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 quick interest check: I kind of want to use our deployment’s spare capacity to host an invite-only WriteFreely instance where our regulars can host longer form articles
…but WriteFreely’s UI is so sub-optimal the official instance (write.as) runs a proprietary fork with a lot of the jank removed, and I don’t really consider WF to be production ready out of the box.
we can point the WF backend at arbitrary directories for its templates, page definitions, and static assets though, so maybe I could host those on codeberg and do a CI job that’d pull
mainevery time it updates so we could collaboratively improve WF’s frontend? it’s not a job I want to take on alone (our main instance needs to take priority), but a community-run WF instance would be pretty uniquethe pros of doing this are that WriteFreely at least seems to have very slim resource requirements and it’ll at least reliably host long form Markdown on the web
the downsides are again, it’s janky as fuck (it only supports Mailgun of all things for email, but if you disable that the frontend will still claim it can send password reset emails… but it’ll check the config and display an error if you click the reset link??? but they could have just hidden the reset UI entirely with the same logic??? also I don’t like the editing experience), and it’s not really what I’d consider federated — it shoots an Article into ActivityPub whenever you post, but it’s one-way so replies, boosts, and favorites won’t show up from ActivityPub which makes it feel a bit pointless. there might be a frontend-only way to link a blog post to the Mastodon or Lemmy thread it’s associated with on another instance though, which would allow for a type of comment system? but I haven’t looked much into it. write.as just has a separate proprietary service for comments that nobody else can use.
this definitely won’t replace Wordpress but does it sound like an interesting project to take on?
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.
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.
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
Brian Merchant put out a “complete guide to luddite horror films”, which focuses on horror films which directly critique tech in one way or another.
On a personal note, I suspect “luddite horror” (alternatively called “techno-horror”) is probably gonna blow up in popularity pretty soon - between boiling resentment against tech in general, and the impending burst of the AI bubble, I suspect audiences are gonna be hungry as hell for that kinda stuff.
Additionally, I suspect AI as a whole (and likely its supporters) will find itself becoming a pop-culture punchline much the same way NFTs/crypto did. Beyond getting pushed into everyone’s faces whether they liked it or not, public embarrassments like Google’s glue pizza debacle and ChatGPT’s fake cases have already given comedians plenty of material to use, whilst the ongoing slop-nami turned “AI” as a term into a pretty scathing pejorative within the context of creative arts.
I was just about to ask after Threads.
I’m just sad Hardware wasn’t mentioned. (Btw, for anybody who needs content warnings, that movie has a big one for the voyeur janitor).
E: prob more of a cyberpunk/sf movie anyway, even if a few people I knew who watched it were horrified
FastCompany: “In Apple’s new ads for AI tools, we’re all total idiots”
It’s interesting that not even Apple, with all their marketing knowledge, can come up with anything convincing why users might need “Apple Intelligence”[1]. These new ads are not quite as terrible as that previous “Crush” AI ad, but especially the one with the birthday… I find it just alienating.
Whatever one may think about Apple and their business practices, they are typically very good at marketing. So if even Apple can’t find a good consumer pitch for GenAI crap, I don’t think anyone can.
[1] I’d like to express support for this post from Jeff Johnson to call it “iSlop”
They’re advertising automated slideshows? In 2024? That’s desperate.
[1] I’d like to express support for this post from Jeff Johnson to call it “iSlop”
Its simple, its catchy, and it turns Apple’s own naming scheme against them, I’m fully in support of this.
Talk with PM went nowhere. Very nice guy, but was insistent on giving the reviewer the benefit of the doubt. I just wanna die.
oof, I’m sorry. it’s so hard to get capitalists to understand the nature of what they’re enabling, especially if it seems to be working in the short term. it’s the most frustrating thing during a bubble — it taints every decision the executive class makes, and enables grifters to get away with obvious shit even over objections from people who know better.
oof :x
what’s the next step on that?
That fucking sucks, esp as you put a lot of time into it.
I’m really sorry. I know how frustrating all of this bullshit is. Here for you. <3
google got legally beat down a fair bit in app store area https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/court-orders-google-monopolist-knock-it-monopoly-stuff
Adobe execs say artists need to embrace AI or get left behind [Jess Weatherbed, The Verge]
Adobe is going all in on generative AI models and tools, even if that means turning away creators who dislike the technology. Artists who refuse to embrace AI in their work are “not going to be successful in this new world without using it,” says Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe.
Personally, I think this is gonna backfire pretty damn hard on Adobe - artists’ already distrust and hate them as it is, and Procreate, their chief competition, earned a lot of artists’ goodwill by publicly rejecting gen-AI some time ago. All this will likely do is push artists to jump ship, viewing Adobe as actively hostile to their continued existence.
On a wider note, it seems pretty clear to me Alexandru Costin’s drank the technological determinist Kool-Aid and has come to believe autoplag’s dominance is inevitable. He’s not the first person I’ve seen drink that particular Kool-Aid, he’s almost certainly not the last, and I suspect that the mass-drinking of that Kool-Aid’s fueling the tech industry’s relentless doubling-down on gen-AI. A doubling-down I expect will bite them in the ass quite spectacularly.
not going to be successful in this new world without using it
The hubris is almost impressive in itself. There’s not a single technology in human history that has managed to kill every art form not using it. Digital art didn’t do it, photography, pencil, movable type printing, nib pens, oil paints, scraffito, probably not even the invention of currency did it. He thinks autoplag of all things will?
I mean, he is their VP of Autoplag, so I imagine he’s got even more reason to believe than the average MBA. That doesn’t undermine your point, but I think the fact that adobe has appointed a VP of Autoplag should be part of the story to begin with, rather than being assumed. Did they ever have a VP of blockchain? Or a VP of copyright fraud?
the boot just does not understand why the face under it is complaining
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
oh dear, how sad, nevermind.
oh no, a bunch of nationalist pricks might stop fucking up our community spaces. I might never have a proud Russian gatekeep my contributions ever again! no please don’t go
and here’s hoping the American nationalist devs contributing on behalf of their military-industrial complex employer (hello Anduril) take a hint from this and also fuck off to their own communities where they can bully each other for no fucking reason
they won’t because the cruelty is the point for fascists regardless of nation, but here’s hoping
mr president, we must not allow kernel gap
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
My enshittification story*: Instagram has been suggesting people for me to follow. It markets them to me by saying “friend X follows this person!” But friend X does not follow this person. Friend X has no tenable connection to this person. Why are you bullshitting me, Zuck? Is the autoplag outflow drain hooked up to Insta?
*orig JP title: 僕のエンシット化ストーリー
Your family wants to see you post on threads bullshit is laughable
Your family wants to see you
Doubt
LinkedIn cold-emailed me this morning to suggest that I follow Vivek Ramaswamy, who lists his job title as “Founder at Vivek Ramaswamy”
Gonna change my name to Goldman Sachs and style myself as my own founder.
he’s a self-made man, apparently
facebook pulled that shit for many years too, along with the “created” notifications
alllll for the engagement farming, desperate to keep those eyeball KPIs on track
Oh it was for the KPIs? All is forgiven then. /s
right? if only you knew it was for Sacred Advertising Revenue and Good Statistics, you wouldn’t have embarrassed yourself so in public! alas, the dangers of the modern internet
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.
Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right.
I wonder what major world events were happening in the 1930s-1940s that would line up with this…
As it turned out, Meyer did take the side of the Republican party on some issues. He was opposed to FDR’s New Deal, and this was reflected in the Post’s editorial stance as well as its news coverage, especially regarding the National Recovery Administration (NRA). He even wrote an editorializing “news” story under a fake name
THERE IT IS!
But back to Jeff.
You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests.
Yep. We’re protected from intimidation and extortion so long as we pay our dues to the consiglieri when he comes around and don’t get too chummy with the cops.
more US politics I know. There is sadly no escape from the fiery vortex that is the U.S. election.
(e: not blaming you, just posting from outside hell)
Ok actually read the screed. Ahhhh yes good ol’ Jeff “In the years after I bought the WaPo and everyone got suspicious, me and my billions of dollars have done nothing but improve the world and my credibility and definitely didn’t trap anyone in warehouses to die in a tornado, so you all trust me now, right?” Bezos
no escape
Rest of world: is there no alternative to US hegemony?
CIA: *raises head from pile of blow, puts gun on table* no
It’s more like everyone is hungry for content and the POTUS election is a big generator of it.
Also most of us speak a lot of English so it is easier to follow than for example Mandarin.
…and other examples of why there are no alternatives to US hegemony!
Broke: Simpsons did it first
Woke: OJ Simpson did it first
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.)
(I think I’ve mentioned it here before, but nonetheless)
both myself and 2 people I know were hunting last year. it’s hell (in tech, which has historically been fucking abysmal at hiring to start with). the ways this shit is going to affect other industries too…
some numbers: the one friend applied to something in the 1000 posts, the other 400-600 in the space of approx 4-5mo. both barely heard back from anyone, or if they did it was often months after. on some of mine, I got nack/followup mails approx 7-8mo after sending details. and that’s without even mentioning the utter fucking toxic dump swamp of listings…. holy shit what a mess
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.
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.
"I am neither left nor right wing, I am [simply as far right economically as one can be].
neither left nor right (feudalist)
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 really hope Harris wins by a landslide just so all these weird nerds eat shit. If even just one goes "wow I really let myself get swept up into believing trump/musk was great by my echo chamber it would be worth it. But i doubt we will get such self awareness. The various betting prediction markets also then have been wrong (or manipulated) would also be fun.
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.
I don’t think you want to hear my opinions
You’re right there, buddy!
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.
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
I’m glad to hear someone’s invested enough to fork it. I like D (hehe) and it would be a shame for it to just languish in Bright daylight.
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
Walter Bright soon reading his second ever newspaper: “Wow, this is a lot like Washington Post!”
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
…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”…)
Two of the major donors pushing to recall the mayor of Oakland, CA are cryptocurrency “executives.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/billionaires-oakland-mayor-sheng-thao-recall
Over the summer, Jesse Pollak, a cryptocurrency investor and executive at Coinbase, launched Abundant Oakland, an advocacy organization that funds “moderate” candidates running in Oakland races. The organization is explicitly linked to similarly named entities in San Francisco and Santa Monica.
Abundant Oakland has a related political action committee, Vibrant Oakland, which, campaign filings show, has received donations from Pollak ($115,000), the Oakland police officers association ($50,000), cryptocurrency executive Konstantin Richter ($60,000), the northern California carpenters regional council ($150,000) and a Pac controlled by Piedmont landlord Chris Moore ($100,000).
