshotting too, of course
holy fuck I just realized the diabolical part of this horseshit:
I only know about the mdn ads cause my development browser doesn’t have an adblocker as a matter of practice (which I’m very quickly considering revising)
that, but also I meant specifically that it allows them to “build confidence” inside the company
“look, we’ve been running ads on mdn for weeks now, and no-one’s complained! obvies we can put it on $xyz other places now too!” with a heavy subtext of “why are you being the one that’s obstructing this?”
I possess no insider information whatsoever and I’ll fairly confidently state that I think it’s a fucking strategic choice. guess we get to wait 6~12mo to see how cassandra that statement is
Computer understanders, click this link for some psychic damage! :D (aside: I tried to upload this as an image but it didn’t work)
Ah, the Image Upload Protocol must have gone woke.
The fact that DNS is “Domain Name Protocol” rather than the actual acronym (Domain Name System) is baffling and maddening.
Coiners are terminally brain poisoned by financialization of everything. HTTP represented by three payment processors (and I don’t even know if paying with Google or Apple pay involves HTTP but whatever).
Yet the money protocol is Bitcoin, apparently.
here you go
12 of the most valuable protocols on earth!
Counting like a chatbot.
Ah, so Google Search runs on UDP, interesting, that must be why it’s so unreliable now.
HTTP: famous for doing Google pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, and nothing else. no other use has been found for http
(also, FTP! as indicated by these apps that famously don’t use or support it!)
Well obviously they can’t be the money protocol, whatever that even means. Surely something like FIX would be the closest thing to an actual protocol for money, as opposed to a system.
my pants are an anti-embarrassment protocol
huh, pict-rs has been acting up a lot lately. I’m gonna give the whole node a quick reboot later and see if that fixes things
ow.
nasb, it warms my cold diamond heart to continue seeing instances of people going “oh, yeah, uh… actually, no, fuck that shit. we’ll do it ourselves” in response to broadcom’s attempt to Raise Revenue Through Product Capture
