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.)
we regret to inform you that mullenweg is still posting through it
no matter how unhinged you may expect this to be on starting to read it, you’re probably guessing low
[The] SEO space, an industry known for making the web better.
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[Fiction] [Comic] Effective Altruism and Rationality meet at a Secular Solstice afterparty
When the very first thing you say about a character is that they “have money in crypto”, you may already be doing it wrong
wow i hate this so much
it’s neat how the cartooning gets lazier and lazier as it goes though
“The Publisher of the Journal “Nature” Is Emailing Authors of Scientific Papers, Offering to Sell Them AI Summaries of Their Own Work”, by Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism:
Springer Nature, the stalwart publisher of scientific journals including the prestigious Nature as well as the nearly 200-year-old magazine Scientific American, is approaching the authors of papers in its journals with AI-generated “Media Kits” to summarize and promote their research.
In an email to journal authors obtained by Futurism, Springer told the scientists that its AI tool will “maximize the impact” of their research, saying the $49 package will return “high-quality” outputs for marketing and communication purposes. The publisher’s sell for the package hinges on the argument that boiling down complex, jargon-laden research into digestible soundbites for press releases and social media copy can be difficult and time-consuming — making it, Springer asserts, a task worth automating.
OT: I remember linux on the desktop as a meme, but like, when did this actually happen? I don’t think ai noticed.
At some point in the last years, playing games on Linux turned from fiddling three hours with a Wine config to maybe get an hour of 30fps before the next crash into a legit better experience than Windows that works out of the box in most cases. That did sell a lot of people on giving it a try.
I guess it happened when Valve went all-in on Proton. And Microsoft first adding ads into Windows and now forcing their autoplag on everyone helped a bit, too.
That seems reasonable.
Thiel has fully lost it, and as I assume nobody around him has warned him about how crazy this
manifesto found after the shootingoped in the ft makes him sound, so do the people around him.jesus christ
That reads like some bullshit you’d find on r/iamverysmart on Reddit.
Maybe side effects of all the substances he uses to become the Übermensch.
Molly White on one of the more obvious problems with betting markets
Tried to add the screenshot in the post but it won’t work for some reason.
With betting markets I often think, so they have all just forgotten the idea of assassination markets?
My favorite quote from flipping through LessWrong to find something passingly entertaining:
You only multiply the SAT z-score by 0.8 if you’re selecting people on high SAT score and estimating the IQ of that subpopulation, making a correction for regressional Goodhart. Rationalists are more likely selected for high g which causes both SAT and IQ
(From the comments for “The average rationalist IQ is about 122”.)
<insert rant about lizardman constant here again>, and I say that as a person with a sat score of 1650!
E: ow god the first comments are ‘actually you and scott underestimate the derived IQ’
E: in other related new turns out Cephalopods have a higher IQ that the people on themotte. Article unrelated, just thought it was neat.
I bet if they restricted the survey entrants to people who actually write on LW, the score would have been far lower. Has a single article on there contained even a twinge of a useful idea?
Yes it has had good ideas. As rationalwiki said. The good ideas are not new, and the new ideas are not good.
An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out it’s much worse:
https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/
[Do not post} Insults, including those about […] Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”
You can see the full diff from last version if you click “Jan 8, 2025” and yeah it’s a doozy.
Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day. I couldn’t really concentrate on work. It’s hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isn’t dunking on them for it.
On the bright side the policy technically lets you go around calling people insane for being straight or cisgender* if anyone is still on there and wants to get banned from that platform in a blaze of glory.
* or indeed simply having a gender and I’m not sure fascists know how to use words right.
I’m pretty confident of a significant backlash against queer communities in North America in the near term.
It is very disturbing and scary.
They’re explicitly carving out an exception to target sexual/gender minorities. And I wonder, given how they are often among the first groups being targeted, and then other groups follow, how long until they add more exceptions? How long until Meta modifies the rules further to e.g. explicitly allow racism too?
Meta/Facebook has never been a good company. But the path they have actively chosen now is so much more evil than before.
I’ve been around the internet a long time, and even back then when throwing slurs at each other and “making fun” of marginalized groups was, if not accepted, at least tolerated because it was considered some poor attempt at humor, I don’t remember ever seeing a rule or passage in any netiquette stating it that explicitly.
It was always “we don’t censor speech but don’t be an asshole” with a giant asterisk about what both censoring and being an asshole meant, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen even the worst places say, “we explicitly allow hate speech, go ahead”.
Holy fucking shitballs.
Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day.
same here. the thing is, I think a lot of us are on awful.systems because we’ve seen far too much of how fascism operates and spreads online. this is an antifascist place; it’s so core to the mission that we don’t publish it as a policy (because a policy can be argued against and twisted and the fash kids love doing that), we just demonstrate it in a way that can’t be ignored. so seeing the first or second (I don’t keep track of these things) most popular social media platform publish a policy whose only purpose is to be used as a weapon against marginalized people, for it to be written in a matter-of-fact “this is just how it is” way, and for essentially nobody outside of the fediverse to push back on it in any real way — that is shocking.
as usual, Nina said it more coherently than I did
Now the new language merely bans “unsupported comparisons” between protected groups’ on the basis of their “inherent intellectual capacity”
Im sure we all noticed that this is also exactly one of those things which was allowed in the Rationalist places. And one of the reasons that it took them forever to get rid of slurinnameO on the ssc subreddit (E: He now moved to twitter where he has a terrifying 200k followers (cremieuxrecueil if you want to block the shithead)).
See this is why I try to do my reading here at night, because now when I feel sad and angry for the rest of the day it’s gonna be like 5 hours tops.
Yud is against seed oils, right? Or was that Siskind? I have a vague memory of the topic coming up but was unable to substantiate it in the 22 seconds of archive-searching that I was willing to do.
yud, a technofascist, recently forming opinions against seed oils forms a poop ouroboros with the wellness to fascism pipeline.
Its Yud I think. As someone from Canola-land this shit really grinds my gears.
Ah, here’s the post I was thinking of; I missed it somehow.
Just want to share this great term & definition “hyperkludge” coined by Jonathan Korman (@miniver on bsky and masto)
After reading some of the counterpoints here, I began thinking about how I considered Excel a hyperkludge if you qualify it enough. I realized the qualifications apply to every programming language (good ol’ Turing Completeness). I think, in my case, the common scenario of
- this tool[1] is just a proof of concept/prototype
- it costs less to maintain our tool than to write a more appropriate solution from scratch
- our infrastructure is now the tool
had me erroneously criticizing the tool instead of its application[2]. In the case of Excel, I worked a few jobs where the spreadsheets used when the company was small led to an absolute nightmare after the company grew.
I appreciate the thoughtful responses from everyone. <3
1: Usually a spreadsheet, in my experience.
2: Noting that, while “it’s not the tool, it’s the application” is a common refrain from people using tools in shitty ways, there is a distinction between “this is the wrong tool for the job” and “this tool will hurt people”.
ehh. even in the original text it rapidly decays into anything that annoys him is a hyperkludge. Successful things have problems that are only problems of success.
Saying that Excel is not and never was a good solution for any problem feels like a rather blinkered, programmer-brained technique.
I love the word, the definition, but I agree with so few of his examples.
I latched on to it because it fit so well with my regular criticisms of tech products, particularly saas shit
Counterpoint: to what extent are hyperkludges actually a unique thing versus an aspect of how technologies and tools are integrated into human context? Like, one of the original examples is the TCP/IP stack, but as anyone who has had to wrangle multiple vendors can attest a lot of the value in that standardization necessarily comes from the network effects - the fact that it’s an accepted standard. The web couldn’t function if you had a bespoke protocol stack hand-made to elegantly handle the specific problems of a given application not just because of the difficulty in building that much software (i.e. network effects on the design and construction side) but because of how unwieldy and impractical it would be to get any of those applications in front of people. The fit of those tools for a given application is secondary to how much more cleanly the entire ecosystem can operate because they are more limited in number.
The OP also talks about how embedded the history of a given problem is in the solution which feels like the central explanation for this trend. In that sense a hyperkludge isn’t a unique pattern that some things fall into and more a way of indicating a particularly noteworthy whorl in the fractal infinikludge that is all human endeavors.
Examples off the top of my head:
- Almost everything about TCP/IP stack
- NETCONF
- YAML
- Most things related to cars and car infrastructure
- Alcohol
- Chiclet keyboards
- Unicode Han unification
- Layer 2 SDN
- Kubernetes
- JavaScript
- Disk partitioning
- UEFI
- Public transit fares
Edit: checked the link and was surprised our lists didn’t have any ones in common (though I considered including MS Excel).
- MS-DOS and Windows, of course…
- but, and this will get some boos, Unix as a workstation OS compared with every other non-windows workstation OS
@self @bitofhope UNIX is arguably the canonical example, see The UNIX-HATERS Handbook
If you step back and think about it, it is rather absurd that a time-sharing multi-user OS essentially took over for personal devices
I’m surprised that alphabetical lists are included. Maybe my brain has completely rotten, but keeping the data sorted is pretty neat for efficient processing
yeah that is an interesting example. I immediately applied the term to commercial products. Like Notion for example - funny because I always say Notion takes wikis which are well established in their usefulness and just slaps them into saas product with other things like docs and spreadsheets (also well established in their usefulness) - but he calls wikis themselves a hyperkludge but what superior thing did wikis kill by network effects?
this rules <3
oh that’s pretty great
Does anyone else get tired of “read documentation and edit this text file to configure your app” Unix shit? I have no problem with the underlying configuration being a text-file (makes for a straightforward API), but do I really need to navigate to https://mpv.io/manual/master/#configuration-files and go through the rigamarole of figuring out which options I need to edit/include[0] because I misplaced (read:
sudo rm -rf /) my config file?
[0]: And there is always so much implicit bullshit. “By default, we summon Cthulhu on Tuesdays and Thursdays if the variable
summon_octopus_guyis unset.” It’s a fucking config file, my friends, can we just be explicit?Oh yeah. I recently wanted to configure something in pipewire… the idea was simple: just creating a boot-persistent audio loopback, i.e. connecting an audio input to an output. I gave up for now after looking at the config examples for that in the documentation. How can such a simple thing need such complex configuration?
As for losing configs, I’ve started to put all my hand-edited config files in a git repo on my NAS so at least I only have to figure out things once.
Surely it’s better to specify those defaults in the config file and have the system just fail if the necessary flags aren’t present. Having worked in support I can vouch for the amount of suffering that could be avoided if more systems actually failed if some important configuration isn’t in place.
Surely it’s better to specify those defaults in the config file and have the system just fail if the necessary flags aren’t present.
Completely agree. I think this may just be an extension of the “you gotta know what you’re doing to code correctly in C” old school bullshit.
This is my biggest gripe with that nonsense. If you make it hard to do something well, you won’t end up with an elite series of uber-coders because there aren’t enough of those people to do all the programming that people want to be done. Instead you’ll see that much more software engineering done really goddamned badly and despite appearances at the time it turns out there is a maximum amount of shitty software the world can endure.
What’s great is even the very best “just use valgrind lol, lmao” folks make these errors all the time. It’s basically impossible to write correct C code generally — the best we can do is verify subsets of code (c.f. Rust’s
unsafekeyword). The memory-safety CVEs in EXT3/4 are proof of this, IMO, as if there were anyone able to write correct C code today, it would be Ted Ts’o.
Personally I think it’s fine to have implicit defaults if you can make them sensible. Maybe ideally have a system-wide config like
/etc/someapp.confwith all the options included and set to defaults out of the box and then allow overrides in~/.config/someapp/someapp.confwhere you only need to specify whatever you want to differ from the system conf file.I personally disagree. I think in the era of “a megabyte is big,” this made sense, but in my opinion after parsing a config file with missing config data, we should print something indicating they are missing then error out. The existence of a reference config file with all options included would definitely help, but I think it’s no coincidence that there is no such config for mpv — why bother creating and maintaining one if the program will use the default value anyway?
tl;dr explicit is better than implicit
I dunno, MPV has like a million config options and I’ve set like three of them in my config. I would not prefer to maintain an enormous config file where I need to include a bajillion options I don’t care about just to play a video. Would I have to update my config every single time MPV adds, removes or renames an option, too?
At the end of the day you shouldn’t have to maintain anything in order to use a program, in my opinion (at least ideally). I think a “everything must be present in the file” type of config would require
lessno extra maintenance (assuming devs don’t do anything too silly). Additionally, while noting that my primary programming language is TeX and also that I am a dipshit, this just strikes me as an API-design problem. Alternative solutions could be:- multiple config files (I think mpv already supports this)
- semver style config (idk if this would be practical)
- a config-editing tool (i.e., what the overwhelming majority of applications do, by hiding the implementation details from the user)
I have thought about doing #3 for Sway (a sort of Sway-config editor). This does give me an idea, though: define a meta-format for specifying the variables, default values, allowed values, etc., for an arbitrary[0] program’s config file, and create a program that reads a meta-format file and presents a GUI for editing the config.
tbh i just lost my config file, forgot what i changed, and now i have to read documentation (and figure out which file the mpv flatpak uses for config)
[0]: maybe not too arbitrary
define a meta-format for specifying the variables, default values, allowed values, etc., for an arbitrary[0] program’s config file, and create a program that reads a meta-format file and presents a GUI for editing the config.
I’d kinda love this even if I’m editing config files in a text editor. emacs could use this with a major-mode or LSP to provide suggestions, validity checking, various rendered versions of the config, and guarantee interoperability with graphical tools (so that changes you make in an editor don’t get trampled by the UI, and vice versa)
I need an excuse to learn Rust and have wanted to do a “parse, don’t validate / make invalid states unrepresentable” project for a while. I will definitely share it if I get anything done.
definitely! that sounds like a great first Rust project.
25475 O Jan 08 Duke University ( 42K) Help Us Evaluate New Personalized AI Learning Tool
groan
put an article in mdpi and you’ll get 70 of these per month
Zuck wants to get back to his roots
It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do: […] 5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
Narrator: this announcement did not, in fact, ease concerns about bias.
Ah i recall somebody got mad when I mentioned traditionally capitalists will team up with fascists.
Maybe I was naive, but I didn’t expect all this to go that fast and that blatant…
this is going in hard enough that I suspect zuck is not expecting there to be another meaningful election
No, I’m with you. Bad feeling about where this is going.
a few people have been posting along the lines of “we all knew Facebook was evil, why are you surprised” which seems to miss the point — this is happening so fast and blatant that we’re almost definitely seeing the early stages of a playbook being executed. and even if not: Facebook was already the fash pipeline targeting mom, dad, and grandma. should I feel good that the pipeline is getting much more efficient and pervasive? none of them are ever gonna be on something like the fediverse.
the new FB standards guy is a Heritage Foundation guy, he would be the precise vector
internally at Meta:
-trans and nonbinary themes stripped from Messenger
-enforcement policy now allows for the denial of trans people’s existence
-tampons removed from men’s restrooms
-DEI programs shuttered
-Kaplan briefed top conservative influencers the night before policy changes were announced
holy fuck :|
Is that a comedy account? The announcement surely reads as if it was…
To add an insult to the injury meta renames pride themed skins in chat https://labyrinth.zone/objects/e129982d-997e-489b-985a-3ef547b66bf3
Fascist virtue signalling aside, candy floss should not exist. That’s like the exact opposite of dental care.
Edit: I have been made aware that Candy Floss is another name for cotton candy, which is delicious. Though my point kind of still stands.
It’s not. Surprise! All of Silicon Valley has gone mask off in preparation for the new administration in Washington!
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For a fun 20 minutes or so, I recommend going through the recent enron “revival”. (It’s all satire)
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