this post was submitted on 16 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.

Last week's thread

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

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

Via Timnit Gebru's mastodon, I just learned that Emily Bender (both of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots fame) has a podcast: "Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000." Looking forward to checking it out tomorrow at the gym!

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes

Summary: Artificial Intelligence has too much hype. In this podcast, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation. They're joined by special guests and talk about everything, from machine consciousness to science fiction, to political economy to art made by machines.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (5 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Absolutely unhinged. Are these people from the As-Seen-On-TV dimension where people burn their house down every time they try to fry an egg?

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

Sometimes you read an article and you think "this article doesn't want me to do X, but all its arguments against X are utterly terrible. If that's the best they could find, X is probably alright."

that thread is an unholy combination of two of my least favorite types of guys: techbros willfully misunderstanding research they disagree with, and homeopaths

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

What a terrible argument. Anything that involves messing around with your teeth needs to have good reasons to do it, rather than just good arguments against doing it.

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

this article doesn’t want me to drink a shitload of colloidal silver, but all its arguments against drinking colloidal silver (it doesn’t do anything for your health, it might turn you blue, it tastes like ass) are utterly terrible. If that’s the best they could find, drinking a shitload of colloidal silver is probably alright.

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

Pulling out a pretty solid Tweet @ai_shame showed me:

countersneer

To pull out a point I've been hammering since Baldur Bjarnason talked about AI's public image, I fully anticipate tech's reputation cratering once the AI bubble bursts. Precisely how the public will view the tech industry at large in the aftermath I don't know, but I'd put good money on them being broadly hostile to it.

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

I suspect it'll land somewhere above "halitosis" but below "wearing black socks with crocs"

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

If you're against unrestricted genAI then you're also transphobic

What. Wait has anyone claimed this? Because that's absurd.

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

Considering how much the AI hype feels like the cryptocurrency hype, during which every joke you made had already been seriously used to make a coin and been pumped and dumped already, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

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

Dunno but why not, after Nanowrimo claimed that opposing "AI" means you're classist and ableist. Why not also make objecting be sexist, racist etc. I'm going to be ahead of the curve by predicting that being against ChatGPT will also be a red flag that you're a narcissistic sociopath manipulator because uhh because abused women need ChatGPT to communicate with their toxic exes /s

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

what are you folks doing for/with bookmarking? I've killed my usage of pinboard because I learned the dude's going off the deep end

already found a couple of the link* flavoured open source things, but looking for some practical/lived feedback

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

About a year ago I exported my bookmarks from there and dropped them in a self-hosted instance of linkding (using the recipe that puts it on fly.io with backups to b2). It works like a charm.

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

Yeah found that, unfortunately it’s js-ware so I refuse to put my data near it

(that’s very much a me thing, but a thing nonetheless)

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

Do you actually need to share your bookmarks? I found that bookmarks in Firefox and an RSS reader hosted on my nextcloud are enough for personal use.

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

the sharing part of it is indeed the thing I give the fewest shits about tbh. things I care more about are software choices and longevity. so, for example, fuck anything js/php - by and large those tend to be unserious software that'll be a nightmare to run even now, and even worse in time

I should probably do a bit of a sketchdown of the exact shape of my desires here, if for nothing else than giving direction to whatever I may have to write myself. a friend and I have been mutually grumping about this in chat for a while, because our wants are quite close but also just different enough to bounce ideas off each other

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

Oh no, what happened to that dude? He seemed fairly sane from his blog.

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

Oh no, what the hell. I found his personal Twitter, which has nothing from the last few years, but I didn't realize he was using his company's Twitter to defend JK Rowling. Eurgh!

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

I honestly just use browser bookmarks. That’s always been enough for me. Firefox can sync them too, so that takes care of backups as well.

For anything that needs special attention, I create a todo item with the link in org-mode.

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

fair 'nuff

I keep finding myself in a position of thinking "bah imma have to write this myself, aren't I", because nothing I've found as yet actually works the way I want things to work :|

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

DHH takes a break from racing cars, railing against DEI, and being perhaps the worst boss Denmark has ever produced to engage in some light nerd-washing

https://world.hey.com/dhh/wonderful-vi-a1d034d3

Some people on lobste.rs call him out for being terrible but mostly it's a celebration about how only the smartest, most productive coders use vi/vim or even more hipster modal editors

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

first comment is a masterpiece.

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

DHH: today I will RP as a high schooler writing an essay for software class about a program you should use

full disclosure: I use vim and honestly I don’t even know why anymore. Maybe it’s because I had a brief, trivial interaction with Bram Moolenaar (RIP king) in which he closed a bug that I opened by mistake, and I imprinted on him for some reason.

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

Man the Pistol unicode mess has always given me mixed feelings

Apple indeed lead the design change, but they did it unilaterally without the input of Unicode. So the standard is still saying that the character represents a pistol, and all the fonts are ignoring that to have it a squirt gun instead, so as to be compatible with a specific Apple font rather than compatible with unicode.

~~It might have been a mistake for Unicode to introduce Pistol in the first place (I wonder how it was chosen, can't look that up right now),~~ Pistol apparently came from Softbank, so Unicode was probably including it for compatibility with existing encodings.

IMO it would have been technologically more sound for UI designers to hide it in a UI or font designers to omit it entirely, than to replace it with another graphic with significantly different meaning. Emojipedia demonstrated the potential for confusion with this cheeky text message example.

Of course by this point we're stuck with water gun so Twitter is just needlessly adding to the mess and Unicode should give up and redefine or add errata to the symbol.

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

'make it look more badass'

I'm so tired of that man. I'm rethinking my idea that capitalism is good and this is meritocracy in action.

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

The 1911 is Murican, not some Italian crap

/s obviously, Italian gunmakers are very good.

Also it's really weird how there's a ton of small-business innovation in American gun gear, but the only ones who seem to be making money are European companies?

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

the 1911 is perfect for musk because it’s also notorious for throwing fucking ridiculous tantrums. though I’m pretty sure he only chose it cause of action movies and airsoft guns

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

the sum total of luxury ZA coiners’ mettle was measured, and it was found to be extremely lukewarm

that’s about 60k usd raw. PPI-equiv would be a bit higher (we have really cheap goods compared to US/UK), but I laugh at this number

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

fuckin. when did Mozilla's twitter feed turn into wall to fucking wall AI spam https://x.com/mozilla

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

convenience xcancel link

fucking Mozilla really is going all in on this whole “you can’t trust AI, except when we and our business partners do it” openwashing thing completely unaware of how it looks, huh? like, they’ve pushed AI so hard and violated so much community trust in the process that I can’t imagine this is doing anything but costing them their remaining donors.

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

who is the investor who pushed Mozilla this hard? where the fuck is this coming from?

all their hiring is AI too

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

haven't really had the headspace to dig into this but one of my hypotheticals about how this could come to pass is "not enough counter-friction left". foundations of the guess are: years of ill-advised products, constant killing of worthwhile projects, creep of bayfucker mentality. that shape of thing

I recall seeing people ringing alarm bells about moz ceo pay like 3~4y ago

not that the above guess eliminates the thing you're pointing to, mind you. I agree that this drive has to be coming from somewhere. my stuff was more coming at it from the "why has this suddenly accelerated so much" angle

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

I recall seeing people ringing alarm bells about moz ceo pay like 3~4y ago

remember when bringing up Mozilla’s financials would get you yelled at by people who needed to see them as a paragon of open source in spite of all evidence to the contrary?

my personal theory for why it’s accelerating so much is, their board might be doing a Sears[1]. they’re inventing ways to make Mozilla bankrupt because there’s profit in it, and that profit window might be closing rapidly with the antitrust actions against Google coming up. this is all based on vibes though, I’m the polar opposite of an accountant

[1] see also, doing a Red Lobster. no, endless shrimp isn’t why they’re going bankrupt, why in fuck would it be, of course it’s capitalists

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

For some reason, the news of Red Lobster's bankruptcy seems like a long time ago. I would have sworn that I read this story about it before the solar eclipse.

Of course, the actual reasons Red Lobster is circling the drain are more complicated than a runaway shrimp promotion. Business Insider’s Emily Stewart explained the long pattern of bad financial decisions that spelled doom for the restaurant—the worst of all being the divestment of Red Lobster’s property holdings in order to rent them back on punitive leases, adding massive overhead. (As Ray Kroc knows, you’re in the real estate business!) But after talking to many Red Lobster employees over the past month—some of whom were laid off without any notice last week—what I can say with confidence is that the Endless Shrimp deal was hell on earth for the servers, cooks, and bussers who’ve been keeping Red Lobster afloat. They told me the deal was a fitting capstone to an iconic if deeply mediocre chain that’s been drifting out to sea for some time. [...] “You had groups coming in expecting to feed their whole family with one order of endless shrimp,” Josie said. “I would get screamed at.” She already had her share of Cheddar Bay Biscuit battle stories, but the shrimp was something else: “It tops any customer service experience I’ve had. Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.”

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

Some people are just a different type of stupid, and they all wander into Red Lobster.

I dated someone who worked at Red Lobster, and that absolutely checks out. the number of people who’d come in hoping to grift free shit and take it out on the servers when they didn’t get it (or would try and get someone fired so they could get free shit, depending on the night) was astounding

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