This person has been on Reddit for two years, and Reddit hasn’t taken them down. If you feel they are a Nazi or violating laws or rules, report them to Reddit. Otherwise what you are now asking the Mods to do is be the Reddit police. That won’t happen.
If users, no matter what their Reddit profile, repeatedly break rules of this Sub, they will be banned. If they don’t, they won’t.
What users post outside of this sub is not our concern.
holy fuck, there’s so much wrong
the org structures that brought you Teams Doing Standup Poker
which must be destroyed. find me who’s responsible for this (it’s the Google OKR people, isn’t it?)
DefendingAIArt is a subreddit run by mod “Trippy-Worlds,” who also runs the debate sister subreddit AIWars. Some poking around made clear that AIWars is perfectly fine with having overt Nazis around, for example a guy with heil hitler in his name who accuses others of lying because they are “spiritually jewish.”. So we’re off to a great start.
loves generative AI, encourages debate, fine with having nazis around the place. it’s like someone saw our instance and wanted to make the exact opposite of it, and the predictable disaster that resulted from that decision only really succeeds at making the AI fans look even worse
what do you mean you don’t want a search engine but much less efficient and much, much worse? you don’t like progress?
edit: lol i was open to learning but nvm i guess
and this is where your bullshit became bannable
i don’t understand, what’s stopping you from just not stepping in the broken glass I left on the floor? am i missing something?
yep! and the important thing to understand about proton is, the end to end encryption (where one end is the sender of a message and the other is the receiver — Proton never handles plaintext at all, beyond a tiny and clearly called out amount of metadata stored as plaintext on their servers for stuff like Calendars) is the whole point of the thing, there’s no reason to use Proton without it. with this LLM garbage, Proton’s threat model has shifted such that you can’t trust that the other end’s plaintext didn’t get transmitted to Proton’s servers (there’s no way for you, the receiver, to tell that the sender didn’t use the cloud LLM features), which makes Proton a lot less useful for some of the most vulnerable people who use it, such as activists and journalists who might be under legal threat. this plaintext leak allows some of the messages you’ve received to be subpoenaed, and it’s very easy for that to be used in a criminal case against you.
also, Proton’s published security model for their LLM feature (which is ultra-thin and resembles a PR puff piece more than any other model they published before this) states that their no-log policy is what makes the cloud version of the LLM secure, but their no-log policy has gigantic holes in it, and Proton’s response to these concerns is utterly unbefitting of a privacy/security software company
so I’ve accidentally been paying shitheads who speculate on crypto to speculate on crypto. I’m kinda angry at myself for not catching this.
so what rhymes with Proton getting into AI grifting? you fucking guessed it
this comment really should be reposted every time the LLM fans start doing their “who cares, it’s all clean energy” bit
that’s exactly why it’s the point of no return for me — I can’t trust a company that does this, and I’ll actively advocate against using them
maybe privacy and security are just too precious to trust to something as malicious as a corporation, and I say that knowing Proton just re-incorporated as something that can be called a non-profit but shouldn’t
fucking wow. so that kinda confirms that:
- that’s Eamon’s alt account he’s using because he’s a fucking coward
- proton fucking sucks and is doing their best to squash this in exactly the way a privacy/security company shouldn’t
could you imagine what web development would be like in a world where browser standards, features, and sandboxes weren’t firmly in the grips of these marketing chucklefucks?
like, I’ve mentioned to coworkers “hey isn’t the browser sandbox kind of bullshit? there’s so many parts of it that don’t do anything for security, but they make things harder for developers and easier for advertisers” and I don’t think a single one knew what I was talking about, because web development as a field has been captured by ad agencies. shit, find me one web development reference that isn’t owned by an ad agency.
and now they’re secure enough in that control that they do this fully mask-off shit, confident they’ll get away with it, cause who’s gonna stop them? bets on Mozilla reversing course on blocking third-party cookies now that google’s gone in this direction
thank you for posting it! there’s definitely a lot to this story, and I feel like there are aspects to it I’ll absorb even more of after a re-read.
ah, this horror is tailored to my anxieties
cw: drugs (not the good ones), pain
including weighing the potential consequences of taking the opiates you’ve been prescribed, while your thoughts and senses are clouded by so much pain it feels like your sense of self’s about to detach again
the rationalists have plagiarized so much from that one episode of Are you Afraid of The Dark? where the computer virus escapes VR into the real world through the serial port in the kid’s hand
e: I got the name of the cheesy 90s horror series confused for the name of a cheesy 90s survival horror game!
oh wow there’s some literal “it’s not a nazi unless it’s an old dead German” shit in there, they’re that kind of fash debatebro
pivoting my startup from blog posts about how my video game’s AI could break out of the game and into the real world, just like a shitty action movie from 2009, to a medical startup that assumes auto-immune diseases are exactly like politics and we must therefore build nanomachines that debate your cells into perfect health
you’re the type of reply guy who rattles off man page names when you’re out of your depth, and you’re reply guying about administrating email to people who professionally administrate email
I don’t expect you to have caught onto that last bit, mainly because you never fucking shut up long enough to catch onto anything at all
Andreessen Horowitz and the uwuness of little technofascism
The time has come to stand up for Little Tech. Bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech. We believe American technology supremacy, and the critical role that Little Tech startups play in ensuring that supremacy, is a first class political issue on par with any other.
so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:
>Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain. > >Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.
does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.
here’s some more banal shit:
>We find there are three kinds of politicians: > >Those who support Little Tech. We support them. > >Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them. > >Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.
I find there are three kinds of politicians:
- those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
- those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
- those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
Lix: a Nix evaluator fork focused on correctness and doing right by its community
Lix is an independent variant of the Nix package manager, developed by a team of open-source volunteers, and maintained by and for a passionate community of users.
it can’t be overstated how important the Nix evaluator is to the Nix ecosystem; it implements the Nix language and package manager, maintains the store, has a hand in the low-level workings of every Nix tool, and is the focus of the push by Eelco and friends to commercialize Nix and keep it appealing to military-industrial interests.
all of the above is why I joined the Aux CLI SIG, which focuses on maintaining a fork of the Nix evaluator for the Aux ecosystem. but just now I saw the announcement for Lix, a Nix evaluator fork that focuses on modernizing the codebase (including gradually replacing C++ with Rust), maintaining correctness (something the upstream evaluator has been notoriously struggling with lately), and doing right by its community. I found myself nodding along to their description of the project and feeling something I haven’t felt since I read the open letter — I’m finally feeling excited for the future of the technology behind Nix.
I have no idea if Lix will become Aux’s chosen evaluator fork, though the Aux CLI SIG can help determine that collectively (and I’ll have many more details on Aux in a post later tonight). here’s what’s truly exciting though: by following Lix’s install steps and pulling auxpkgs-unstable, we can have a package ecosystem and NixOS fork that’s completely independent of the Nix community, and we can have it right now. I’m so excited by that news that I’m going to spin up a host just to give Lix+auxpkgs a try later tonight.
here’s the Aux thread about Lix; so far, there’s a lot of high-level support and excitement for using it as Aux’s evaluator.
an open letter to the NixOS foundation
this thread fucking sucks for me to have to post, but the linked open letter is an important read. none of the systemic issues pertaining to marginalized folks and commercial/military-industrial interests in the Nix community I’ve previously written about on TechTakes have been solved; in fact, they’ve gotten worse to the point where the Nix community moderation team is essentially in the process of quitting. that’s the beginning to an awful end for a project I like a whole lot.
even if you don’t give a fuck about Nix, the open letter is an important read because the toxicity, conflicts of interest, and underhanded tactics detailed in it are incredibly common in the open source space. this letter could have been written about a multitude of infamously toxic open source projects; Nix is lucky that it has marginalized folks involved who care about the direction of the project and want to make things better, but those people are actively leaving, after being burnt out by the toxic people and structures entrenched in Nix’s community. that’s a fucking tragedy.
the tea protocol is still predictably a gigantic source of PR spam
The tea.xyz protocol first earned an entry on Web3 is Going Just Great in late February, when their plan to reward open source software contributors resulted in crypto enthusiasts with no intention of participating in OSS opening endless pull requests to claim ownership of prominent OSS projects. Th...
who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do
thread your Philthy feature requests
reply with features and bug fixes you'd like to see in Philthy, the lemmy fork that runs on this instance. no guarantees I'll get to any of them soon, but particularly low-hanging fruit and well-liked features can be prioritized.
ask me questions about awful.systems or NixOS!
the awful.systems server cluster runs on an open infrastructure based on NixOS and Nix flakes, and though it desperately needs cleanup in some places, it's still a pretty good example of how to use a Nix flake to deploy NixOS in production. feel free to browse the repo and ask any questions about how it works, or about Nix in general!
also, if I get hit by a bus, this can be used to redeploy awful.systems elsewhere. an existing admin who isn't in the hospital or the grave can import a database backup and get back up and running!
and as always, contributions are welcome.
the r/SneerClub archive welcomes contributions
An archival site for the posts from r/SneerClub, generated from a static data snapshot
the r/SneerClub archive at awful.systems is welcoming contributors. it's a statically-generated site (from this set of archived posts in JSON format) that uses a unique, high-performance Nix-based static site generation system. the current site desperately needs a new stylesheet (especially on mobile), but one area where I really need advice or contributions is the dataset.
currently, the SneerClub archives only pull in data from the bdfr set, which I generated using Bulk Downloader for Reddit right before Reddit killed its API, but I'd love to merge the SneerClub_comments.jsonl and SneerClub_submissions.jsonl files into the data we're using to generate the site, since those have older data from ArchiveTeam. unfortunately, that data set is in a complete different format from the BDFR data. any advice for tools or techniques to merge those two data sets into one (or offers to contribute a merge script) is greatly appreciated.
Philthy, the awful.systems fork of Lemmy, is seeking contributors
Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led organization that aims to help free and open source projects prosper by giving them a safe and friendly home.
the software we use to run awful.systems, which @[email protected] suggested I call Philthy (and I agreed!), is seeking contributors.
like upstream Lemmy, this consists of a Rust backend and a Typescript+React frontend. contributions to both are welcome; use this thread to discuss ideas and collaborate.
here's some contribution ideas off the top of my head (but all reasonable contributions are welcome):
- (frontend & backend) actually rebrand to Philthy, to prevent confusion between us and upstream Lemmy
- (frontend & backend) rewrite
README.mdto emphasize that this is a fork - (frontend) make the page header and footer more configurable; remove various links that aren't relevant to awful.systems
- (backend) delete posts from Mastodon when they're deleted on our end
- (frontend & backend) implement The Firehose, a big admin-only list of the posts and content leaving our instance
- (frontend & backend, ongoing) merge in changes from upstream Lemmy if there are features you wish our instance had
or make suggestions in this thread!
one major blocker preventing folks from contributing to Lemmy-related development I've seen is that a lot of people don't know Rust. if that's the case, I can offer the following:
- the Lemmy codebase is the worst possible place to learn Rust, but I'd love to start a thread for Rust tutorials and shared learning. it's honestly an excellent language in its own right, so I'd love to teach folks about it even if they don't end up contributing to Philthy.
- if you're good with React and/or Typescript and the feature you want to implement has a backend component, I don't mind handling the backend portion if I'm able.
welcome to FreeAssembly: a non-toxic collaborative community
this is a non-toxic place to collaborate on projects (programming, design, art, or otherwise) and share information; effectively, it's the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. this community has been in the planning phase for a long time, but the xz backdoor recently emphasized how severe the toxicity problem in existing open source communities is, and how important it is that we have a place to collaborate that isn't controlled by toxic personalities or corporate interests.
FreeAssembly is starting its existence as a Lemmy community that enables collaboration on externally-hosted projects, but that doesn't necessarily need to be its final form. as we figure out the needs of this community, we can grow to service needs like code hosting and design collaboration. for now, we recommend hosting code on software forges like Codeberg (and we recommend avoiding github if possible, though it's well-understood that this isn't easy for established projects). we also want to explore the best options for designers and artists to collaborate without making them dependent on large corporate infrastructure.
there are some expectations around posting to FreeAssembly. see the sidebar for details.
Amazon’s 'Just Walk Out' grocery stores are dead
Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.
(via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)
surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive
even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down
flag any spam you see from lemmy.world (or elsewhere)
we’re seeing a bit of spam come in from lemmy.world. if you happen to see any (and a lot of it seems to be in DMs), make sure to flag it. that’ll let both us and the originating instance’s mods know. if we get a bunch of reports and it seems like lemmy.world isn’t cleaning things up properly, we’ll take further steps to limit the amount of spam we get
the Amaranth hardware description language
Amaranth is a simple-but-expressive hardware description language (the type of language you use to define integrated circuits for FPGAs, ASICs, and similar hardware) implemented as a Python DSL. I'm not the biggest Python fan, but Amaranth is worth it -- even though it's in heavy development and its documentation is incomplete, it's by far the most comprehensible HDL I've ever used, and I've tried many of them.
its documentation is incomplete since the language is under heavy development, but its language guide is still the best gentle introduction to HDL concepts I've read, and its tutorials are written for an older version of the language (sometimes called nMigen) but are still excellent -- in particular, Robert Baruch's tutorials combine design fundamentals with formal verification (which itself is usually considered an advanced technique, but Amaranth streamlines it), and the Vivonomicon RISC-V tutorials are worth a read too
>You could get a robot limb for your blown-off limb > >Later on the same technology could automate your gig, as awesome as it is > >Wait, it gets awful: you could split a atom willy-nilly > >If it's energy that can be used for killing, then it will be > >It's not about a better knife, it's chemistry and genocide > >And medicine for tempering the heck in a projector light > >Landmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes > >Cameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness > >We can not be trusted with the stuff that we come up with > >The machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons, um > >Technology, focus on the other shit > >3D-printed body parts, dehydrated onion dip > >You can buy a Jet Ski from a cell phone on a jumbo jet > >T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y, it's the ultimate
the subject matter of Aesop Rock's latest album felt relevant to our instance's interests
a self driving car burns in San Francisco. the orange site can’t decide which racist trope to blame
(here’s a Verge article about the Waymo car getting burned during a Chinese New Year celebration)
a self-driving car got destroyed (to a round of applause from the crowd) in San Francisco! will the robot car fans on the orange site take this opportunity to explore why the tech seems to be extremely unpopular among the populations of the cities where it’s deployed?
of course the fuck not, time to spin the wheel of racist dog whistles and see which one we land on! a note to the roving orange site fans (hi, fuck off), these replies are either heavily upvoted or have broad agreement in the thread (or I’m posting them here cause I want to laugh at some stupid shit, you don’t dictate the terms of my enjoyment)
>This isn't a revolt against AI. SF attracts anarchist mobs and they'll vandalize buses, trains, police cars, bikes, whatever is around.
we’re off to a strong start with some bullshit straight from musk’s twitter (which he stole from the fever dreams of the conservatives on his platform)
>Alternatively: this is San Francisco where on a good day the locals don’t need much excuse to set fire to a car (although I usually associate it with the Giants winning a World Series) and this poor dumb stupid driverless Waymo drove into a celebratory and by the looks of it somewhat drunken crowd on the Streets of Chinatown during the Chinese New Year where in following its prime directive to do no harm, it got itself stuck up the creek without a paddle so to speak. Waymo probably should have accounted for that ahead of time and told their cars not to go near Chinatown this evening.
remember that no matter what, the robot car is the victim here. there’s no chance Waymo was doing anything dangerous or assholeish in the area; much like robocop, the car is an innocent victim of its fucking prime directives??? and you wouldn’t set fire to robocop, would you?
>This is a hilarious take. A few youths went bonkers and defaced private property. Has nothing to do with philosophical beliefs or a Big Tech agenda. You should debate the finer points of the Big Tech agenda with them while they run up to you in a maddened rage.
yeah! I can’t wait until these angry mobs set fire to your robot car body! then you’ll see!
>Arguments about driverless cars aside, the youth in this country are seriously lost. It only takes one generation of poor parenting and poor civic policies to ruin a culture.
this one is downvoted, but this reply isn’t:
>Sounds like they were right. The youth at that point was lost, and are now raising people who will literally burn down a waymo for fun, or because of some horrifically ignorant idea about fairness.
oh you poor woke kids don’t like when shitty dangerous robot cars are on the streets? are you gonna start crying about how it’s “unfair” they’re covering up pedestrian injuries and traffic accidents now? your grandpa would never stand for this
as it turns out, a mountain of health woo and transfusing your teenage son’s blood into yourself is no match for long covid
The billionaire who wants to live forever just admitted he has long covid. Specifically, covid wrecked his lungs. If you haven’t come across him, Bryan Johnson is a 46-year-old tech bro who cashed out a few years ago and now spends all his time trying not to die.
(via mastodon)
upgrade: lemmy 0.19.3
this one should hopefully fix the remaining token issues folks have been having, though I'm not seeing anything in the commit log about fixes for the other session and pagination issues we've noticed. as always, let me know if anything looks broken. I'm still working on getting Photon deployed, which might be a good workaround for the frontend breakages we've been seeing.
upgrade: lemmy 0.19.2 + infrastructure
today's (later than planned) upgrade to lemmy 0.19.2 provisionally appears to have gone alright. if you see excessive amounts of jank (and your page footer can't decide what version of lemmy it's running on, IE it shows separate FE and BE versions), clear your browser cache and cookies since lemmy doesn't seem to do that cleanly on its own
next up I'm planning to deploy the Proton frontend as an alternative to the default and I'm also going to start pushing code to codeberg (most likely) so stay tuned for that
awful.systems is updating its priors
I’m taking awful.systems down for a bit tomorrow (January 13) around 11 PM GMT because after 16 release candidates and 2 hotfixes, lemmy 0.19.x finally seems like a safe enough upgrade. this is going to be a major one, so I’ll be taking our instance down temporarily to get a database backup before I apply the upgrade. expect exceptional levels of jank!
some AI jackasses decided to reanimate George Carlin’s corpse and make it say embarrassing shit
Comedy legend George Carlin died in 2008, but a new AI-generated special is bringing him back to life with commentary on current events.
remember, regardless of how outspoken you are in life, nothing will stop the capitalists from reanimating your defiled corpse into a shitheaded centrist zombie if there’s a buck in it:
>“I'd just like to say that as much as I think billionaires are destroying the fabric of society with unchecked greed and blatant self-interest at the expense of basic human rights for everyone else, it is a little strange to me that people get mad at them. People are the ones who gave them the money in the first place," the AI Carlin said.
(editor’s note: the above is supposed to be a joke from the comedy special these fucking assholes hijacked Carlin’s corpse to promote. I can’t find the punchline, but it’s supposed to be a joke)
DIDcomm: what happens when you let crypto folks into your web standards org
we had a previous thread on this thing way back when TechTakes moved here, but it deserves a Buttcoin thread too. observe, for your enjoyment(???), an even worse derivative of the reputedly most worthless W3C standard. when you’ve got nothing of value to write about but you need a spec to be taken seriously so you write stuff like this:
>The purpose of DIDComm Messaging is to provide a secure, private communication methodology built atop the decentralized design of DIDs. > >It is the second half of this sentence, not the first, that makes DIDComm interesting. “Methodology” implies more than just a mechanism for individual messages, or even for a sequence of them. DIDComm Messaging defines how messages compose into the larger primitive of application-level protocols and workflows, while seamlessly retaining trust. “Built atop … DIDs” emphasizes DIDComm’s connection to the larger decentralized identity movement, with its many attendent virtues.
(that typo in the second paragraph of the spec has been there for at least 6 months, cause if anyone went back to proofread this crap they’d probably delete all of it out of embarrassment)
DIDcomm is what happens when crypto folks get invited to join your standards org, and it does to the spec writing process what crypto and AI did to whitepapers: it’s all extreme filler to mask the lack of an idea, built on top of a spec that famously specifies nothing