“if you’re so inclusive name every lgbt” is real and I can’t believe it
It was a good faith discussion. Not everything you disagree with is “debatefan horeshit”. How many languages can you speak? Have you lived in any other countries? Do you have any kind of exposure to non-english speaking LGBT communities?
ahahahaha my god, thanks for making the next part easy
@[email protected], about this
the moderation principles you vehemently disagree with are principles we’ve built our communities on, and you’ve been posting with us long enough to know that.
if the trans community in Ukraine don’t face certain forms of bigotry that trans people do in the west, that’s lovely! where I’m from, trans people are facing a rapidly increasing amount of systemic bigotry and danger, and maintaining a space where they can communicate without fuckheads getting in the way is a top priority.
when I read this:
You don’t know whether trans folk in non-english speaking countries are in 100% alignment with you on this issue.
I will admit I don’t either. But unlike you I do have some exposure to our local LGBT community and to me this comes off as almost orientalist.
I don’t see someone trying to reach a mutual understanding. I see someone who saw an opportunity to shout down a trans poster with a bunch of debatefan horseshit and took it, and I don’t think I want that kind of person on our instance. I don’t care that this was posted elsewhere — this is about who you are.
what I’d like to see is that you can exist as a positive part of an explicitly trans-friendly community. I can’t ask your local LGBT community about it, and in any case we’re talking about online communities here — so show me you can positively contribute to an online trans community. that should be easy enough, since you’ve got some pretty heavy opinions regarding how online trans-inclusive communities should be run.
yeah, this is nothing but red flags
so the nix devenv CLI tool that was gaining popularity around the time I left nix is now doing extremely invasive telemetry and quietly implemented a feature that exfiltrates your entire repo and all related files to their servers to feed into an LLM. if you’d like a reminder of the extreme bad faith the corporate assholes who own nixpkgs operate under, someone tried to add DO_NOT_TRACK to Nix’s wrapped version of devenv, and the devenv lead maintainer used their elevated privileges on the nixpkgs repo to revert that change instantly without following any existing processes or asking for the community’s consensus.
I ranted some time ago about how all these shit commercial tools are just ways to capture and monetize large parts of the nix ecosystem, and the bill has finally come due. lixpkgs can’t happen soon enough (and the nix infra people seem to agree — they’ve been using lix for a while now, cause the regular evaluator is too unstable for large-scale use)
a very old concept with useful applications dating back in the 80s.
wait a fucking minute
you came here to lecture us and you think algorithms from the field of AI only started seeing serious use in the 80s? the Mark I Perceptron was built in 1958
(I admittedly didn’t know about the machine before today, but I know more than enough about AI to know perceptrons as software are old as hell)
why do all these papers have their own microsites, dedicated domain names (in Anguilla no less!), and shitty graphics? I can’t think of another branch of research that consistently does this shit. it’s almost like it’s all marketing fluff or something!
I feel the same way. I program in rust cause I like it, and the feeling of actually liking writing systems code was refreshing coming from C and especially C++. rust is a language I find beautiful — but I won’t for long if its excellent diagnostics and tooling all get deprecated in favor of an LLM. I can’t imagine what pivoting to AI would do to the language’s roadmap.
wow what utter horseshit
AI, as I’m sure you are all aware, is a very old concept with useful applications dating back in the 80s.
the first AI winter happened because those fuckers couldn’t stop grifting academic funds by promising shit that didn’t work. we know the history of the field better than you do. not that you had a point other than wanting to reply guy about a name we didn’t adopt (cause we’re not OpenAI) for a technology all of us strongly dislike.
fucking pointless shit
holy shit that’s perfect
Niko Matsakis wrote a post about how the fucking rust compiler toolchain should include an LLM to explain error messages because teaching the semantics of a language is too hard and that pissed me off so much that instead of linking that piece of shit directly I’m posting this excellent sneer from Anatol Ulrich that’s also much shorter than Niko’s extended attempt to beg for a promotion at Amazon
my related guess is primarily marketing surveillance and secondarily all other types of surveillance. notably Venmo no longer lets you put “hookers and blow” as a transaction note, because it was the default response from most people who didn’t really want to do a social transaction but had to use Venmo cause it’s all their recipient had. Venmo’s social features are all designed to make you leak as much data to Venmo as possible so it can be monetized or otherwise capitalized upon, and that’s about par for the course for how a thielverse paypal mafia offshoot operates. this is surveillance capitalism with a smiley face.
it’s turning out the most successful thing about deepseek was whatever they did to trick the worst fossbro reply guys you’ve ever met into going to bat for them
also, holy fuck their post history is essentially nothing but unsubtle dogwhistles and pro-AI garbage
how about you go fuck yourself
The only thing LLMs typically are bad at
is everything. including summarizing research since it’s pretty fucking obvious you didn’t read shit. now fuck off
somehow it got even worse
Google appears to have faked AI output in a commercial set to run during the Super Bowl. The ad shows a business owner using Gemini to write a website description, but the text portrayed as generated by AI has been available on the business’s website since at least August 2020
also they doubled down on the bad stat
The ad originally had Gemini present copy stating that Gouda accounts for “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption” — which is not true. Google later edited the commercial to take out the stat, while the business owner also removed it from their website.
[…]
But Google maintained that the website description was written by Gemini all along. In addition to showing Gemini “generate” the description in the commercial, Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler said on X that the Gouda stat was “not a hallucination,” adding that “Gemini is grounded in the Web.”
also also they later doubled down on lying that Gemini wrote the whole page? it’s… really embarrassing that Google’s marketing team doesn’t know about web archives
standard “fuck off programming.dev” ban with a side of who the fuck cares. deepseek isn’t the good guys, you weird fucks don’t have to go to a nitpick war defending them, there’s no good guys in LLMs and generative AI. all these people are grifters, all of them are gaming the benchmarks they designed to be gamed, nobody’s getting good results out of this fucking mediocre technology.
this is utterly pointless and you’ve taken up way too much space in the thread already
It sounds to me like you have a very clear bias, and you don’t care at all about whether or not what they said is actually true or not, as long as the headlines about AI are negative
oh no, anti-AI bias in TechTakes? unthinkable
also:
So in that thinking, Wikipedia is not open source, if the editor used a proprietary browser?
fucking no! how in fuck do you manage to misunderstand LLMs so much that you think the weights not being reproducible is at all comparable to… editing Wikipedia from a proprietary browser???? this shit isn’t even remotely exotic from an open source standpoint — it’s a binary blob loaded by an open source framework, like how binary blob modules taint the Linux kernel (you glided right past this reference when our other poster made it, weird that) or how loading a proprietary ROM in an open source emulator doesn’t make the ROM open source. the weights being permissively licensed doesn’t make them open source (or really make any sense at all) if the source literally isn’t available.
my fucking god how have you missed the point this hard. fuck off
pict-rs 0.5, NixOS 24.11, 100GB more storage
after some extended downtime, I rolled out the following changes to our instance:
- pict-rs was migrated to version 0.4 then 0.5. this should hopefully fix an issue where pict-rs kept leaking TCP sockets and exhausting its resources, leading to our image uploads and downloads becoming non-functional. let me know if you run into any issues along those lines!
- NixOS was updated to 24.11.
- the instance's storage was expanded by 100GB. this increased the monthly bill for our instance by €1.78 per month. to keep the bill low, I disabled an automated backup feature that became unnecessary when we started doing Restic backups.
I have one more thing I want to implement before our big Lemmy upgrade; I expect I should be able to fit it in tomorrow. I'll update this thread with details when I start on it.
scheduled downtime: January 24 at 8 AM GMT
since we’ve been experiencing a few image cache breakages, I’m scheduling some maintenance for January 24th at 8AM GMT to upgrade our pict-rs version, increase the total amount of storage available to our production instance, and do a handful of other maintenance tasks. this won’t include a lemmy upgrade, but I plan to do one soon after this maintenance round. I anticipate the maintenance should take around 2-4 hours, but will post updates on the instance downtime page and Mastodon if anything changes.
an introduction to gibberish.awful.systems
welcome to gibberish.awful.systems, a platform for long-form writing and blogging hosted on awful.systems and running on WriteFreely. thi...
we have a WriteFreely instance now! I wrote up a guide to why it exists, why it's so fucking janky, and what we can do to fix it.
update: email, backups, and writefreely
this is somewhat of a bigger update, and it's the product of a few things that have been in progress for a while:
email should be working again as of a couple months ago. good news: our old provider was, ahem, mildly inflating our usage to get us off their free plan, so this part of our infrastructure is going to cost a lot less than anticipated.
backups
we now have a restic-based system for distributed backups, thanks to a solid recommendation from @[email protected]. this will make us a lot more resilient to the possibility of having our host evaporate out from under us, and make other disaster scenarios much less lethal.
writefreely
I used some of the spare capacity on our staging instance to spin up a new WriteFreely instance where we can post long-form articles and other stuff that's more suitable for a blog. post your gibberish at gibberish.awful.systems! contact me if you'd like an invite link; WriteFreely instances are particularly vulnerable to being turned into platforms for spam and nothing else, so we're keeping this small-scale for instance regulars for now.
alongside all the ordinary WriteFreely stuff (partial federation, a ton of jank), our instance has a special feature: if you have an account, you can make a PR on this repository and once it's merged, gibberish will automatically pull its frontend files from that repo and redeploy WriteFreely. currently this is only for the frontend, but there's a lot you can do with that -- check out the templates, pages, less, and static directories on the repo to see what gets pulled. check it out if you see some jank you want to fix! (also it's the only way to get WriteFreely to host images as part of a post, no I'm not kidding)
what's next?
next up, I plan to turn off Hetzner's backups for awful.systems and use that budget to expand the node's storage by 100GB, which should increase the monthly bill by around 2.50 euros. I want to go this route to expand our instance's storage instead of using an object store like S3 or B2 because using block storage makes us more resilient to Hetzner or Backblaze evaporating or ending our service, and because it's relatively easy to undo this decision if it proves not to scale, but very hard to go from using object storage back to generic block storage.
after that, it'll be about time to carefully upgrade to the current version of Lemmy, and to get our fork (Philthy) in a better state for contributions.
as always, see our infrastructure deployment flake for more documentation and details on how all of the above works.
On “Safe” C++: An Odyssey of Sneers
this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:
> This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.
fucking masterful
an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol
Odes & Satires, and other matters of stuff & things.
this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:
>Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.
>I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.
>The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.
infra: email notifications might be a bit spotty
we’ve exceeded the usage tier for our email sending API today (and they kindly didn’t email me to tell me that was the case until we were 300% over), so email notifications might be a bit spotty/non-working for a little bit. I’m working on figuring out what we should migrate to — I’m leaning towards AWS SES as by far the cheapest option, though I’m no Amazon fan and I’m open to other options as long as they’ve got an option to send with SMTP
the Humane AI Pin is fucked
After raising $200 million from investors, Humane has only sold $9 million worth of products and has received $1 million in returned products.
after the predictable failure of the Rabbit R1, it feels like we’ve heard relatively nothing about the Humane AI Pin, which released first but was rapidly overshadowed by the R1’s shittiness. as it turns out, the reason why we haven’t heard much about the Humane AI pin is because it’s fucked:
> Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.
it’s fucked in ways you might not have seen coming, but Humane should have:
>Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone.
AI shovelmaker Nvidia has been looking into making its own AI models. To that end, it’s been vacuuming up YouTube videos like nobody’s business. According to leaked internal communications obtained…
404media: Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI
Internal emails, Slack conversations and documents obtained by 404 Media show how Nvidia created a yet-to-be-released video foundational model.
as I was reading through this one, the quotes I wanted to pull kept growing in size until it was just the whole article, so fuck it, this one’s pretty damning
here’s a thin sample of what you can expect, but it gets much worse from here:
>Internal conversations at Nvidia viewed by 404 Media show when employees working on the project raised questions about potential legal issues surrounding the use of datasets compiled by academics for research purposes and YouTube videos, managers told them they had clearance to use that content from the highest levels of the company. > >A former Nvidia employee, whom 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about internal Nvidia processes, said that employees were asked to scrape videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other sources to train an AI model for Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human” products. The project, internally named Cosmos (but different from the company’s existing Cosmos deep learning product), has not yet been released to the public.
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