bitofhope @ bitofhope @awful.systems Posts 8Comments 402Joined 2 yr. ago
Thanks. I wrote this last night not expecting it to become so long, but I like to think the real work was done by thousands of very clever people with highly sophisticated moral compasses pretending not to understand privacy legislation.
Hello, I'd like to punch you in the groin. Will you accept or would you like to learn more?
Sorry, I didn't quite catch that. Did you say you accept?
Ah, you don't want to be punched in the groin. That's OK, I understand. We value your painless existence very much.
Now, obviously we cannot let you opt out of the Strictly Necessary punches in the groin. Surely you understand that if it's necessary to punch you in the groin, your permission or lackthereof is irrelevant. Rest assured, this applies only when we really have to punch you in the groin.
What, do you want me to list all the possible circumstances in which one might be obligated to punch you in the groin? Don't be unreasonable, now. I'm sure you know it when you see it.
That aside, I presume we can punch you in the groin for functional purposes? The kind that may not be strictly necessary, but serve a purpose in the functioning of our service.
Oh, we can't? It's OK, you have the right to make that choice. We don't judge. Anyway, we take it that you're probably at least cool with us punching you in the groin for the purposes of analyzing your behavior to improve our groin punching. Let me know if you decide you don't want us to do that anymore.
Oh, I thought you were cooler than that. Alright, if you hate the working class and want to make it harder for the poor, overworked developers to improve your experience, we'll do it your way. I guess we'll have to make do with just the groin punches that are strictly necessary or for marketing purposes.
Ah, aren't you observant. Have you ever noticed that all the adverts you get are really terrible? That's because advertisers need to be able to punch you in the groin to find out what you like and to make their ads more appealing to you. Just food for thought. But if you really insist…
Fine, fine. Marketing groin punches are out. As for your question, no we don't identify as an advertising company per se. But we are partnered with other companies that are in fact advertising companies. Would you like to adjust your preferences for our groin punching partners?
Well maybe to you it looks like the opt-out process we just went through should also cover this part but can we really know if we don't look?
Who's a good puppy? You're a good puppy, yes you are! ❤️
Will you deny us permission to punch you in the groin on behalf of AAAAAAAAAAA Inc. or will you not?
OK, so we can only punch you in the groin on behalf of AAAAAAAAAAA Inc. for the purposes of Legitimate Interest?
It means the kinds of purposes where there is a legitimate interest to punch you in the groin.
Why would you ask if you didn't want me to answer? Fine, that's a no for Legitimate Interest based groin punching on behalf of AAAAAAAAAAA Inc.
Will you deny us permission to punch you in the groin on behalf of AAAAAAAAAAB Inc. or will you not?
Oh, we have a total of six hundred and sixteen thousand six hundred and sixty-six partners in our crotch impactizing network.
Indeed, we are proud to have such a wide network of trusted allies.
Ugh, fine. I guess I can check the end of the list to see if there's a way to make a selection for all of them at once. Honestly, this form is starting to make me a bit dizzy as well.
Wow, who knew flipping through all those pages would take so long. There's a line in here that says "disagree to all", but there's no checkbox or anything. It's just there. Clicking it doesn't seem to change anything. You can probably assume it worked.
Please calm down, we're almost done. Would you like to accept and save?
Well it sounds like I mean "accept and save the options you just set", not the ones we offered initially, doesn't it?
Your groin punching settings have been applied. I don't think there were any mistakes, but if you need to change the settings, you can find the form hidden somewhere in this house, assuming we remembered to put it there.
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.
Is @self piping Dwarf Fortress into the comment section again?
You could hook Cthulhu with bait that big.
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?
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.
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).
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.
Wow, that's bleak. The whole article I mean.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
To be fair, he is a really, really shitty writer in addition to the other flaws.
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.
"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.
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.
Attractive Gullibility Inducer