this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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TechTakes

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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.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I have thought about this guy every day since I saw this post

https://awful.systems/comment/4601049

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

If only all my snark could elicit such absurd perfection.

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

Every day? I dont think I have read that post at all. (This is both a joke and not a joke, as I had not read it, I did now and I was amused, so thanks).

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I think Zizek is a super nice guy, despite disagreeing with 90% of what he says. I still think he's a great person with a nice soul.

The sentences these people post, man.

Anyway, it's great that he chose a cryptofascist crank who tries to pass himself off as a communist to show how open minded he is. Damn, you respect Habsburg, Orban and Zizek, let me guess how you feel about Putin.

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

Basing my opinions on who seems nice or not. I'm visualizing a very angry Taleb shouting about how these assholes learned nothing from him.

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

Anyway, it’s great that he chose a cryptofascist crank who tries to pass himself off as a communist

oh thank fuck I’m not the only one who knows about Zizek. there’s still so many people whose first introduction to leftist thought was The Pervert’s Guide to Film on Netflix or whatever who never went back to check if Zizek was maybe a fucking asshole

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I'm still blissfully clueless as to who zizek is

although saying that here now might cause an accidental crash course

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

Maybe it's because I've started reading a book about Germany and Austro-Hungary in WW1 (Ring of Steel) but I've suddenly started pattern-matching a bunch of pro A-H comments in HN. "It was a peaceful multi-national nation" well yeah until they pointlessly insisted on invading Serbia (and fucking that up twice before being bailed out by Germany) thus setting of the wider war. And when refugees from Galicia had to flee the Russians they were not happily accepted by the rest of the Empire.

Anyway, A-H was teetering on the edge before WW1 and signed their own death warrant willingly.

As always in HN you can find links to new horrifying examples of fascism: https://theworthyhouse.com/2021/06/17/the-foundationalist-manifesto-the-politics-of-future-past/

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

oh boy, some of the comments there

I think that the people in the breadline would have better things to do than be rude on twitter. Or maybe not, it is a fun way to pass the time for some.

how to instantly identify someone with a social circle barely stretching past their own nose. and I’d bet there’s some “work = moral” thinking held there, too

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

followed up by a real winner of a comment:

If you're in the breadline, hobbies and other idle time activities cost money in comparison to twitter that is "free". Don't be surprised the rhetoric is toxic like 4chan and its hordes of basement dwelling NEETs.

"dont be surprised that rhetoric is toxic"

mr pot, I have a call for you from mr kettle

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

generally my rule is "don't read the comments" and super double triple-mega-bonus so for the orange site, so I only glance-scan through some when I do happen to open comment threads (such as from here)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (6 children)

remember all the fucking rubes saying Proton’s LLM wasn’t a problem cause only business and visionary accounts had access to it? well, only one month later of fucking course they went back on that and now it’s included with duo and family accounts, and my soon to be cancelled unlimited account just popped an ad for it on the compose window trying to get me to opt into the free trial for the fucking thing (and also the button’s purple just as a last dark pattern to try and fool users into clicking it)

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

@self I wonder what "popular demand" and "overwhelming number of requests". Are there actually a lot of people asking for this? Are there more than there are people begging them not to? Maybe I just live in an anti-AI bubble, because I sure don't encounter a lot of pro-AI views.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

it’s not just you — I can dig up the posts if you’re curious, but Proton wrote their last user survey so it was impossible to say no to this LLM crap directly, and they still got caught massively fudging the numbers to make this needless bullshit look popular. I can promise you it’s just the same people doing that again, except this time there’s no publicly accessible numbers they can be called out over

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

@self It’s probably the same folks who wanted the Bitcoin wallet.

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

@self I can understand Microsoft and Google chasing this fad, but I would expect most of Proton's users to be exactly the type of person who's against this. But of course it's easy to fudge with numbers.

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

I would expect most of Proton’s users to be exactly the type of person who’s against this

that’s very true! unfortunately, we’ve discovered that a lot of the foundational members of Proton’s board and engineering team are huge LLM fans (and gigantic Bitcoin fans too — that’s why Proton released a Bitcoin wallet, of all things, almost simultaneously with this LLM bullshit)

we’re not sure if something changed that suddenly made them go all in on their bad ideas, but the initial communication around Scribe was how much Proton’s business users wanted it — and the survey was very much crafted to get what looked like a pro-LLM response from that demographic. Proton has essentially admitted that they’re doing this for their tiny number of enterprise whales rather than their normal privacy-conscious users; it’s a shame they’re willing to burn their business down for that kind of short-term gain. I can only imagine them enabling the LLM for all their paid accounts this quickly is either a desperation move because the feature didn’t do the numbers they hoped for, or it’s a sign that Proton’s otherwise compromised.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

@self @zogwarg
Ffs I just swapped to Proton for drive and email. Thankfully only done a couple of email migrations.

Who isn't huffing this nonsense?

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

Ffs I just swapped to Proton for drive and email. Thankfully only done a couple of email migrations.

Its worse for me - I've got a metric shitload of emails on Proton. Thankfully, I'm not using them for anything particularly important.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

from the last time this came up, Tuta is of the few that aren't, although there's not really anyone with feature match on some of proton's features afaik

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

I agree; Tuta is the only real replacement, and they’ve promised (for what that’s worth) they don’t have any plans for AI features. I may migrate to Tuta myself, but I can’t truly recommend it — as always, I have to point out that Tuta is still a single point of failure like Proton, and one day I hope we’re able to design a federated, e2e encrypted replacement for email (that crucially isn’t gpg or anything like it — imagine teaching your grandma and your drug dealer (assuming they’re not the same person) to use that kind of thing)

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

@froztbyte
I forgot I'm using their VPN too, and they accept bitcoin (not a big deal, but useful). I was aware of Tuta and fastmail when I chose Proton.

For now I'll prioritize moving to a self managed domain to make swapping provider easier in future.

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

@self @zogwarg highly recommend migrating to posteo

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Posteo is from Germany and they’re reasonably popular here. Their offer is quite different from Proton, though. If you want full E2E encryption you need to use GPG or S/MIME and handle that yourself (and obviously so does your recipient), so it’s not as batteries included as what Proton offered.

I like their focus on green energy and sustainability though.

Another option like that is mailbox.org. They’re presenting themselves as a bit more business-like.

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

Why do I get the feeling we're gonna see a colossal tech crash

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

this isn’t surprising, but now it’s confirmed: in addition to the environmental damage generative AI does by operating, and in spite of all attempts to greenwash it and present it as somehow a solution to climate change, of course Microsoft’s been pushing very hard for the oil and gas industry to use generative AI to maximize resource exploitation and production (via Timnit Gebru)

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

tbh i don't see a single sane way that genai could be used for anything like they say it can be, if it works it's gotta be something more or less custom. but ms doesn't care, because they're selling shovels so it doesn't matter if their shit doesn't work as long as someone's buying. it sorta starts looking like cryptobros in 2020-ish trying to insert themselves as middlemen everywhere where there's already some money

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