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Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive
  • fucking imagine coming back to a place you’re not welcome with this “eeehhh you’re being a bit aggressive tbh” shit

  • Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive
  • I think your response is a bit aggressive TBH.

    nah, an aggressive response is me telling you to fuck yourself as I ban you for a second(!) time for making these exact terrible fucking posts

    I’ve saved many hours of work with it, in languages I don’t really even know.

    maybe by next ban you’ll figure out why your PRs keep getting closed

  • Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive
  • congrats on asking jeeves

    is it bad to be bad at a system designed for exploitation? maybe your grandma had a point

  • Featured
    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th November 2024
  • what’s wild is in the ideal case, a person who really doesn’t have anything to hide is both unimaginably dull and has effectively just confessed that they would sell you out to the authorities for any or no reason at all

    people with nothing to hide are the worst people

  • Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive
  • maybe it was a mistake to lionize a corporate monopolist to the level where we ostracized people for not being “good” at using their trap of a product

  • Featured
    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th November 2024
  • the marketing fucks and executive ghouls who came up with this meme (that used to surface every time I talked about wanting to de-Google) are also the ones who make a fuckton of money off of having a real-time firehose of personal data straight from the source, cause that’s by far what’s most valuable to advertisers and surveillance firms (but I repeat myself)

  • ChatGPT in the classroom: OpenAI continues its education push with two new courses for teachers
  • the linked Buttondown article deserves highlighting because, as always, Emily M Bender knows what’s up:

    If we value information literacy and cultivating in students the ability to think critically about information sources and how they relate to each other, we shouldn't use systems that not only rupture the relationship between reader and information source, but also present a worldview where there are simple, authoritative answers to questions, and all we have to do is to just ask ChatGPT for them.

    (and I really should start listening to Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 soon)

    also, this stood out, from the OpenAI/Common Sense Media (ugh) presentation:

    As a responsible user, it is essential that you check and evaluate the accuracy of the outputs of any generative AI tool before you share it with your colleagues, parents and caregivers, and students. That includes any seemingly factual information, links, references, and citations.

    this is such a fucked framing of the dangers of informational bias, algorithmic racism, and the laundering of fabricated data through the false authority of an LLM. framing it as an issue where the responsible party is the non-expert user is a lot like saying “of course you can diagnose your own ocular damage, just use your eyes”. it’s very easy to perceive the AI as unbiased in situations where the bias agrees with your own, and that is incredibly dangerous to marginalized students. and as always, it’s gross how targeted this is: educators are used to being the responsible ones in the room, and this might feel like yet another responsibility to take on — but that’s not a reasonable way to handle LLMs as a source of unending bullshit.

  • Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive
  • Lack of familiarity with AI PCs leads to what the study describes as "misconceptions," which include the following: 44 percent of respondents believe AI PCs are a gimmick or futuristic; 53 percent believe AI PCs are only for creative or technical professionals; 86 percent are concerned about the privacy and security of their data when using an AI PC; and 17 percent believe AI PCs are not secure or regulated.

    ah yeah, you just need to get more familiar with your AI PC so you stop caring what a massive privacy and security risk both Recall and Copilot are

    lol @ 44% of the study’s participants already knowing this shit’s a desperate gimmick though

  • Featured
    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th November 2024
  • fuck me that is some awful fucking moderation. I can’t imagine being so fucking bad at this that I:

    • dole out a ban for being rude to a fascist
    • dole out a second ban because somebody in the community did some basic fucking due diligence and found out one of the accounts defending the above fascist has been just a gigantic racist piece of shit elsewhere, surprise
    • in the process of the above, I create a safe space for a fascist and her friends

    but for so many of these people, somehow that’s what moderation is? fucking wild, how the fuck did we get here

  • Featured
    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th November 2024
  • a better-thought-out announcement is coming later today, but our WriteFreely instance at gibberish.awful.systems has reached a roughly production-ready state (and you can hack on its frontend by modifying the templates, pages, static, and less directories in this repo and opening a PR)! awful.systems regulars can ask for an account and I'll DM an invite link!

  • Featured
    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th November 2024
  • most of the dedicated Niantic (Pokemon Go, Ingress) game players I know figured the company was using their positioning data and phone sensors to help make better navigational algorithms. well surprise, it’s worse than that: they’re doing a generative AI model that looks to me like it’s tuned specifically for surveillance and warfare (though Niantic is of course just saying this kind of model can be used for robots… seagull meme, “what are the robots for, fucker? why are you being so vague about who’s asking for this type of model?”)

  • On “Safe” C++: An Odyssey of Sneers
  • another absolutely fucked thing about the gotcha interview is, they never stop at just one. if you somehow read the interviewer’s mind and asspull the expected (not “correct”, mind you) answer, they’ll just go “huh” and instantly pivot to a different instant-fail gotcha. the point of the gotcha interview isn’t candidate selection; the point is that the asshole interviewer has power over the candidate, and can easily use gotchas to fabricate technical-sounding reasons for rejecting suitable candidates they personally just don’t like.

    shit like this is one reason our industry is full of fucking assholes; they select for their own by any practical means. it’s reminiscent of those rigged, impossible “literacy tests” they used to give voters in the south (that is, the southern US), where almost every question was a gotcha designed so that a poll worker could exclude Black voters at effectively their own discretion, complete with a bullshit paper trail in case anyone questioned the process.

    (also, how many of these assholes send candidates down a rabbit hole wasting time answering questions unrelated to the position when they don’t get the gotcha right? I swear that’s happened to me more than once, and I can only imagine it’s so nobody asks why most of the interviews are so short)

  • On “Safe” C++: An Odyssey of Sneers
  • I start every new day by screaming this is the remix, as required by law

  • On “Safe” C++: An Odyssey of Sneers
  • I can now believe that they might have considered that, and are probably hoping he’ll come down in their favour now that he’s coming in.

    I’m betting there are some juicy logs of something like this happening in the C++ Alliance Slack’s secret #unfiltered channel, given that its typical content allegedly consists of abuse directed towards marginalized people, coordination of harassment and misinformation on community platforms, and various other fash shit. it’s weird that a Slack so closely associated with the “professional and respectful” ISO C++ committee would host two (including the diet version, #on-topic) of what are essentially chan-style trolling channels for people who think they’re adults on an official Slack. maybe it shouldn’t be too surprising, since one committee member felt comfortable posting an extensive, unhinged COVID conspiracy rant on the WG21 mailing list — with a community like that, it’s just a matter of time before the assholes in charge go mask-off.

    and for anyone who hasn’t read the article yet, the above isn’t even the worst shit you’ll learn about, it’s a fucking rollercoaster (and there are some details alluded to that you’ll only pick up on a second reading too)

  • Pumping the AI bubble: a data center funding craze with ‘novel types of debt structures’
  • We’re sure phrases like “novel types of debt structures” won’t give you flashbacks to the 2008 financial crisis.

    I feel like John taking the Soy Sauce for the first time and knowing how many people are gonna explode

  • On “Safe” C++: An Odyssey of Sneers

    this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:

    > This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.

    fucking masterful

    an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol

    22
    Featured
    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th November 2024
  • It is the fourth book in the John Dies at the End series

    oh damn, I just gave the (fun but absolute mess of a) movie another watch and was wondering if they ever wrote more stories in the series — I knew they wrote a sequel to John Dies at the End, but I lost track of it after that. it looks like I’ve got a few books to pick up!

  • Coca-Cola’s new AI-generated Christmas ad is as bad as you’d expect
  • how are you this fucking mid?

  • Coca-Cola’s new AI-generated Christmas ad is as bad as you’d expect
  • In fact, they’re getting plenty of free publicity for using AI to make it thanks to articles like these

    good thing there’s no such thing as bad publicity, otherwise this shit would be fucking embarrassing

  • OpenAI, Google, Anthropic admit they can’t scale up their chatbots any further
  • I hereby vow to be extremely firm and extremely realistic

  • Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something
    fromjason.xyz Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something

    Odes & Satires, and other matters of stuff & things.

    Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something

    this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:

    >Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.

    >I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.

    >The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.

    56
    the Humane AI Pin is fucked
    www.theverge.com Humane’s daily returns are outpacing sales

    After raising $200 million from investors, Humane has only sold $9 million worth of products and has received $1 million in returned products.

    Humane’s daily returns are outpacing sales

    after the predictable failure of the Rabbit R1, it feels like we’ve heard relatively nothing about the Humane AI Pin, which released first but was rapidly overshadowed by the R1’s shittiness. as it turns out, the reason why we haven’t heard much about the Humane AI pin is because it’s fucked:

    > Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.

    it’s fucked in ways you might not have seen coming, but Humane should have:

    >Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone.

    15
    Nvidia caught ingesting as much of YouTube as possible
    pivot-to-ai.com Nvidia caught ingesting as much of YouTube as possible

    AI shovelmaker Nvidia has been looking into making its own AI models. To that end, it’s been vacuuming up YouTube videos like nobody’s business. According to leaked internal communications obtained…

    Nvidia caught ingesting as much of YouTube as possible
    19
    404media: Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI
    www.404media.co Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI

    Internal emails, Slack conversations and documents obtained by 404 Media show how Nvidia created a yet-to-be-released video foundational model.

    Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI

    as I was reading through this one, the quotes I wanted to pull kept growing in size until it was just the whole article, so fuck it, this one’s pretty damning

    here’s a thin sample of what you can expect, but it gets much worse from here:

    >Internal conversations at Nvidia viewed by 404 Media show when employees working on the project raised questions about potential legal issues surrounding the use of datasets compiled by academics for research purposes and YouTube videos, managers told them they had clearance to use that content from the highest levels of the company. > >A former Nvidia employee, whom 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about internal Nvidia processes, said that employees were asked to scrape videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other sources to train an AI model for Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human” products. The project, internally named Cosmos (but different from the company’s existing Cosmos deep learning product), has not yet been released to the public.

    4
    Andreessen Horowitz and the uwuness of little technofascism
    a16z.com The Little Tech Agenda | Andreessen Horowitz

    The time has come to stand up for Little Tech. Bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech. We believe American technology supremacy, and the critical role that Little Tech startups play in ensuring that supremacy, is a first class political issue on par with any other.

    The Little Tech Agenda | Andreessen Horowitz

    so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:

    >Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain. > >Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.

    does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.

    here’s some more banal shit:

    >We find there are three kinds of politicians: > >Those who support Little Tech. We support them. > >Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them. > >Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.

    I find there are three kinds of politicians:

    • those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
    • those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
    • those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
    25
    the tea protocol is still predictably a gigantic source of PR spam
    www.web3isgoinggreat.com tea.xyz causes open source software spam problems, again

    The tea.xyz protocol first earned an entry on Web3 is Going Just Great in late February, when their plan to reward open source software contributors resulted in crypto enthusiasts with no intention of participating in OSS opening endless pull requests to claim ownership of prominent OSS projects. Th...

    who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do

    0
    Amazon’s 'Just Walk Out' grocery stores are dead
    gizmodo.com Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores

    Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.

    (via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)

    surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive

    even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down

    0
    a self driving car burns in San Francisco. the orange site can’t decide which racist trope to blame

    (here’s a Verge article about the Waymo car getting burned during a Chinese New Year celebration)

    a self-driving car got destroyed (to a round of applause from the crowd) in San Francisco! will the robot car fans on the orange site take this opportunity to explore why the tech seems to be extremely unpopular among the populations of the cities where it’s deployed?

    of course the fuck not, time to spin the wheel of racist dog whistles and see which one we land on! a note to the roving orange site fans (hi, fuck off), these replies are either heavily upvoted or have broad agreement in the thread (or I’m posting them here cause I want to laugh at some stupid shit, you don’t dictate the terms of my enjoyment)

    >This isn't a revolt against AI. SF attracts anarchist mobs and they'll vandalize buses, trains, police cars, bikes, whatever is around.

    we’re off to a strong start with some bullshit straight from musk’s twitter (which he stole from the fever dreams of the conservatives on his platform)

    >Alternatively: this is San Francisco where on a good day the locals don’t need much excuse to set fire to a car (although I usually associate it with the Giants winning a World Series) and this poor dumb stupid driverless Waymo drove into a celebratory and by the looks of it somewhat drunken crowd on the Streets of Chinatown during the Chinese New Year where in following its prime directive to do no harm, it got itself stuck up the creek without a paddle so to speak. Waymo probably should have accounted for that ahead of time and told their cars not to go near Chinatown this evening.

    remember that no matter what, the robot car is the victim here. there’s no chance Waymo was doing anything dangerous or assholeish in the area; much like robocop, the car is an innocent victim of its fucking prime directives??? and you wouldn’t set fire to robocop, would you?

    >This is a hilarious take. A few youths went bonkers and defaced private property. Has nothing to do with philosophical beliefs or a Big Tech agenda. You should debate the finer points of the Big Tech agenda with them while they run up to you in a maddened rage.

    yeah! I can’t wait until these angry mobs set fire to your robot car body! then you’ll see!

    >Arguments about driverless cars aside, the youth in this country are seriously lost. It only takes one generation of poor parenting and poor civic policies to ruin a culture.

    this one is downvoted, but this reply isn’t:

    >Sounds like they were right. The youth at that point was lost, and are now raising people who will literally burn down a waymo for fun, or because of some horrifically ignorant idea about fairness.

    oh you poor woke kids don’t like when shitty dangerous robot cars are on the streets? are you gonna start crying about how it’s “unfair” they’re covering up pedestrian injuries and traffic accidents now? your grandpa would never stand for this

    3
    “just open sourced someone else’s code ama” - a case study in fucking around and finding out
    coolmathgam.es Jules :notnet: (@notnite@coolmathgam.es)

    just open sourced someone else's code ama https://github.com/jawslouis/MakePlacePlugin/pull/26

    from the linked github thread:

    >Your project is in violation of the AGPL, and you have stated this is intentional and you have no plans to open source it. This is breaking the law, and as such I've began to help you with the first steps of re-open sourcing the plugin.

    the project author (who gets paid for violating the AGPL via patreon) responds like a mediocre crypto grifter and insists their violation of the law be debated on the discord they control (where their shitty community can shout down the reporter):

    >While keeping code private doesn't guarantee security, it does make it harder for bad actors to keep up with changes. You are welcome to debate this matter in the MakePlace discord: https://discord.com/invite/YuvcPzCuhq If you are able to convince the MakePlace community that keeping the code open-source is better, I will respect the wishes of the community.

    aaaand the smackdown:

    >Respectfully, I won't attempt to "debate" or "convince" anyone; I'm leaving this pull request and my fork here for others to see and use. It is not a matter of "better"; you are violating a software license and the law. It does not "make it harder" for anyone; Harmony hooking exists, IL modification exists, you can modify plugins from other plugins.

    2
    the ACM publishes an article about AI being a cargo cult, and the orange site cargo cult reacts

    >The problem is that today's state of the art is far too good for low hanging fruit. There isn't a testable definition of GI that GPT-4 fails that a significant chunk of humans wouldn't also fail so you're often left with weird ad-hominins ("Forget what it can do and results you see. It's "just" predicting the next token so it means nothing") or imaginary distinctions built on vague and ill defined assertions ( "It sure looks like reasoning but i swear it isn't real reasoning. What does "real reasoning" even mean ? Well idk but just trust me bro")

    a bunch of posts on the orange site (including one in the linked thread with a bunch of mask-off slurs in it) are just this: techfash failing to make a convincing argument that GPT is smart, and whenever it’s proven it isn’t, it’s actually that “a significant chunk of people” would make the same mistake, not the LLM they’ve bullshitted themselves into thinking is intelligent. it’s kind of amazing how often this pattern repeats in the linked thread: GPT’s perceived successes are puffed up to the highest extent possible, and its many(, many, many) failings are automatically dismissed as something that only makes the model more human (even when the resulting output is unmistakably LLM bullshit)

    >This is quite unfair. The AI doesn't have I/O other than what we force-feed it through an API. Who knows what will happen if we plug it into a body with senses, limbs, and reproductive capabilities? No doubt somebody is already building an MMORPG with human and AI characters to explore exactly this while we wait for cyborg part manufacturing to catch up.

    drink! “what if we gave the chatbot a robot body” is my favorite promptfan cliche by far, and this one has it all! virtual reality, cyborgs, robot fucking, all my dumbass transhumanist favorites

    >> There's actually a cargo cult around downplaying AI. >> >> The high level characteristics of this AI is something we currently cannot understand. > >The lack of objectivity, creativity, imagination, and outright denial you see on HN around this topic is staggering.

    no, you’re all the cargo cult! I asked my cargo and it told me so

    0
    my chatbot is so efficient it only needs one $2000 GPU per user

    >Running llama-2-7b-chat at 8 bit quantization, and completions are essentially at GPT-3.5 levels on a single 4090 using 15gb VRAM. I don't think most people realize just how small and efficient these models are going to become. > > [cut out many, many paragraphs of LLM-generated output which prove… something?]

    my chatbot is so small and efficient it only fully utilizes one $2000 graphics card per user! that’s only 450W for as long as it takes the thing to generate whatever bullshit it’s outputting, drawn by a graphics card that’s priced so high not even gamers are buying them!

    you’d think my industry would have learned anything at all from being tricked into running loud, hot, incredibly power-hungry crypto mining rigs under their desks for no profit at all, but nah

    not a single thought spared for how this can’t possibly be any more cost-effective for OpenAI either; just the assumption that their APIs will somehow always be cheaper than the hardware and energy required to run the model

    0
    the r/SneerClub archives are up! [incredibly janky v1]

    the r/SneerClub archives are finally online! this is an early v1 which contains 1,940 posts grabbed from the Reddit UI using Bulk Downloader for Reddit. this encompasses both the 1000 most recent posts on r/SneerClub as well as a set of popular historical posts

    as a v1, you'll notice a lot of jank. known issues are:

    • this won't work at all on mobile because my css is garbage. it might not even work on anyone else's screen; good luck!
    • as mentioned above, only 1,940 posts are in this release. there's a full historical archive of r/SneerClub sourced from pushshift at the archive data git repo (or clone git://these.awful.systems/sneer-archive-data.git); the remaining work here is to merge the BDFR and pushshift data into the same JSON format so the archives can pull in everything
    • markdown is only rendered for posts and first-level comments; everything else just gets the raw markdown. I couldn't figure out how to make miller recursively parse JSON, so I might have to write some javascript for this
    • likewise, comments display a unix epoch instead of a rendered time
    • searching happens locally in your browser, but only post titles and authors are indexed to keep download sizes small
    • speaking of, there's a much larger r/SneerClub archive that includes the media files BDFR grabbed while archiving. it's a bit unmanageable to actually use directly, but is available for archival purposes (and could be included as part of the hosted archive if there's demand for it)

    if you'd like the source code for the r/SneerClub archive static site, it lives here (or clone git://these.awful.systems/sneer-archive-site.git)

    0
    as always, the orange site would rather carry water for right-wing weirdos than admit rationalwiki is right

    >RationalWiki is a highly biased cancel community which has attacked people like Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander before.

    >Background on the authors according to a far-left website. > >Let's at least be honest.

    >That is profiling work. (Not just "Ad hominem".) > >The clash with the name "rational-wiki" is too strong not to be noted.

    as the infrastructure admin of a highly biased far-left cancel community that attacks people like Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander: mmm delicious

    for bonus sneers, see the entire rest of the thread for the orange site’s ideas on why they don’t need therapy:

    >I was about to start psychotherapy last month, I ask my family's friend therapist If he could recommend me where to go. So he interviewed me for about 30 mins and ask me about all my problems. > >A week later he send me the number of the therapist. I didnt write her yet, I think I dont need it as badly as before. > >Those 30 mins were key. I am highly introspective and logical, I only needed to orderly speak my problems.

    to quote Key & Peele: motherfucker, that’s called a job

    0
    won’t anyone think of corporate hacker culture

    hey let’s see what the people who killed and buried hacker culture think should go in the jargon file!

    >If the spirit of the original Jargon file was to be a living document, alas, it failed to keep with the times. > >Hackers at large have moved away from Lisp despite Paul Graham and other evangelists […] > >Hackers also have moved away from academia at large, and 9-5 jobs at tech behemoths are more natural habitats for them, which also shaped the lingo. I mean, there’s a whole layer of slang usually pertinent to outsourcing agencies and to cubicle farms.

    I can’t wait for the corporate-approved jargon file, with any hint of anti-capitalism replaced with fun words and quotes from billionaires to share as the soul leaves my body

    >So in order for the document to evolve, we need a system to determine consensus. Everyone who cares runs a program on their computer that joins the network and registers their intent. With each proposed change, a query goes out to the network, and it's up to everyone on the network to say yea or nay to the proposal. With enough "yea"s, the document is updated. > >...this is starting to sound like a blockchain, isn't it.

    for the absolute sake of fuck. coming soon: HackerDAO! collect 10xer tokens and finally prove to the junior devs why corporate gives you so many points to crunch on! vote on fun new jargon, but only if it’s crypto-related! surely you’re hacker enough to be on the pump side of this pump and dump!

    0
    the weird “co-op” behind the mastodon instance hachyderm.io just started a generative AI project
    hachyderm.io aburka 🫣 (@aburka@hachyderm.io)

    Welp, looks like @nivenly is funding AI nonsense so I'm definitely leaving #hachyderm as soon as I decide where to go. Contribute to your instance admins, but not if the money goes to AI.

    reposting here for better visibility (let me know if there’s a better way to do this now that we’re federated): the owners of hachyderm.io just started a generative AI for gaming project, and it looks like donations to them will likely end up going to that

    0
    the orange site musksucks like it’s 2012

    > It's because there is a vast concerted effort by the political left to destroy Musk now that he is no longer regarded as being strictly on their side. It's at Trumpian scale these days, in terms of the venom being directed at him. > >Reddit is overflowing with non-stop Musk hatred. They spout lie after lie about him in every single thread where he's a topic. The most popular lie being that his business efforts - ie his success - were funded by an emerald mine that his father owned (neither thing is true). > > I say this as an emotionally independent, objective observer of the craziness, I have no stake in it, and don't feel one way or another about it. The seeming mental illness the topic of Musk seems to draw out of people is astounding however, the herd promptly acts like deranged lunatics when he comes up as a topic. > >Until Trump I had never seen anything like it before, in person or online. There must be a name for such a massive scale of crowd insanity, to describe the frothing-at-the-mouth irrationality.

    my deranged lunatic hivemind venomous mentally ill frothing-at-the-mouth leftist brain can’t handle how rational this fucking asshole’s take on musk and trump is

    there’s also this at the top of the thread:

    > I've been mostly ambivalent about the Musk-era at Twitter—mostly because I just don't care enough to have an opinion. > >This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed. > >Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding.

    turning one of the most popular sites on the internet into a cesspit of transphobia and nazis: ambivalent

    musk fails to appreciate the Twitter brand: angry and disappointed

    remember, hacker news is a bastion of high-quality discussion. fucking shitheads

    0
    the Bevy game engine: a cozy ECS that punches above its weight
    bevyengine.org Bevy Engine

    Bevy is a refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust. It is free and open-source forever!

    Bevy Engine

    Bevy is a fun, cozy game engine to play with if you’re looking for something very flexible that implements some surprisingly advanced features. things I like:

    • it’s all rust, which is an advantage for me and the chemical burns I have from handling the dialect of C++ a lot of older game engines used to be written in
    • it implements a flexible entity component system, which I found pretty great for specifying game and rendering logic for things like roguelikes and simulations, where multiple game systems might interact in dynamic ways
    • the API is very cozy and feels like querying an extremely fast database at times
    • it’s a lot lower level than something like Unity or Godot, but you get some pretty advanced rendering features included
    • the main developer seems to have a lot of industry experience and a solid roadmap
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    Zero to Nix: a gentle introduction to the Nix package manager
    zero-to-nix.com Zero to Nix

    An unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix

    Nix is one of the few pieces of software I trust. I use it on just about every computer I work on — awful.systems is managed and deployed by just nixos-rebuild and a deployment flake, as are almost all the computers in my house (including a few embedded into the house itself). in general it makes both software development and configuring Linux a lot more fun compared with the traditional way of doing things

    I often call Nix fucking incomprehensible, but it doesn’t need to be. Zero to Nix is one of the documentation projects that’s intended to be a more gentle goal-oriented introduction to Nix concepts, and it’s definitely worth following along if you’re curious about Nix and want to be able to do something useful with it right away

    if you end up liking Nix and want more of it, NixOS is an entire Linux distro configured and managed by Nix, and it’s incredibly powerful and stable. I run it on a full-fat gaming PC as my primary OS and the experience of running it is surprisingly very good; feel free to ask and I’ll summarize how I run stuff like games on NixOS

    0
    self self @awful.systems
    Posts 37
    Comments 696
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