this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

(happened to notice this while digging into something else)

upwork's landing page has a whole big AI anchorblob. clicking from frontpage takes you to /nx/signup (and I'm not going to bother), but digging around a bit elsewhere finds "The Future Of Work With AI"

so we're now at the stage where upwork reckons it's a good bet to specifically hype AI delivery from their myriad exploitatively arbitraged service providers

(they're probably not wrong, I can see a significant chunk of companies falling over each other to "get into AI" at pay-a-remote-coder-peanut-shells prices)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Go check your privacy settings in Firefox - they've switched on sending data to advertisers by default as of Firefox 128. Even Google sent this setting out default off, probably having spoken to an actual lawyer who mentioned the GDPR.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

this is quite infuriating, i had a number of mozilla/firefox people telling me that this feature wouldn't want with opt-in (it's bullshit though) because too many users would enable it, and neither fucker asked himself : “wait, if we're afraid we can't convince our user base to buy-in, perhaps we shouldn't develop the feature?”

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Well, I needed an excuse to use Supermium - no better excuse than this.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Update - Ended up jumping ship to Librewolf, since I just didn't like the feel of Chromium.

I was contemplating going back to Firefox, but then I accidentally wiped my entire profile whilst trying to transfer over my browser history and went "fuck it, I'm sticking with Libre".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I don't really know if any chromium-based options are a real solution - there's so much code in there that a lot of times won't get caught (cf. brave etc for this very thing), and goog is actively working to push their own agenda and they have a lot more dev-hours than anyone else to churn shit out

ladybird and servo seem like the most promising alternative paths right now, and ladybird less so because chuds -_-

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Ladybird isn't going anywhere. The web standards move too fast and they're not going to be able to catch up. I wish it was another way, but there's no way a couple of million $ is going to move the needle here when (probably) tens of billions have been poured into chromium/FF.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

also it looks likely to have other possible problems

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

oof. Something tells me he's a good guy and just knee-jerked that response without thinking about it. But then I realize it doesn't matter because the kind of community you create doesn't depend on who you are deep down but what you say publicly.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Sounds like a good idea to piss off your primary user base, because at this stage I feel the only people singing Firefox's praise are privacy advocates who won't touch Chrome & friends with a ten-foot pole.

(I have the feeling that this comes from the same shithead who pushed to include spicy autocomplete in Firefox.)

It's also enabled in the dev builds, by the way. I just checked.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

(I have the feeling that this comes from the same shithead who pushed to include spicy autocomplete in Firefox.)

it definitely reads like the same shithead, but I’ve had them blocked on mastodon for some time so I can’t say for sure if it was for rampant LLMery or for doing the “without advertising the modern web would die and you don’t want that do you” thing advertisers do constantly

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Lol what an absolute tool. That’s the same shit the marketing bozos at my job say when I inform them that, no, I can’t auto opt-in our customers into whatever stupid Facebook ad campaign they’re pushing this week because it’s literally against the GDPR and our privacy laws.

But I guess that’s the logical next step if your whole business model depends on lazy people clicking the button with the flashiest color in the cookie popup without reading the label.

P.S. the modern web can die in a fucking fire.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

this is not people's laziness; it's that the practice is deceptive. don't reinforce the business narrative.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

Fair point, you’re right.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

and because it feels like it’s worth screaming this into the void in case there’s any marketing assholes reading: fuck yes I’m here to kill the modern web

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

truly a man who rocks out with his grock out

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

That feels like a too perfect tweet, which I also couldn't find a direct link to. So I'm going to assume it was faked. Did find these prophetic words however, Xcancel

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

friend mentioned that dril has posted that it's a fake (but don't have link handy)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Your friend was also spreading fake news. Dril said it was real, xcancel. But yes your friend was correct.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

haha, I'll send word along

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

The "Thank you Grock" at the bottom made my day

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

So remember when Google Domains got sold off to Squarespace because it wasn't profitable enough and Google has the attention span of a squirrel?

Well that meant bye bye MFA for anyone who didn't check their email diligently enough, allegedly leading to a number of cryptocurrency domains getting hacked.

The cryptocurrency aspect is mostly just funny, but Google and Squarespace should know better than to effectively disable MFA out from under people. Tech companies put profit over people all the time. And then everyone blames the people for not being hyper-vigilant about computer security.


Edit: The tweet linked in that bleepingcomputer article is funny if this was indeed the issue: https://twitter.com/pendle_fi/status/1811683909509558562

Some "defi" company realized this could be a problem 22 hours before they were hacked. Even had time to write a tool to mitigate the impact of getting hacked. Got hacked anyway. Did they uhh... IDK change their password? Make sure MFA was set up? They don't say.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

More details: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/07/researchers-weak-security-defaults-enabled-squarespace-domains-hijacks/

It sounds like Squarespace just let people take over domains without actually logging in wtf?

What’s more, Monahan said, Squarespace did not require email verification for new accounts created with a password.

“The domains being migrated from Google to Squarespace are known,” Monahan said. “It’s either public or easily discernible info which email addresses have admin of a domain. And if that email never sets up their account on Squarespace — say because the billing admin left the company five years ago or folks just ignored the email — anyone who enters that email@domain in the squarespace form now has full access to control to the domain.”

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

code is lol

all these libertarian pyramid schemes sit at convenient crosssection of high reward and low probability of being caught, which makes me believe that no good people were harmed in this incident

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

"Any messages beyond this tweet from anyone claiming to be from Pendle is a scam"

33 replies from scammers. Holy shit.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I know cryptocurrency people have a weirdly high tolerance for getting scammed and blaming the victim, but the twitter spam is constant now. You'd think they'd get tired of it at some point and switch to a platform that lets them moderate better.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

presumes that people know there's better possible

soapbox.gif: you see a dynamic of this sort with a lot of people who have largely only ever interacted with "the internet" through vendor-mediated apps and shit. you can often pick up on it by people that speak in frames of "this app" - the app is their gateway to that engagement, and they have never known substantially otherwise. and it's a day-vs-night type difference in experiences in so many cases! there are some sites that I outright refuse to even open on mobile simply because the anti-nagblocker/etc capabilities that I have on RealComputer with RealOS (i.e.: not some artificially hobbled shit run by a monopolist fuckwad company) just completely block the annoying shit, whereas it is almost impossible to have that experience on mobile

and for so many people, the latter type (of experience/internet) is all they ever know

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

hey if the cost of operations is a tweet (or an openai chatgpt api call) and the possible reward is a couple dozen suckers at $200-equiv, Von Neumann ends up with a hangover

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

Can't wait to find out that the Perseid meteor shower, which has inspired humanity for centuries, is actually just Von Neumann probes from a long-dead civilization that spam their equivalent of tea.xyz pull requests on any planet that has advanced to hosting source forges.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

"toughened up our defenses" like adding DNS monitoring. so they just ... didn't have that before? for a user-facing public web service? cool.

(and yeah lol at how little detail the rest of this covers)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

Over at "work on climate" there's been an influx of companies that will greenwash using ChatGPT. One company I interviewed for (in my estimation it) boiled down to using ChatGPT to make generic greening recommendations for a business and attach hallucinated numbers that the client can then pass off for themselves.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (3 children)

https://t.co/rBxJwxtqDl

Medium article about Yud came across my dash (I hope the link works).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

My god this sounds boring as shit

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I really can't imagine reading a book by someone whose vision of the future is "men will be taller and have more muscles, women will stay the same height but they'll all be conventionally attractive and have voluntary control of their uterus".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Babel-17 came out in 1966, and its vision of the future was that a good ship's captain knows how to complete a poly triad and you can't leave Earth without a full crew including three ghosts and a furry.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

Now that's the kind of stuff that makes puppies sad...

(New wave SF is a bit of a blind spot for me. Never really read any Delany, even though his autobio is one the best I've read)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

Thanks for posting this. I live in Sweden and many of these actors are new to me.

FWIW we have our own word for people who try to hijack the judicial system with spurious lawsuits etc: rättshaverist ("justice wrecker"). I don't believe the Roman/German law system really meshes well with the SovCit movement in common law systems, but I'm sure people are trying to apply it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Here's a link that bypasses the URL shortener.

Also: ew.

Perilous Waif follows the story of its narrator Alice Long, a cybernetically enhanced orphan with a variety of superhuman powers in the 25th century. One of these enhancements causes Alice’s body to grow very fast, giving her the body of a thirteen year old at just age six.

nopetopus

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