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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Look who are in the news again, has it been six months again?
Stephanie Kirchgaessner is the deputy head of investigations for Guardian US, based in Washington DC
Hannah Devlin is the Guardianās science correspondent, having previously been science editor of the Times. She has a PhD in biomedical imaging from the University of Oxford.
so is it that both these fuckers are ideologically bankrupt, or are they willing complicit ghouls?
Yes
Quick update - Brian Merchantās list of āluddite horrorā films ended up getting picked up by Fast Company:
To repeat a previous point of mine, it seems pretty safe to assume āluddite horrorā is gonna become a bit of a trend. To make a specific (if unrelated) prediction, I imagine weāre gonna see AI systems and/or their supporters become pretty popular villains in the future - the AI bubbleās produces plenty of resentment towards AI specifically and tech more generally, and the publicās gonna find plenty of catharsis in watching them go down.
Personally, Iād love to see the Luddites be rehabilitated as a result of the Great Bullshit Collapse. They were just regular folks fighting for dignity in work, and itās tragic how successful the bastards have been at erasing them from history.
Judging by some stray articles from WIRED and The Atlantic, Merchantās likely done plenty to rehabilitate the Ludditesā image.
I suspect Silicon Valleyās godawful reputation and widespread hatred of AI have likely helped as well - āmachinery harmful to commonalityā may be an unfamiliar concept to Joe Public, but āAI is ruining the Internet/taking your job/scamming your parentsā is very fucking tangible to them.
Pulling out a previous post of mine, the NFT craze likely helped indirectly, by killing technological determinismās hold on the public and badly wounding Silicon Valleyās public image.
Of those two, technological determinismās death was probably the more important one - that ideaās demise meant the public was willing to entertain that new tech developments from Silicon Valley could be killed in their crib, that they wouldnāt inevitably become a part of public life, for worse or (potentially) for better.
nfts damaged public image of crypto beyond recovery, fine. tech in general, iām not so sure
Iād say they did do some damage to techās wider image by becoming a pop-culture punchline and a mark of shame rolled into one.
Incidents like Seth Greenās Ape getting kidnapped, the public exploitation of George Floydās death and the legendary dumpster fire that was The Red Ape Family, plus the onslaught of dogshit NFT art and the nonstop scams and deception within the NFT/crypto sphere all led NFTs to become widely and rightfully panned, with NFTs getting unflatteringly compared to beanie babies and NFT profile pics getting either right-click saved to mock their supposed āownershipā or blocked on sight, depending on how people generally felt.
It is refreshing to see the general trend of people laughing when promptbros try to paint themselves as the Wright Brothers Reborn, isnāt it?
my point is that these incidents were mostly mentally filed to ācryptoā and were not generalized to wider tech industry
Going outside awfulās wheelhouse for a bit:
Logan Paul doxed and harassed a random employee for posting a sign saying Lunchly was recalled
You want my take, the employee in question (who also got a GoFundMe) should sue Logan for defamation - solid case aside, I wanna see that blonde fucker get humbled for once.
I hated seeing that guy just wanting to live his life dragged into weird net drama and pushed under the bus by his company. And wow look at how collected and reasonable he was compared to anyone else in the story.
All Mr. Paul had to do was shut the hell up for once and the worldād still be talking about his moldy cheese bread instead of about his moldy cheese bread and how he bullies and doxes retail workers.
All Fred Meyer had to do is be like āwhoops looks like the product recall procedure at that store was vague recollections, weāll get a policy in placeā.
The sole silver lining of this situation is that Loganās deplorable behaviour probably scared at least a few shops away from stocking Lunchly - not just because of the risk you end up selling some mold-ridden garbage (most likely to kids), but because you risk Logan starting a harassment campaign against you or your store.
The AI lawsuitās going to discovery - I expect things are about to heat up massively for the AI industry:
Has ESR always been antigay or is the latest āgays=pedoā spiel new?
New for him, Iād wager, but I think ESR is treading a well-worn path: i.e. a huge weirdo gets himself in trouble but then finds favor with terrible people, and ultimately suffers from audience capture.
Edit: I was wrong, itās not new (hat tip to @Soyweiser)
ESR went like this after 9/11
@dgerard @o7___o7 He was weird and creepy before that (see his attempts to make the Jargon File say that everyone in hackerdom was just like him), but yeah, hoo boy. Him and the LGF guy were prominent cheerleaders for Dick Cheneyās wilder fever dreams back in the day. The LGF guy got better, ESR didnāt.
@m @dgerard @o7___o7 @techtakes Back in 2007 I was a guest of honour at Penguicon. ESR was there and we got talking. As of 2007 he was all-in on all the insane āEurabiaā conspiracy theories and islamophobia. If youād taken his word salad and substituted ājewsā for āmuslimsā Julius Streicher would have hired him as a columnist in a split second. (Thatās when I added ESR to my list of āpeople I will not share a platform withā.)
He was somewhat less cray-cray in 2003.
In the very late 90s - so only a year or two after the Good Friday Agreement - he gave a talk in Dublin. The only part I remember was when he went off on his tangent about access to guns being an essential component of a free society and then stood there wondering why he was suddenly being heckled.
I think that might be new levels of shithead for him. E: it was not new for him http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26
Bonus content : https://xcancel.com/esrtweet/status/1852466515519341014#m āim not a racist, im an empericistā
Racism is insane; it fixates on superficial characteristics like skin color rather than important ones like IQ and time preference.
Iām sorry, ātime preferenceā? Is this piece of shit referring to Colored Peopleās Time as a scientific concept or am I missing something?
This is such a cursed tweet ughhhhh
racism is insane
ā¦okā¦
introducing racism 2
Oh I see
The plot of Seveneves, but worse.
referring to Colored Peopleās Time
to the what now? What cursed horror beyond my comprehension am I going to learn today?
I recommend looking it up. I believe itās a term that has been reclaimed by Black people. Obama referenced it as CPT (in response to some other event) in his 2016 WHC dinner speech.
I hope at least CPT does not have daylightās savings
āBlack people are late sometimesā but in a racist way instead of a āRepent, Harlequinā kind of way.
White people are late sometimes tooā¦?
It goes back to the old āsteppin fetchitā racist charicature of the lazy black man, usually either enslaved or formerly enslaved depending on when weāre talking.
I think that is a reference to the āeat 1 cookie now or wait, and get 2 cookiesā childrens thing. Racists refer to it often. (This also means the black eat the 1 cookie kids canāt build empires bla bla bla).
(when I search for the term on youtube, it instantly gave me a video linking it to cultural degeneracy for example. Really annoying you canāt block channels properly. Also the mises institute has a video on it)
Oh cool itās even worse then!
(This particular study, if there even is a real study, is infuriating because what itās really measuring is how much you trust a figure of authority to keep their promise. I wonder why black kids would have issues with this!)
Study finds greedy white children would rather have two fictitious cookies than one real one they can eat.
One weird trick explains venture capital!
Poor hungry kids also more likely to want to eat now than later. Big shocks, clearly this must mean the poor are deficient in some genetic way.
A woman was scheduled to give a talk at an AI conference. The organizers run her photo through an AI image expansion program to get the aspect-ratio right (how did we ever manage to show photos of speakers before AI existed?).
The AI image expansion invents a bra / undershirt which wasnāt visible in the original photo.
This made the rounds last week IIRC. Though, looking at it again I realize I didnāt notice how over-stressed the hallucinated button is. Itās funny in a disgusting way.
Iād like to imagine that Adobe/other AI photo editing people are frantically scrambling to fondle their prompts a little harder to avoid things like this. Infinite whack-a-mole.
I wonder if Adobe has considered cooling their new data centers with liquid nitrogen?
Cold is key to successful turd polishing.
For anyone who wants a belated Halloween scare:
https://xcancel.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1852033244729860397
Spoiler: The real kicker is in the hash tags.
Quite the proof he no longer writes his own tweets. Fun fact seems like they created various freerossdayone cryptocurrency tokens, who are all doing badly (according to my quick google) he has lost the mandate of heaven.
Electric Wizard š¤Donald Trump
āLegalize Drugs & MurderāTruly, we are blessed to have a candidate willing to represent the freedom to sell anything on a darknet market and hire a hitman to take out your previous partners or detractors or whatever.
āWhat kind of gambling do you usually have here?
āOh, we got both kinds. We got day trading and betting.
I feel like Ed is underselling the degree to which this is just how businesses work now. The emphasis on growth mindset is particularly gross because of how it sells the CEOs book, but itās not unique in trying to find a feel-good vibes-based way to evaluate performance rather than relying on strict metrics that give management less power over their direct reports.
Of course heās also written at length about the overall problem that this feeds into (organizations run by people with no idea how to make the business do what it does but who can make the number go up for shareholders) but the most unique part of this is the AI integration, which is legitimately horrifying and I feel like the debunk of growth mindset takes some of the sting away.
Amazon has a similar cult-y thing going on with its āØleadership principlesāØ, but this seems worse.
Didnāt corporations used to use landmark and shit like that?
almost every smart person I talk to in tech is in favor of mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages in order to deal with the fertility crisis. people are absolutely fed up with the lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism.
almost every person in tech (ā¦) to deal with the fertility crisis
Why would we be listening to ātechā to deal with āthe fertility crisisā? Why is ātechā concerned with āfertilityā?
Stay in your fucking lane, will ya. How about mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages to address the growing crisis of open-source development? The crisis of newest C++ standards not being implemented in the popular compilers quickly enough? The crisis of Node.JS existing?
Oh, heās apparently riffing on this https://xcancel.com/nic__carter/status/1851719672456188197
Knowing the context doesnāt really change anything about this tweet though.
Every person I talk to ā well, every smart person I talk to ā no, wait, every smart person in tech ā okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybodyā¦
Man, I didnāt even know how to react to this nonsense. The obvious sneer is to point out that if the alternative is to interact with people like ER here we really shouldnāt be surprised to see a declining birth rate. But I think the more important takeaway that this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious.
Like, thereās plenty of surveys and research into why people are having fewer kids than they used to, and itās not because toddlers are little hellions more so than in the past. And āgenerational insolvencyā is a pretty big fucking part of the explanation actually, as is empowering families to choose whether or not to have children rather than leaving it entirely up to the vicissitudes of biological processes and horniness. The latter part cuts both ways, in that people who want families are (theoretically; see above re: financial factors) able to take advantage of fertility treatments or IVF or whatever and have kids where they historically would have been unable to do so.
But no, rather than actually engage with any of that or otherwise treat the world like other people have agency they have identified what they believe to be the problem and have decided that the brute application of state power is the solution, so long as that power is being applied to other people. For all that we acknowledge the horrors of fascism, I think the stupidity of these people is also worth acknowledging, if for no other reason than to reinforce why this shit shouldnāt be taken seriously.
Saying theyāre dumb and incurious offers almost too much respect. They believe in racial eugenics based on IQ - look at the kind of shit Elon Musk retweets. Scaremongering about fertility is just the way they get to the racial eugenics, while pretending itās a necessity not a choice.
Edit: and now I see froztbyte said almost the same thing first. Oops
Man, I didnāt even know how to react to this nonsense
same way as other nazis - boop 'em on the nose
Iād be willing to wager a guess that this fragile little flower has never had a āphysical altercationā in their life and would walk away with fucking ~ptsd from a single āhey that shit is not okayā boop
this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious
if youāre talking about eigenrowboat, I donāt think I agree. theyāre quite curious, but they ājustā go in with a particular viewpoint and a desire to āprove their pointā in the most prevaricating way possible. itās no accident that the entire sphere of āhow do we make scientific racism and nazism more socially palatableā gravitates around these fuckers. if youāre instead talking about them making these comments in a āsee the poor are dumb and useless and thus deserve what they getā, well, see aforementioned shitty opinions
Nah, itās the Nazis who are dumbasses, not that that makes them less dangerous. They certainly think theyāre smart and the want to present themselves as curious, but in reality they reduce knowledge to another political tool. There is no true spirit of inquiry or asking questions, only trying to marshal arguments in favor of their pre-established answer. Intellectual discourse becomes both a source of power to give their preexisting ideology a veneer of legitimacy and also an arena of conflict where they can prove that theyāre the biggest bestest boys.
These people possess neither a desire nor a willingness to engage with the world as it actually is. Instead they want the power to impose their vision of what the world should look like (a strict hierarchy with them at the ostensible top) onto reality, and when it inevitably fails because thatās not how any of this works they end up uselessly doubling down and retreating into conspiracies. Next time theyāll have more power and itāll work, even though itās the basic underlying shape of Creation that theyāre ultimately at war with.
Cue the scene where Buck Turgidson finds out that Dr. Strangelove proposes humanity survive deep inside mineshafts, with multiple women for every man.
Anyway I like how the options presented are āsocialismā - vaguely defined so as to be something anyone can project their fears on - on the one hand, and state-ordered sexual slavery on the other. True freedom, amirite?
I had to doublecheck what āpolygynousā means, and I āloveā this Google-generated Wiki excerpt. Itās technichally correct in some parts of the world.
āsocialism or barbarism you say? well maybe barbarism has its upsidesā
Oh but you see itās not regressive because itās polygynous not polygamous. Those women totally want to be forced to have the ubermenschās children
why do we want people who canāt deliver viable technology raising more kids?
why should we assume that they would be any better at the kid-raising than the technology?
Status. Also just a bit of kink and āprovingā heterosexuality (I wish I was joking).
aww, is the poor baby missing that maybe thereās people who donāt want to talk to them because of how much of a piece of shit they are? how sad
lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism
this dipshit continues to make the most astounding not-even-wrong posts. guess theyāre angling for a job as the next Noahpinion or Yglesias
Iāve gotten too offline to sniff out ironic posts. This nearly sent me to my grave
eigen āIāll call it ironic if people call me on my shitā robot
Weird way to say he doesnāt talk to many women
eigen āBreeding Stock for Me, Unwilling Abortions for Theeā robot
Was browsing ebay, looking for some piece of older used consumer electronics. Found a listing where the description text was written like crappy ad copy. Cheap over-the-top praising the thing. But zero words about the condition of the used item, i.e. the actually important part was completely missing. And then at the end of the description it saidā¦ this description text was generated by AI.
AI slop is like mold, it really gets everywhere and ruins everything.
So apparently the US government has been compromised by rustheads
https://thenewstack.io/feds-critical-software-must-drop-c-c-by-2026-or-face-risk/
https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/product-security-bad-practices
cobol devs in shambles
I donāt think itās exclusively due to rust but itās a very cool change
can only imagine how much wailing and consternation it must be causing in some areas
the C reactionaries[*] I know definitely arenāt ok, but thatās not a new condition. the cognitive load of never, ever writing bugs takes its toll, you know?
[*] and I feel like I have to specify here: your average C dev probably isnāt a C reactionary, but the type of fuckhead who uses C to gatekeep systems development definitely is
You (group A) think C is simple, that it can be thought of as portable assembly, that it teaches you how computers actually work, and that itās easy to avoid memory safety errors with good programming discipline, and is therefore fine.
You (group B) think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that itās very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, therefore C shouldnāt be use for new software development.
I think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that itās very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, which are some of the features that make C so fun and exciting. Like rawdogging a one night stand!
We are not the same.
Yeah thatās the property of C that ensures it will never go away. If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course theyāll start using it. Thereās all sorts of rationalizations going on - itās portable, itās performant, itās what the computer is really like - to justify basically driving a fast car without a seatbelt for the sheer thrill of it.
If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course theyāll start using it
I always suspected that I wasnāt a REAL MANā¢, but I didnāt know that me learning programming through C++ and being like āwell this shit sucks, what the fuck, there has to be a better wayā was one of the first symptoms.
Past a certain point itās a little bit like learning to type on a typewriter. On one hand it forces you to think about certain types of mistakes and forces you to avoid making errors. On the other hand it gives you a whole bunch of trained habits that are either useless or actively harmful once youāre working with better tools.
Now to be fair, C really is quite close to what the machine is really like, if by C you mean B and by machine you mean PDP-7.
Itās also highly portable in the sense that all twenty or thirty well-formed, standard-compliant and nontrivial C programs ever written can be compiled to a mind-bogglingly huge variety of hardware and OS targets and even work correctly on some of them.
[*] and I feel like I have to specify here
and like all C things, the specificities of pointer mechanics might mean any one of a number of things and theyāre all correct
The original statement was clearly meant to dereference a pointer to an object of type āreactionary,ā but I expected it to return maybe a Yarvin or at least a Catturd
the thrill of UB: you try to dereference a C reactionary but get a lambda calculus neoreactionary instead
I donāt think itās exclusively due to rust
to be fair, I donāt know any other languages concerned with safety other than rust, so it was my only option for joke construction.
the US DoD used to push for Ada adoption, with mixed success outside of where its use was mandated, due to Adaāsā¦ well, look at it
Got linked to this UFO sightings timeline in Popbitch today. Thought it looked quite interesting and quite fun. Then I realized the information about individual UFO sightings was being supplied by bloody Co-pilot, and therefore was probably even less accurate than the average UFOlogy treatise.
PS: Does anyone know anything about using Arc-GIS to make maps? I have an assignment due tomorrow and Iām bricking it.
I know a bit about qgis + wfs (and surroundings)? enough to be dangerous tho
I donāt know what these acronyms mean š«”
Iām just going to have to send an email in and be like hi Iām out of my depth. Can I still pass this class if I fail this assignment
Update: I got an extension š
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3595687/googles-flutter-framework-has-been-forked.html/
Iām currently using Flutter. Itās good! And useful! Much better than AI. It being mostly developed by Google has been a bit of a worry since Google is known to shoot itself in the foot by killing off its own products.
So while itās no big deal to have an open source codebase forked, just wanted to highlight this part of the article:
Carroll also claimed that Googleās focus on AI caused the Flutter team to deprioritize desktop platforms, and he stressed the difficulty of working with the current Flutter team
Described as āFlutter+ā by Carroll, Flock āwill remain constantly up to date with Flutter, he said. Flock will add important bug fixes, and popular community features, which the Flutter team either canāt, or wonāt implement.ā
I hope this goes well!
that android project of some months was a venture into flutter (and havenāt touched it before)
I had similar impressions on some things, and mixed on other
dartās a moderately good language with some nice primitive, tooling overall is pretty mature, broad strokes works well for variant targeting and shit
libraries though holy shit the current situation (then) was a mess. one minor flutter sdk upgrade and a whole bunch of things just exploded (serialisation things in nosql-type libraries I tried to use for the ostensible desired magic factor (just went back to sqlite stuff again after)). this canāt have been due to sdk drift alone, and felt like an iceberg problem
and then the documentation: fucking awful, for starting. excellent as technical documentation once you grok shit but before that all the examples and things are terrible. lots of extremely important details hidden in single mentions in offhand sentences in places that if you donāt happen to be looking at that exact page good luck finding it. this, too, felt like inadequate care and attention by el goog
I imagine if one is working with this every day you know the lay of the land and where to avoid stepping into holes, but wow was I surprised at how much it was possible to rapidly rakestep, given what the language pitches as
Yes to be clear when I say flutter is āgoodā I deliberately avoided a definition of āgoodā. I find itā¦ usable.
yep yep - didnāt mean to argue with your post inasmuch as to fill in details to the fork, but I guess I couldāve been clearer about that
