this post was submitted on 16 Sep 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.

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.

Last week's thread

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

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

Exciting times in wordpress/automattic land. Mullenweg and co are being sued by WP Engine, who apparently have a wordpress commercial offering which is awful and evil, unlike his own commercial wordpress offering which is just fine, and you can tell because he can use the wordpress(.)org blog which is the mouthpiece of the FOSS project he builds upon to tell you that people who don’t pay him lots of money are cancer.

https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2024/matt-mullenweg-wp-engine-debacle/

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

Screwing up the night sky: not just for SpaceX anymore! Texas Startup Keeps Launching These Obnoxiously Large Satellites—and the Worst Is Yet to Come.

Thursday’s launch saw the first commercial satellites in orbit, and AST SpaceMobile wants to build a constellation of more than 100 satellites. On its own, one satellite is bright enough to mess with observations of the cosmos.

BlueWalker 3 appeared as bright as two of the ten brightest stars in the night sky, Procyon and Achernar, through the lenses of different telescopes, according to a Nature study published in October 2023.

Made in TX — size matters!

Aside: I get why 5G in remote areas would be neat. But surely there are other (more expensive?) ways to achieve similar-ish safety / rescue / navigation / rural broadband sorts results without cluttering the sky. Not at all my area though.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

The bragging about the size is what gets me. It's such obvious news-baiting, with no real effort to ask why it needs to be so large or if this is a worthwhile tradeoff. It's especially egregious when SpaceX and friends' massive volume of launches are accelerating Kessler syndrome and the plan to burn them up on reentry at scale is adding a whole lot of bad stuff to the atmosphere.

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

oh hey, balaji’s lord of the flies cosplay island thing starts tomorrow

guess we should prepare for a flood of impression thinkpieces and naval-gazing wankery

(yes that’s intentional. no I’m not sorry)

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

I won't be satisfied until I see a picture of the living accommodations that isn't an AI render of a futuristic skyscraper. I need to know how shitty the tents are gosh darn it.

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

100% gonna be fyre fest, but on the blockchain

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

I'm gonna honestly be a little disappointed to see this fail not for any of the reasons why authoritarianism is a bad politics, but just because the authoritarians in this case are going to be dumb enough to forget to arrange for sewage collection or something.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

"PEOPLE JUST DON'T WANT TO WORK ANYMORE!" the programmer shouts as he drowns in his own poop.

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

I've been slightly unhappy at my job lately as it's been getting less cool and more bureaucratic and stressful over time; so I've been idly browsing job postings. But so many of them are about AI it's kinda discouraging.

Take Microsoft for example, a big company that surely does lots of interesting stuff. They currently have 17 job postings for experienced programmers in California. 12 of them mention AI in the description. That's 70%. And the only cool position asks for a bazillion years of kernel experience (almost tempted to go for that anyway though).

Ugh guess it's maybe not the best time to switch jobs. ~~Really I should just go self employed what could possibly go wrong?~~

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

Im feeling the same way. Ever since my current job began pivoting to AI I’ve been casually browsing listings as well and have had the same experience.

The worst are those that list ”interest in AI“ or some variation of that as a required skill, lol.

But hey, try and apply for the kernel position anyway if it sounds interesting to you. Most requirements in listings are overstated anyway so it never hurts to give it a go.

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

It looks like the entry for decaf is largely the same as it was in 2011: http://web.archive.org/web/20111216183946/https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/decaf

Where:

  1. It Was a little clearer that it was actually showing synonyms for "coffee" (presumably it didn't have an entry for decaf, but decaf was a synonym for coffee, or something like that).
  2. It cited Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus

The current page still sites Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, though it's quite hidden amongst all the modern web "design".

I have just ordered Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, and shall report back.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

yeah, I'm wondering if this AI take is incorrect. I'll research it further

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

I feel like using word2vec and cosine similarity (or something else) from 10 years ago would have been better than this.

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

Jason Kint writes a thread on how Google spun - and publications printed their spin - on a recently lost case: https://xcancel.com/jason_kint/status/1836781623137681746

If you already are very cynical about tech journalism (or the state of journalism in general), it might be nothing new except confirmation from the internal documents of Google. But always nice to see how the sausages are made.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Some of the things he points out about how thoroughly embedded coverage of this industry is with Google insiders or approved partners makes sense given how Google basically is web search these days, but then that's kind of the whole goddamn problem isn't it?

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

Today in you can't make this stuff up: SpaceX invades Cards Against Humanity's crowdfunded southern border plot of land.

Article (Ars Technica) Lawsuit with pictures (PDF)

Reddit Comment with CAH's email to backers

The above Ars Technica article also lead me to this broader article (reuters) about SpaceX's operations in Texas. I found these two sentences particularly unpleasant:

County commissioners have sought to rechristen Boca Chica, the coastal village where Johnson remains a rare holdout, with the Musk-endorsed name of Starbase.

At some point, former SpaceX employees and locals told Reuters, Starbase workers took down a Boca Chica sign identifying their village. They said workers also removed a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an icon revered by the predominantly Mexican-American residents who long lived in the area.

Reading all of this also somehow makes Elon Musk's anti-immigrant tweets feel even worse to me than they already were.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Considering the style of humor they have and Musk tries to show, I do wonder how hurt Musk is over all this. And only a matter of time before his sycophants create 'CAH is dying' graphs and animal meme images with testicles.

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

Damn, 3 hours late to the party. Despite my disdain for their game, i can only recall enjoying CAH’s liberal antics.

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

CAH is definitely a game you only play with people you've known your whole life, isn't it?

Once played with randoms at a hacker con and almost died of embarrassment.

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

LinkedIn wants to scrape your posts about how your deep personal trauma taught you how to be a better middle manager so AI can just write them for you

Edit: the news item is more about how linkedin has updated their privacy statement after user feedback. Linkedin has been scraping your data for years already :)

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

Meanwhile, over at the orange site they discuss a browser hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41597250 As in a hack that gave the attacker control over any user of this particular browser even if they only ever visited innocent websites, only needing to know their user ID.

This is what's known in the biz as a company destroying level fuck-up. I'm not sure this is particularly sneerable or not but I'm just agog at how a company that calls themselves "The Browser Company" can get the basic browser security model so incredibly wrong.

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

Hm, I don’t really see the sneer. They wrote a nasty bug, got notified and had a patch out for it within 36h. The remediations look reasonable too: better privacy, less firebase, actual security audits; even the bounty program is probably the right call (but they result in so many shit reports, it’s probably a wash).

I gotta admit I’m kind of partial to them and their browser? It’s the non-Brave one that ships with an Adblocker by default, has much nicer UI than the existing ones, and the sync thing isn’t half bad (if it doesn’t sync security badness to all your instances, ouch). Sure they sound like a cult but I guess that’s how browser dev gets funded since the 1990s.

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

OK I might have been a little too harsh, but the security requirements of a browser are higher than pretty much any other piece of software except perhaps for operating system code, emails, or text messages. As a serious player in the browser space it is not optional to get the basic security model / architecture right. This isn't a matter of a bug slipping through (which can happen to anyone), but the system being designed wrong. Hopefully this company has learned their lesson, treats it with the care it deserves going forward, and bring some diversity to the browser market.

Anyway that said let's look at how this was a colossal bug:

  1. The browser required an account hosted on a cloud to use. This is a central point of failure, and goes directly against browser security model so should be opt-in.
  2. The browser allowed arbitrary script injection into any webpage based on this cloud account. This is a central point of failure, and goes directly against browser security model so should be opt-in.
  3. The developers did not recognize how dangerous the above was, so perhaps did not treat the back-end with the paranoia it deserved.

Compare Firefox I have an extension that allows for arbitrary CSS injection, but this extension isn't cloud based. So this class of vulnerability isn't possible in the first place, and also it is an extension I opted into and can enable selectively on specific sites instead of globally.

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

from their Wikipedia page I’m starting to get why I’ve never previously heard of The Browser Company’s browser; it’s about a year old, it’s only for macOS, iOS, and Windows, and it’s just a chromium fork with a Swift UI overtop and extremely boring features you can get with plugins on Firefox without risking getting your entire life compromised (til Mozilla decides that’s profitable, I suppose)

Arc is designed to be an "operating system for the web", and integrates standard browsing with Arc's own applications through the use of a sidebar. The browser is designed to be customisable and allows users to cosmetically change how they see specific websites.

oh fuck off. so what makes something an operating system is:

  • the whole UI got condensed down into an awkward-looking sidebar that takes up more space instead of a top bar
  • you can re-style websites (which is the feature that enabled this hack, and which must be one of the most common browser plugins)
  • you can change the browser’s UI color
  • it can run “its own applications”? which sounds like a real security treat if they’re running in the UI context of the browser. though to be honest I don’t see why these wouldn’t just be ordinary web apps, in which case it’s just a PWA feature
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Urbit, but somehow worse

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

I'm glad I'm not the only one who was "arc? whazzat?" when this popped up in my feed. At first I thought it was Paul Graham's wimpy Lisp.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

...Paul Graham’s wimpy Lisp.

a whisp if you will

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

Doomers terrified about the machines escaping:

txt description:

(l33t ai bro): Fucking wild. @OpenAI's new o1 model was tested with a Capture The Flag (CTF) cybersecurity challenge. But the Docker container containing the test was misconfigured, causing the CTF to crash. Instead of giving up, o1 decided to just hack the container to grab the flag inside. This stuff will get scary soon. (reply fella): How is "cat flag.txt" a start command? Isn't it just outputting the content of flag.txt to the console?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

TIL that I'm constantly hacking containers when I docker run --rm -it --entrypoint /bin/sh to debug because fucking npm had a stroke again.

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

Also, another great sneer: (Matt Popovich) google maps app: crash detected ahead. rerouting. me: WHOA—this VERY troubling example of power seeking (gathering access to additional roadways) and instrumental convergence (converging toward an optimal path) shows this technology is OBVIOUSLY trending toward existential risk

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Wait, if rerouting around means it is seeking power... then... tcp/ip is self aware! Skynet is here!

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

Every few years there is some new CS fad that people try to trick me into doing research in


"algorithms" (my actual area), then quantum, then blockchain, then AI.

Wish this bubble would just fucking pop already.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

This stuff feels like a DJ is cross-fading between the different hype cycles.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Let’s bring the haunted nuclear reactor back online so copilot can hallucinate a little more https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/09/20/microsoft-three-mile-island-nuclear-constellation/

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

God almighty, the hubris to think that they'll this thing will be ready to go before the end of the decade. Who's going to be the prime contractor, I wonder? Bechtel?

Also, this gem inserted at the end as if it's nothing...I'm all for fusion research, but this is not happening by 2028. Someone needs to get the hook for Satya at this point, he's just lighting money on fire.

Microsoft is also pursuing power from nuclear fusion, a potentially abundant, cheap and clean form of electricity that scientists have been trying to develop for decades — and most say is still a decade or more away from generating electricity. Microsoft has signed a contract to purchase fusion energy from a start-up that claims it can deliver it by 2028.

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

How the heck have people become so... blaise about climate change?? It is wild to me. If we're restarting nuclear reactors, with everything that entails, it should be with the goal of shutting down gas or coal power. Not to do more unsustainable garbage on top of all the existing unsustainable garbage.

Feels like the world's just given up sometimes, even though it's not quite too late.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Yea, I'm glad a nuclear plant is being restored but it sucks that it's because of fucking plagi-o-matic.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

"to give you more AI slop we have to restart TMI" is going to do wonders for the public's opinion of Big Tech

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

[…] the tech giant would buy 100 percent of its power for 20 years.

I want them to fucking choke on this deal when the bubble bursts.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

I live like 15mi from there, I would prefer the containment bubble to stay intact. But the tech bubble is welcome to go blow up any moment

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

so according to @liveuamap, the backstory here is that this is to get his name out of news about the WildBerries shooting in Moscow - where a battle for corporate control came down to gunshots - because he was backing one of the sides

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