this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The best solution right now may be “buy a Macbook and learn MacOS”, which is so depressing.

Depends on whether you include "my personal data is sent to the manufacturer of the computer against my wishes" in your threat model... Apple does many good things for security, and I wish PC hardware makers would take security-related things even just nearly as seriously as them. But I can't trust Apple anymore either.

(Explanation: the whole iCloud syncing stuff is such a buggy mess. I don't want it, I don't need it, so I want it off. But I guess Apple just doesn't test enough how well it works when you turn it off, maybe they can't imagine someone not wanting it. The problem is, iCloud sync settings don't stay off. Settings randomly turn themselves back on, e.g. during OS updates, and upload data before you even notice it. I'm not claiming that's intentional, I assume it's just bugs. But I've observed such bugs again and again in the past 9 years, and I've had enough. Still have a Macbook around, but I use it very rarely these days, only when I need some piece of software on MacOS that has no suitable Linux equivalent.)

While a PC+Linux setup can avoid the specific issue of "don't randomly upload my data somewhere", the setup of it all can be a mess, as you say. And then security is still limited by buggy hardware and BIOS/firmware that is frequently full of security holes. The state of computers is depressing indeed (in so many ways, security just being one of them)...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

A note to the effect of:

You have basically no control over how Apple handles your data. When iOS users opted out of data collection, Apple still collected the data, they just didn't allow third-party access to it.

is a good idea if I ever do recommend a Mac.