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3d ago
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YOU ~wouldn’t~
shoplift a ~WEBSITE~
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3d ago
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brb banning David from the awful.systems plugin repo, modifying the login page so everyone has to swear they don’t know him, and launching a lawsuit for (throws a dart at a dartboard) uhh shoplifting, he shoplifted my website
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3d ago
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like a good developer, I made my personal preference the default (and I think when we started there were major issues with switching themes?)
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that’s almost certainly the plan — I remember there was some horrific “proof of humanity” shit tied in with this, supposedly so that you could tell if you’re interacting with a human rather than a chatbot. there’s so many problems with that technically of course, not least of which is the chatbot guy also owning the proof of not-bot, but there’s deeper horrifying implications: this is the technology conservatives have been begging for to block access to “adult sites” (see: LGBTQ+ spaces and associates) and “protect voting” (see: purge voter registries). that the technology is fucking stupid and doesn’t work doesn’t matter to them — as always with technofascism, that’s a feature.
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3d ago
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That’s amazing, I wish I had that kind of discipline to learn!
I can’t decide what’s worse: the fucking insulting tone that sounds like I’m about to get a pamphlet about Joseph Smith or GameStop or some shit, or that the suggestions just make up opinions you don’t have and events that didn’t happen
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3d ago
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it’s weird that Enron of all things was the line for them
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4d ago
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my hobbies include instance administration and exploding out of my tomb, cursing whoever disturbed my skeletal remains (usually a cat)
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4d ago
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it’s a really weird week for them to do this, as my spinal column has decided to finally, painfully turn into dust
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4d ago
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christ alfucking mighty all your posts are this boring
and since that “counterargument” shit means you definitely didn’t read the sidebar, off you fuck, debatebro
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4d ago
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imagine having takes about tech
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4d ago
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here’s the latest on the wordpress situation thanks to 404media:
New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That's water under the bridge. Maybe the last offer needed to be higher. People have said they want a new window, so this is my attempt. Here's a new one: You have until 00:00 UTC Oct 17 (-4 hours) to DM me the words, ‘I resign and would like to take the 9-month buy-out offer’ You don't have to say any reason, or anything else. I will reply ‘Thank you.’ Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep you [sic] office stuff and work laptop; you will lose access to Automattic and Wong (no slack, user accounts, etc). HR will be in touch to wrap up details in the coming days, including your 9 months of compensation, they have a lot on their plates right now. You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won't be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.
there’s a (mid) joke here about how a boy who’s obsessed with photography really should understand more about optics
and who wouldn’t trust their livelihood in a difficult job market to a promise from a very stable genius like matt, who will destroy you financially if he thinks you talked to the press:
After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer—and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.”
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4d ago
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how do you do, fellow kid. tell me more about the field of shitty muclear reactors (SMR)
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6d ago
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fucking hell how are Musk’s Banks takes even worse than I remember? that was the point where I realized I hated the fucker so you’d think there’d be nothing left to feel rage over but no, Musk corpsefucking Iain’s memory once he was too dead to tell Musk to go fuck himself is absolutely doing it
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6d ago
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actually speaking of fascism, I took a quick look at our guest’s post history:
- African countries and IQ
- COVID conspiracy theories
- constant right-wing conspiracies in general really
- fucking links to voat and zerohedge
- there’s more but I tapped out early
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6d ago
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JSON has its issues but at least it’s only the worst of some worlds. Want to make JSON unparsable anyway, for a laugh? Try YAML, the serialization format recommended by four out of five Nordic countries!
fucking
this take is so dangerously real I’m pretty sure uttering it at work will earn you a PIP and a fistfight in the parking lot with the lead data architect
you know, normal startup shit
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6d ago
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I’ve always seen XML as much more of a tech executive thing — here’s the language that’ll run your entire business but is also incredibly easy to create proprietary semantics with, ensuring you can’t be ousted without taking the company down with you! it looks like absolute shit and it’s painful to type! buy in now!
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6d ago
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it’s not shocking because we’ve seen worse, but it is remarkable how fascist the implications of this “most people don’t possess cognition” idea are
it’s also very funny how many of these presumed cognition-havers have come to this thread and our instance in general with effectively the same lazy, shitty, thoughtless take on the nature of humanity
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6d ago
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so uh, they keep self-fellating on Twitter about how they invented their own CAD program over the objections of the haters
here it is, it’s an extremely thin wrapper around the typescript version of manifold with live reloading on changes. note that not only is manifold already a CAD library, they already have a web-based editor that reloads the model on code changes, and kache’s live reloading is just nodemon. the server part looks like it’s barely modified from a code example. the renderer is just three.js grabbed from a CDN.
it’s so weird they didn’t take the necessary 2 weeks to learn how to write the CAD parts of the CAD system they made!
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7d ago
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I almost want to go Twitter diving to see if kache has the requisite unhinged rant about how universities are only making quantum physics hard to get money/because of woke or whatever
e: holy shit I already regret this
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7d ago
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the absolute worst type of coworker from my cubicle days: heard about a technology at a conference, decided they invented it
fromjason.xyz
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.
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
www.theverge.com
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.
www.404media.co
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.
a16z.com
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.
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](https://lix.systems/about/#why-lix) 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](https://lix.systems/install/) and [pulling auxpkgs-unstable](https://forum.aux.computer/t/our-first-unstable-release/397/5), 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](https://forum.aux.computer/t/the-future-of-nixcpp-lix/483); so far, there’s a lot of high-level support and excitement for using it as Aux’s evaluator.
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.
www.web3isgoinggreat.com
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
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.
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](https://awful.systems/archives/) at awful.systems is welcoming contributors. it's a statically-generated site (from [this set](https://codeberg.org/awful-systems/sneer-archive-data) 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.
the software we use to run awful.systems, which [@dgerard@awful.systems](https://awful.systems/u/dgerard) suggested I call Philthy (and I agreed!), is seeking contributors. like upstream Lemmy, this consists of [a Rust backend](https://codeberg.org/awful-systems/lemmy) and [a Typescript+React frontend](https://codeberg.org/awful-systems/lemmy-ui). 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.md` to 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.
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.
(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
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
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](https://amaranth-lang.org/docs/amaranth/latest/) is incomplete since the language is under heavy development, but its [language guide](https://amaranth-lang.org/docs/amaranth/latest/guide.html) is still the best gentle introduction to HDL concepts I've read, and [its tutorials](https://amaranth-lang.org/docs/amaranth/latest/tutorial.html) 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
aesoprock.bandcamp.com
>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
([here’s a Verge article about the Waymo car getting burned during a Chinese New Year celebration](https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/11/24069251/waymo-driverless-taxi-fire-vandalized-video-san-francisco-china-town)) 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
(via [mastodon](https://wandering.shop/@soonleenz/111909667654377938))