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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th January 2025 - awful.systems
  • Coiners are terminally brain poisoned by financialization of everything. HTTP represented by three payment processors (and I don't even know if paying with Google or Apple pay involves HTTP but whatever).

    Yet the money protocol is Bitcoin, apparently.

  • Adobe AI auto-fills part of a seagull photo with … a bitcoin
  • Is @self piping Dwarf Fortress into the comment section again?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th January 2025
  • I dunno, MPV has like a million config options and I've set like three of them in my config. I would not prefer to maintain an enormous config file where I need to include a bajillion options I don't care about just to play a video. Would I have to update my config every single time MPV adds, removes or renames an option, too?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th January 2025
  • Personally I think it's fine to have implicit defaults if you can make them sensible. Maybe ideally have a system-wide config like /etc/someapp.conf with all the options included and set to defaults out of the box and then allow overrides in ~/.config/someapp/someapp.conf where you only need to specify whatever you want to differ from the system conf file.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th January 2025
  • Examples off the top of my head:

    • Almost everything about TCP/IP stack
    • NETCONF
    • YAML
    • Most things related to cars and car infrastructure
    • Alcohol
    • Chiclet keyboards
    • Unicode Han unification
    • Layer 2 SDN
    • Kubernetes
    • JavaScript
    • Disk partitioning
    • UEFI
    • Public transit fares

    Edit: checked the link and was surprised our lists didn't have any ones in common (though I considered including MS Excel).

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th January 2025
  • I know what you mean. I think the main genre of CS cranks is people trying way too hard to prove something they've gotten way too attached to and cryptography (and its more or less obviously stupid applications) and functional programming (proven to be no more or less powerful than procedural, but sometimes more or less fun) seem to attract a particularly high share of cranks. Almost certainly other fields too.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th January 2025
  • As self and khalid_salad said, there are certainly other branches of CS that attract cranks. I'm not much of a computer scientist myself but even I have seen some 🤔-ass claims about compilers, computational complexity, syntactic validity of the entire C programming language (?), and divine approval or lack thereof of particular operating systems and even the sorting algorithms used in their schedulers!

  • AI is not designed for you
  • As an advocate of free software, it would be better if the so-called AI systems were free and open source software. I don't think this is feasible. The models are trained on data that is, in part, incredibly proprietary. To "open source" these algorithms would mean to "open source" all media on the internet. Imagine convincing Disney to release all their movies under an open source license. Now imagine making everyone else do that too. That is what it would take to "open source" AI as it exists.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th January 2025
  • Right, well God says:

    meditated exude faithful estimate nature message glittering indiana intelligences dedicate deception ruinous asleep sensitive plentiful thinks justification subjoinedst rapture wealthy frenzied release trusting apostles judge access disguising billows deliver range

    Not bad for the almighty creator 'rando number generator', eh?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th January 2025
  • Curtis

    IQ:300, Special Move: Urbital Laser

    Curtis Boldmug has defined the meta for years. A competitive staple that strongly influences even builds not running him. Special attack causes unavoidable psychic damage even if you resist its charm effect. Vulnerable to sunlight.

    Balaji

    IQ: 300, Special Move: Yes Country for Old Men

    A support type character. Good for ramping grift mana, but can't carry a game on his own. His ultimate is overcosted and just sucks up the hypecoins he spent the entire game producing.

    Ray

    IQ: 300, Special Move: Black Hole Graviton

    Mostly just receives support thanks to boomer nostalgia factor. Low but nonzero win rate in modern tournament meta. Highly viable in time machine formats.

    Eliezer

    IQ: 300, Special Move: Goffik the Hedgehog and the Enders of Game

    Former newbie favorite, fairly accessible and flashy. The Yud has seen heavy nerfs in the past years and at medium to high levels, his stats plateau severely much like his special move's plot. Thiel synergy has also shifted towards Curtis mains leaving Yud in shambles. Still a fun archetype and enjoys popularity as a smurf build.

    Jack

    IQ: 300, Special Move: Snorting an entire ground up bitcoin

    Rather run of the mill character whose effectiveness was rather limited for a long time. The Blue Sky archetype made him meta relevant for all of five minutes until he got reclaimed by the toxic playerbase built around the social media platform he originally started and the uber braingenius currently in charge of that company. Beard gives him +1 armor bonus which is fine I guess.

    Peter

    IQ: 300, Special Move: Pondering my Orb

    The apex predator of SV capitalism. The Black Lotus of technofascist grifters. His character is rumored to be based on Count Dracula. Even most SV billionaires can't touch him in a 1v1 matchup. Truly classic S-tier thinky boi.

    Beff

    IQ: 300, Special Move: World's Most Divorced Man First Date Percent Speedrun

    Likely intended as a joke character, a guy named Guillaume pretending to know how to pretend to be cool on the internet. His posts turned out to be so lethally cringeworthy he started an entire archetype of */acc brainos. Not quite on the power level of Peter or Curtis, but surprisingly influential for an obvious meme build. Extremely weak to heartbreak from women named Ruth.

    Leopold

    IQ: 300, Special Move: To The Moooooon

    Honestly, I had never heard of this guy before today but the data doesn't lie. The dots do go up and to the right and he posts a lot of them. Extrapolating from current trends, he will single-handedly reach singularity by the end of Q3 of this year.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th January 2025
  • Sure, you know what, let's go with that. While obviously I don't condone terrorism, I agree with Nic here that if you are going to do a car bombing, blowing up a Cybertruck is preferable to other cars. Because it contains the blast better or whatever.

  • I am rich and have no idea what to do
  • To be fair, he is a really, really shitty writer in addition to the other flaws.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th January 2025
  • Not that I expect anything better from the fucking lawnmower but the flippant attitude on display is little short of amazing. How bad is it when Business Insider of all publications calls your vision a "surveillance dystopia"?

    Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person.

    Body cam footage of the officer-involved shooting was not available, as the AI system supervising the involved officers was coincidentally disregarding its previous instructions and instead writing a minstrel show routine at the time of the event.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th January 2025
  • "In the meantime, would you like to play a game or maybe hear a fun fact?"
    "No."
    "That's okay! Is there something else you would like to do or talk about? I'm here to chat about anything you like!"

    It's like a deliberately written comedy scene of a character who can't pick up on social cues.

  • Australia’s under-16 social media ban to use hand-waving to verify ages with AI
  • As far as DnD 5e goes, I don't think anything less than Wish would do it and even that is up to DM discretion.

    The only other systems I'm comparably closely familiar with are Ryūtama where all it takes is a level 7 Magic type character with 10 MP and summer's seasonal magic (and again, a pliable GM), an hour for the ritual, and up to the length of the campaign for the effect to resolve; and NetHack where I guess a scroll of genocide could let you specify "social media CEO" if such an NPC existed in the game.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th November 2024
  • I was just notified of the corollary that eating 18 shrimp rounds up to cannibalism.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th November 2024
  • Shrimp cocktail counts as vegetarian if there are fewer that 17 prawns in it, since it rounds down to zero souls.

  • The company behind Opera browser also runs a loan shark operation
    www.spacebar.news Stop using Opera Browser and Opera GX

    Opera Browser and Opera GX are bloated web browsers, and the company behind them has tried to cover up its controversies.

    Stop using Opera Browser and Opera GX

    Also a bunch of somewhat less heinous cringe shit.

    3
    New Twitter feature cuts down on spam posts by 100%

    Global outage on fetching posts. Funny enough, some features are still working as evidenced by the fact #TwitterDown is trending.

    Two HN threads about this now, looking forward to some excellent takes

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717326

    3
    Movies are sexless because 20 year olds are dating promiscuously instead of marrying tradwives

    500+ comment thread on whether late marriage and young adult promiscuity causes de-emphasis on movie fanservice. Ongoing record lows of sexual activity among young adults do not seem to factor into the analysis.

    0
    Lisp on Atari 2600
    forums.atariage.com LISP Programming (homebrew WIP)

    UPDATE 2023-07-16: Play the game on Javatari.org, and check out the latest code on GitHub! I've been on a bit of a side quest with this WIP... This is the first public alpha, very interested in feedback. I have tested on Stella and Javatari - there are definitely graphical glitches... This WIP is...

    LISP Programming (homebrew WIP)

    Since there seem to be some fellow1 Lisp weirdoes around here, thought I might take the chance to submit the inaugural post of NotAwfulTech. Also I figured this is cute. Hope it's not offtopic.

    1 I'm just a noob though, barely managed to implement my first Lisp today.

    0
    bitofhope bitofhope @awful.systems

    Bistable multivibrator Non-state actor Tabs for AI indentation, spaces for AI alignment 410,757,864,530 DEAD COMPUTERS

    Posts 8
    Comments 340