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)
Bezos’ open interference in the Washington Post’s editorial section has pushed Walter Bright into a very funny series of public admissions that he did not have to make. See the orange site here for his ongoing libertarian meltdown.
His comment history is a weird mix of programming language discussion, terrible takes, simping for Musk, simping for Musk even harder (just in case you didn’t realize how much he liked Musk the first time).
Musk is the sane one. It’s the rest of us that are insane.
Holy hell.
I don’t think you want to hear my opinions on what the left wing thinks is obvious :-)
Also, I am neither left nor right wing, as I’m a libertarian. I believe in the principles in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the system of checks and balances set up by the Constitution.
it’s just really surprising to see the political takes of a 13 year old come out of the 65 year old who created the least successful C variant
I am neither left nor right wing, as I’m a libertarian
Ah, yes, the classic “I’m not like the other girls” of politics.
Not really that surprising. Computer programmers are textbook petite bourgeoisie.
Edit I don’t keep track of C and C-likes, but apparently D has been forked, and it seems that Walter Bright is a bit of a dick as a maintainer too
https://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2024_01_01.html
Walter Bright is a bit of a dick as a maintainer too
Not a huge schock. But this imho also shows a bit of a problem with these kinds of projects and their ownership. Shit will go bad when the owners grow old and refuse to give up ownership. Walter is 65, you dont expect people to keep up with the cutting edge and wider needs of programmers
A libertarian who glamorizes the state as set up by old people in the past. The libertarian to reactionary funnel.
E:
HN: Since you believe in checks and balances, do you believe Trump should be disqualified for running for office, for using violence, intimidation and lies to attempt to change the results of the last election? As a principled libertarian I’m sure the peaceful transfer of power is at the height of your concerns.
WalterBright: I think I’ll spare everyone from yet another Trump vs Harris debate.
Weichei!
This is quite cowardly of him to write. He knows it speaks specifically to the question of newspapers giving endorsements. Him answering it truthfully would either undermine the statement that kicked off these comments or reveal that he doesn’t give a fuck about the Constitution.
Yes, which is why i called him a softboiled egg in German. Which means something like coward (at least that is what I always learned, google translate gives ‘wimp’). Unless you directly translate it to Dutch then it turns into the Dutch f-slur for gay people. Because we suck.
This was a random insults in various languages derail.
"I am neither left nor right wing, I am [simply as far right economically as one can be].
neither left nor right (feudalist)
for the love of beebo can i just get like eleventeen seconds pls where i dont have to put up with the sociopathy that is academic cs
Look who are in the news again, has it been six months again?
Stephanie Kirchgaessner is the deputy head of investigations for Guardian US, based in Washington DC
Hannah Devlin is the Guardian’s science correspondent, having previously been science editor of the Times. She has a PhD in biomedical imaging from the University of Oxford.
so is it that both these fuckers are ideologically bankrupt, or are they willing complicit ghouls?
Yes
I wonder if the OpenAI habit of naming their models after the previous ones’ embarrassing failures is meant as an SEO trick. Google “chatgpt strawberry” and the top result is about o1. It may mention the origin of the codename, but ultimately you’re still streered to marketing material.
Either way, I’m looking forward to their upcoming AI models Malpractice, Forgery, KiddieSmut, ClassAction, SecuritiesFraud and Lemonparty.
i used to be the sysadmin for lemonparty
it was quite a surprise when i found out i can tell you
A couple months ago I lobbied for (and won) my weekly trivia team to use the name “mike’s hard lemonparty”
Then I learned exactly how old I was
…I feel like there’s a story here.
camping out on a friend’s box, two others had root, but they effectively never bothered. the disk filled one day and i went looking for stuff that wasn’t useful. found that site, found it really was where DNS pointed.
my current box is the descendant of that one
this is what the cloud and its enshittification has taken from us
shared root on ad-hoc hardware doing fuck knows what (but it’s probably lemonparty)
these days lemonparty would be a (ahahahaha) docker image (fnarr etc)
did y’all see bash.org looks to maybe finally have died died? there’s an archive up somewhere at least but rip to a bastion
(this thought comes to mind because I instantly wanted to link “our thoughts go out to the recent victims of internet fraud”…)
today i found out that openai wanted to make their own chips https://neuters.de/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-builds-first-chip-with-broadcom-tsmc-scales-back-foundry-ambition-2024-10-29/
can you imagine what kind of disaster would it be
that article misses one of the delicious parts of that story: they called saltman a “podcast bro” in derision
OpenAI considered building everything in-house and raising capital for an expensive plan to build a network of factories known as “foundries” for chip manufacturing.
Oh man, that’s a delicious understatement. If the allegations are true, this was a plan that would make the military-industrial complex envious.
Amazon used an AI-generated image as a cover for 1922’s Nosferatu, and it got publicly torn apart on Twitter:
On a personal note, it feels to me like any use of AI, regardless of context, is gonna be treated as a public slight against artists, if not art as a concept going forward. Arguably, it already has been treated that way for a while.
You want me to point to a high-profile example of this kinda thing, I’d say Eagan Tilghman provided a textbook example a year ago, after his Scooby Doo/FNAF fan crossover (a VA redub came out a year later BTW) accidentally ignited a major controversy over AI and nearly got him blacklisted from animation.
I specifically bring this up because Tilghman wasn’t some random CEO or big-name animator - he was just some random college student making a non-profit passion project with basically zero budget or connections. It speaks volumes about how artists view AI that even someone like him got raked over the coals for using it.
Unfortunately it’s the small artists who are most open and vulnerable to criticism. Amazon can probably impose this kind of shit on everyone through sheer persistence
What do they mean by “in color”? If it’s just various tints throughout the film that’s normal and cool. If they mean full on colourised that’s messed up.
Talk with PM went nowhere. Very nice guy, but was insistent on giving the reviewer the benefit of the doubt. I just wanna die.
Dead internet? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within the job hunting process?
(Github project supposedly for AI assisted mass job application, including using the AI to cater resume to job posting. God I’m terrified of ever having to return to the job market this is fucking insane.)
God I’m terrified of ever having to return to the job market this is fucking insane.)
Absolutely. automated AI applicants getting read by automated AI parsers. It’s inanity!
One thing I hope comes out of all this nonsense is that it collapses the modern job seeing meta completely.
Had a first-hand AI encounter today at the grocery store. The self-checkout now has a script that monitors an overhead video feed to make sure you’re not getting tricky about what scanned and what got put into the bagging area, and if it thinks you’re shady it will stop you from proceeding and summon an employee with no notification that something is wrong.
The new self-checkout process is as follows:
- Scan your item
- Hold the item plainly before you so the overhead camera doesn’t get confused, looking like a Catholic priest about to deliver communion.
- Place item in bagging area. Try not to have to shift things around to find a place.
- Swear as the nom-mutable voice instructions tell you to bag “your… Item.” Legitimately feels like they got as far as assembling the voice lines before anyone realised that having the compu-checker read every purchase out loud would lead to at best an unworkable cacophony if not several immediate lawsuits.
- GOTO 1
Even as antisocial and impatient as I am I’ve found self-checkout to be a UX disaster, but somehow it keeps getting worse.
I call this the law of conservation of complexity
sometimes i manage to confuse self-checkout overhead camera by having a bike helmet on, when that happens i have to hold it up over bagging area (but not put inside because weight won’t match)
I wonder when the management will figure out these rigid anti theft systems cost a lot more than they save.
On that note, think i figured out a way to get free products on the lidl checkout. There was a large amount of errors (some of which caused by me by accident). And required help a couple of times and later i realized that i had paid less than expected. Not sure if it is reproducable, as that would be stealing, or trying to get hired as a red teamer.
in the continuing series of russian bitching over kernel maintainers: Russia says it might build its own Linux community after removal of several kernel maintainers
JFC it was just 11 individuals??? To read the Putin sockpuppets having a Russian grandmother was enough to be booted from the MAINTAINERS list, your computer confiscated, and you being sent to Archangelsk on trumped-up charges.
Oh wait, that’s just what happens to random teens in Russia: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7v5rn8jr82o
Alternative headline for this Washington Post opinion piece from Jeff Bezos: We’re all trying to find the guy who did this!
more US politics I know. There is sadly no escape from the fiery vortex that is the U.S. election.
no escape
Rest of world: is there no alternative to US hegemony?
CIA: *raises head from pile of blow, puts gun on table* no
Sundar Pichal, Google Q3 2024 earnings call:
We’re also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster.
Firstly, if this is literally true they’re completely fucking cooked.
Secondly, if it isn’t, what version of it is?
Best case scenario they are using a loose definition of AI to mean any code generated by other code in order to signal to investors that google isn’t the hulking, sluggish monolith that it is and is agile enough to use AI.
Worst case scenario: “hey chatgpt pls write me new search algorithm to print money, thanks, sundar”
from someone on Mastodon:
Google has a gigantic code generation culture, because the engineers there strongly prefer complexity to drudgery.
If you asked them to write fizzbuzz and left them in a room for twelve hours they would deliver a new programming language that generalized repetitive string printing, with an extension language for potential non-string-printing actions.
I left in ‘22 but feel fairly confident that “25% of code generated by AI” is going to be more of the same.
I half want to jest “PDD strikes again” but honestly it feels like only half the explanation
(promotion driven dev)
Man now I’m thinking about AI written PIPs. God if I got an AI PIP I’d self immolate on company grounds.
oh this is almost definitely real, given that the regular PIP process was already designed to get you to quit
that’s quite appealing to me ngl
God knows I like a good DSL, but “complexity over drudgery” just sounds miserable. I also wonder what kind of stuff they’re coding that’s supposedly trivial enough to be generated by AI.
Firstly, if this is literally true they’re completely fucking cooked.
I totally believe it. Y’all remember Stadia? That was a cosmic freebie and Google absolutely dropped the ball on it so laughably hard.
which part of it was the freebie? whole service looked dead on arrival to me (for the simple reason of physics)
At least for me in the US, performance was very good. I was able to 100% Sekiro, for example.
The reason I think it was a freebie is:
- Everyone was stuck in-doors about six months after launch
- Everybody wanted to play videogames, but no one could get GPUs and the console situation was not great
- Cyberpunk
20222077 came out and tons of people wanted to play it. It ran terribly on consoles and on PCs, but surprisingly well on Stadia at launch
It may have still failed altogether anyway, but the fact that they didn’t seize this opportunity, and instead stuck by their absolutely confusing-as-fuck “like Netflix but not really; first let me explain how this works” subscription model, always gets me.
Edit: Cyberpunk 2077 🤦🏻♂️
but the fact that they didn’t seize this opportunity
honestly, I think they did try, and ran into the unfortunate reality of physics
to make that product work, you need reliable high throughput (this is helped by codecs), sufficient juggle-able GPU space (this is helped by being a gear-hogging first-in-line monopolist), and lastly the casual little requirement of actually being close enough to your customer base
iirc US cost to coast latency is around 65~70ms (so 2x that is the upper timebound for player interactivity, obvs there it’d be less because more local DCs though). just from me to europe is 165msec+, with a far less predictable path throughput. the scale economics to launch a DC for this in ZA (even to serve subsaharan africa all the way up to kenya) just plain doesn’t work, and there are many more places in the world where it doesn’t
it’ll be interesting to see if a retrospective as to why it failed leaks out of that biz someday
So apparently the US government has been compromised by rustheads
https://thenewstack.io/feds-critical-software-must-drop-c-c-by-2026-or-face-risk/
https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/product-security-bad-practices
introduced the mtg players to Ed zitron
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1gdd083/magic_the_gathering_is_an_example_of_the_rot/
