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.

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        5 months ago

        (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

        • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          5 months ago

          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 deceiving people into 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.

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          5 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

    • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      5 months ago

      this is quite infuriating, i had a number of mozilla/firefox people telling me that this feature wouldn’t work with opt-in (it’s bullshit though) because too few 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?”

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        5 months ago

        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 -_-

        • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          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.

            • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
              5·
              5 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.

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        5 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”.

  • zbyte64@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    5 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.

    Edit: is there a list of companies that use “prompt engineering” so that I can just avoid them?

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        5 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.

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        5 months ago

        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”.

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          5 months ago

          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.

          • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            5 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)

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      5 months ago

      It’s weirdly open about its nostalgia for the good old days when you could throw around racial slurs and watch porn at work with no consequences.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • earthquake@lemm.eeEnglish
      12·
      5 months ago

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

      33 replies from scammers. Holy shit.

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        5 months ago

        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.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          12·
          5 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

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        5 months ago

        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

        • earthquake@lemm.eeEnglish
          11·
          5 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.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      5 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)

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      9·
      5 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

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      5 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.”

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    5 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)

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    5 months ago

    orbstack 1.6.4:

    Debug Shell: AI-powered package install suggestions for commands

    in the app upgrade popup it’s just bare text. in the documentation for debug shell there’s no reference. in the release notes feed it’s the same bare text

    I’ve already sent feedback asking for more information about it, but just … what? I mean there’s that annoying(-to-me) ubuntu shell hook that goes “oh hey $binary not found, try installing $pkg!” already, and that’s been out for years, but what?

    if/when I hear more I’ll post comment I guess. in the meantime consider me fucking bewildered.

    • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      5 months ago

      I’m pretty sure this is just a handy convenience around launching another container that has debug tools in all the same namespaces (network, pid, user, filesystem, …) as the other. Kubernetes has a similar thing and it’s pretty handy.

      Edit: oooooh wait, I misread your entire comment: you were referring to the ai-powered install instructions. Oops, and yep, that is a big yikes. Wow.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        5 months ago

        yeah the orb debug shell is kinda neat! it leverages nixpkgs for its packages scope, and allows you to attach a not-impoverished shell to a container (which is immensely helpful because the tooling and systems in containerland suck so extremely fucking hard)

        hoping for a sensible response from the developer

    • earthquake@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      5 months ago

      “disorderly cities are required by the state religion”

      When they are absolutely sure the tweet will not escape containment, they will just take assumptions like “a certain percentage of people has incurable Criminal Mind” as given and go from there.

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      5 months ago

      tangent: these screencaps are from scott? he doesn’t mention long acting injectable antipsychotics (one shot every 2-4 weeks or so, no pills needed; needs consent ofc, result is vastly increased compliance) is that not a thing over there?

      e: he mentions it but doesn’t discuss it for whatever reason

  • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    6 months ago

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02218-7

    Might be slightly off topic, but interesting result using adversarial strategies against RL trained Go machines.

    Quote: Humans able use the adversarial bots’ tactics to beat expert Go AI systems, does it still make sense to call those systems superhuman? “It’s a great question I definitely wrestled with,” Gleave says. “We’ve started saying ‘typically superhuman’.” David Wu, a computer scientist in New York City who first developed KataGo, says strong Go AIs are “superhuman on average” but not “superhuman in the worst cases”.

    Me thinks the AI bros jumped the gun a little too early declaring victory on this one.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      5 months ago

      See, in StarCraft we would just say that the meta is evolving in order to accommodate this new strategy. Maybe Go needs to take a page from newer games in how these things are discussed.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      5 months ago

      this is simple. we just need to train a new model for every move. that way the adversarial bot won’t know what weaknesses to exploit

      • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        5 months ago

        In chess the table base for optimal moves with only 7 pieces takes like ~20 terrabytes to store. And in that DB there are bizzare checkmates that take 100 + moves even with perfect precision- ignoring the 50 move rule. I wonder if the reason these adversarial strats exists is because whatever the policy network/value network learns is way, way smaller than the minimum size of the “true” position eval function for Go. Thus you’ll just invariably get these counter play attacks as compression artifacts.

        Sources cited: my ass cheeks

        • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          5 months ago

          i don’t think that can be quite right, as illustrated by an extreme example: consider a game where the first move has player 1 choose “win” or “hypergo.” if player 1 chooses win, they win. if player 1 chooses hypergo, begin a game of Go on a 1,000,000,000 x 1,000,000,000 board, and whoever wins that subgame wins. for player 1, the ‘true’ position eval function must be in some sense incredibly complicated, because it includes hypergo nonsense. but player 1 strategy can be compressed to “choose win” without opening up any counterattacks

          • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
            8·
            5 months ago

            more generally I suspect that as soon as you are trying to compare some notion of a ‘true’ position eval function to eval functions you can actually generate you’re going to have a very difficult time making correct and clear predictions. the reason I say this is that treating such a ‘true’ function is essentially the domain of combinatorial game theory (not the same as “game theory”), and there are few if any bridges people have managed to build between cgt and practical Go etc playing engines. so it’s probably pretty hard to do

            (I know there’s a theory of ‘temperature’ of combinatorial games that I think was developed for purposes of analyzing Go, but I don’t think it has any known relationship to reinforcement learning based Go engines)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    6 months ago

    And in other news:

    Muse is a new creative platform that can create your own AI-generated series so you can dive into a new world of storytelling without the need for personal content creation.

    Who the fuck are these people and why do I not have a button that spreads Lego bricks across their floor?

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      5 months ago

      Yeah, I always hated the part of art and storytelling where there was always a tiny and sometimes misshapen window into the human soul there. Better to do away with that and replace it with an endless parade of #sponsoredcontent. That way there’s no risk of suddenly developing empathy or accidentally connecting with the people I’m exploiting as a billionaire VC.

  • flizzo@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    6 months ago

    I’ve been out-of-the-loop for a bit on the Nix drama. Is there a good summary of the last couple weeks?

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        5 months ago

        Man there was a long thread about different forms of self-identifying as Muslim that was finally purged by mods after 2 days.

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        5 months ago

        Evaluation is 5-20% faster than 2.18, depending on which benchmark is in use, thanks to eldritch horrors.

        this is awesome

        nix flake lock --update-input nixpkgs is now the much more reasonable nix flake update nixpkgs.

        but this is making me go “fuck yeah” on the inside. it seems like a small change, but I can’t emphasize enough how frequently this command gets used (for every flake dependency, not just nixpkgs) for how longwinded and non-memorable the old form of it was. it’s kind of fucking incredible how many UX warts Nix has just from the old evaluator’s devs digging in their heels on shit like this.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          5 months ago

          which reminds me, I need to check if lix/aux are going to do a cli-side nixpkgs search with a reasonable invocation

          • self@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            5 months ago

            what do you mean you don’t like when your package search command is one of several random, probably-unmaintained ecosystem packages that has to very slowly index everything every time nixpkgs updates because it doesn’t have access to the evaluator’s internals?

  • deborah@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    From the just released GOP 2024 party platform (PDF), this is a single bullet point in CHAPTER THREE: BUILD THE GREATEST ECONOMY IN HISTORY:

    Republicans will pave the way for future Economic Greatness by leading the World in Emerging Industries.

    Crypto

    Republicans will end Democrats’ unlawful and unAmerican Crypto crackdown and oppose the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency. We will defend the right to mine Bitcoin, and ensure every American has the right to self-custody of their Digital Assets, and transact free from Government Surveillance and Control.

    Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.

    Expanding Freedom, Prosperity and Safety in Space

    Under Republican Leadership, the United States will create a robust Manufacturing Industry in Near Earth Orbit, send American Astronauts back to the Moon, and onward to Mars, and enhance partnerships with the rapidly expanding Commercial Space sector to revolutionize our ability to access, live in, and develop assets in Space.

    When your party platform is just a long-form weird tweet that you wrote after bong rips with Elon Musk.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Human Flourishing

      This term was already very iffy, but this cements it into being full on red flag territory.

      When your party platform is just a long-form weird tweet that you wrote after bong rips with Elon Musk.

      Wouldnt be surpised if we discover he is behind it, the whole manufacturing things in space (yes I also played SMAX Musk) has his smell over it. What makes this a bit more funny is that Musk has also been hired to help safely crash down the ISS into the sea (Personally considering the cost of lifting stuff out of our gravity I would try to keep it up there, if I wanted to build more things in space, but due to capitalism we cannot (really, the ISS is going to be trashed because figuring out who own what part and resolving all that is too hard, capital says no)). Which brings up a fantastic opportunity for a random person on twitter who has Musks ear. We can now put a city at risk of being crushed by the ISS by tweeting ‘hey musk, make the ISS do a barrel roll’.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      5 months ago

      Wait, this guy published “is Near” twenty years ago and then UNIRONICALLY published “is Nearer”?

      Come the fuck on, this has to be satire?

      The sequel to “Apocalypse Now”, “Apocalypse Even More Presently”