Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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!

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
    22·
    5 months ago

    Oh look, Elon openly snuggling up to Nazis and “just asking questions”. As if I didn’t hate this clown enough.

    (For anyone out of the loop: the AfD is a far-right political party in Germany and the spiritual successor to the NSDAP. They’re praising the SS, advocate for legalization of holocaust denial and historical revisionism, removal of hate crimes from the code of law, and more. They’re so openly Nazis that they got kicked out of the EU parliament’s far-right ID coalition for being too fucking Nazi. There’s no leeway. They’re literal card-carrying national socialists.)

    • deborah@awful.systemsEnglish
      20·
      5 months ago

      They want to ban kosher food and circumcision, but love the Israeli government and the war on Gaza, which says… so many things, about so many people.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      5 months ago

      he’s been openly a nazi propagandist pretty much since he took over twitter. they are hiding black crime stats from you.png, “this is the actual truth,” etc. without saying “I am literally a Nazi” or “we should do holocaust” I genuinely don’t know how much more open he can be about it

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          5 months ago

          oh huh. I didn’t actually know about that bit. TIL!

          christ every little bit of history I read which had some power-hungry rich fucker going “mmmm maybe we should hear them out”, and then watching what’s happening in popular media coverage and shit. le sigh.

    • null@slrpnk.netEnglish
      13·
      5 months ago

      Notice that he, of course, does not list any of those “policies” that he’s “read”.

      • deborah@awful.systemsEnglish
        16·
        5 months ago

        Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views. Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes? Con: LOL no...no not those views. Me: So....deregulation? Con: Haha no not those views either. Me: Which views, exactly? Con: Oh, you know the ones

        (for mastodon users who don’t get the image: it’s Andrew Lawrence’s “you know the ones” tweet)

    • johne@denvr.social
      12·
      5 months ago

      @mii
      I really didn’t think the second part of “Those who don’t learn history” was going to be so literal.

    • ebu@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      5 months ago

      Maybe I’m missing something.

      translation: thinking about this too much, or at all really, would be disastrous for my political ideology and ego, so someone else please waste their time and energy typing up a reply i won’t read, so i can continue having the image of an intellectual engaged in vigorous debate without actually having to do anything

      • deborah@awful.systemsEnglish
        14·
        5 months ago

        I suspect Elon’s pretty comfortable with his political ideology and ego, tbh. But I agree with the second part.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        5 months ago

        Imho that is just plausible deniability, just asking questions style shit. So news papers can keep writing ‘his politics are so vague, we don’t know’ while he keeps unbanning fascists on twitter.

    • William B Peckham@techhub.social
      29·
      5 months ago

      @mii @blakestacey I cannot and will not argue about your points, they’re absolutely valid. The words you’re using however are not correct. Nazis are fascists, as are these right wing monsters. They are antisocialist, not socialists. They are against socialism and against democracy and only for their own brand of autocracy.

      • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
        161·
        5 months ago

        “National socialism” is the term the Nazis invented to describe themselves. “Nazi” is the abbreviation of the term “national socialism”. Could be good to know.

        • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
          23·
          5 months ago

          also good to point out for someone just finding out about this:

          (1) The name is a lie in the same way “the democratic people’s republic of north korea” is. So Peckham is absolutely correct that the Nazis hated socialists and were not socialists, as evidenced by the fact that they tried to kill all of them.

          (2) The modern version of this lie is pretending the Nazis were socialists, and it’s a very common tactic in the far right. So Peckham is correct that we should not call them socialists, it’s just that using the term “national socialist” doesn’t actually imply you think they are socialists.

          (3) They did spring originally from the fusing of former socialist idealogues with the far right. So as with many massively successful lies there is a distant evolutionary relationship to something true.

          • self@awful.systemsEnglish
            22·
            5 months ago

            no, nobody here is particularly shocked that fascists would lie about being socialists

          • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
            13·
            5 months ago

            don’t be the annoying pedant; we’re fully capable of understanding that the “national socialist german workers’ party” was not a socialist party (and that a “nazi” is a pejorative and was from the start), that the phrase “marxist-leninist” is generally used to mean “left-authoritarian but want to pretend it isn’t”, that the “communist party of the soviet union” was actually presiding over a project of building an authoritarian state capitalism, and that the “republican” party in the united states is trying to make the united states a theocratic dictatorship.

  • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    19·
    5 months ago

    This fucking thread on HN right now.

    OP is an enlightened freelance webdeveloper who is very scared about ghosts from their computer.

    “I find myself in a unique position here, as my diverse background and experiences have given me a perspective that allows me to see the potential impact of AI more clearly than large parts of the society I’m living in”

    Another poster is also very scared about ghosts from the computer and converted their entire net-worth into NVidia shares. Now that they are heavily invested in a company deeply entangled with ghosts from the computer the apocalypse basically has to happen. After all it couldn’t be that they overreacted.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    5 months ago

    CW:

    spoiler

    Dongs, Blood and Thunder, Victory at Sea, Child birth, Scented Candles

    So yeah…remember that manly Roko post from last week where he manplained how much men don’t need women? Oglaf did it first.

    This is Roko’s ideal future; Roko’s Modern Life, if you like.

    (NSFW)

    https://www.oglaf.com/dark-miasma/ (part 1 of 24 lol)

    https://www.oglaf.com/burningjewels/

    But nature finds a way:

    https://www.oglaf.com/honor/

    https://www.oglaf.com/son-of-kronar/

    https://www.oglaf.com/son-of-kronar/2/

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      5 months ago

      Blood and Thunder, Victory at Sea, (…), Scented Candles

      I’m sorry what is any of this. I’m scared to click any of the things since I can’t even comprehend the content warning.

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        5 months ago

        Sorry! I leaned too hard on the inside jokes. Oglaf is a pretty successful fantasy-themed web comic with adult humor. It’s nothing you’d need therapy to get over, though it has more nudity than you’d want your boss to notice if they walked by your desk.

        “Blood and Thunder” was heavily memed around a dozen years ago.

        • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          5 months ago

          I’ve been around internet enough to expect “Scented Candles” to be some insanely disgusting psychosexual performance art, not… literal fucking candles.

            • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
              10·
              5 months ago

              and it’s remarkably wholesome, in a way. it’s never particularly gross or over the line, it’s always oglaf

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      5 months ago

      This has got to be some sort of sucker filter, like it’s not that he particularly means it, it’s that he is after the exact type of rube who is unfazed by naked contrarianism and the categorically preposterous so long as it’s said with a straight face,.

      Maybe there’s something to the whole pick up artistry but for nailing VCs thing.

      • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        5 months ago

        It really is as simple as that. The dude got a fair bit of attention from his LSTM blog post and got addicted. Turns out, you can’t churn out awesome blog posts that often so you gotta switch to the harder stuff.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      5 months ago

      I also hate movies where I can see the actual action going on and it isn’t all shaky cam and cuts cuts cuts.

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      5 months ago

      I bet that guy watches anime on 2x speed and skips parts without dialog to feel more “productive”.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      5 months ago

      according to modern film scholars, this cultural shift was brought about by the lasting audience impact of that scene in Speed (1994) where the bus fucking noclips across a gap while pretending there’s a ramp it’s using to jump (or Keanu made it pop a wheelie?)

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
        13·
        5 months ago

        “Are you telling me I can jump a bus across a 50 foot gap at 67 miles per hour?”

        “No Neo, I’m telling you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.”

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      5 months ago

      Who? Is that some indie movie director?

      Andrej Karpathy is a former director of AI at Tesla and a founding member of OpenAI

      So just a rando with a stupid opinion. Go back to your totally-not-naive AGI vision board.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    5 months ago

    iterm2 update, moving the shit out of the core application (like it probably should’ve been in the first place):

    3.5.1

This release adds some safety valves to eliminate
the risk of private information leaving the
terminal via the AI endpoints. While an API key
and explicit user action were always needed to use
AI features, some users asked for an impenetrable
firewall for safety and regulatory purposes.

To that end, there are three relevant changes:

1. Code that communicates with AI providers such
as OpenAI has been moved into a plugin that you
must install separately. Enterprise system admins
can block bundle id com.googlecode.iterm2.iTermAI
to prevent it from being installed in the first
place.

See here for details:
https://iterm2.com/ai-plugin.html

2. In addition, you must manually enable AI
features in Settings. Doing so requires admin
access.

3. Enterprise administrators who wish to disable
iTerm2's AI access may set the user default
GenerativeAIAllowed to False in their MDM systems.

    still never received a reply email from the author to my mail. wonder what they think/have learned of this experience tho

    • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      5 months ago

      I’m afraid their character has been exposed

      I uninstalled when they announced it but this week’s news says it’s time to uninstall macos too

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        5 months ago

        For the moment, I’m choosing to believe the following: 1) that itermdev was operating under hyped-engineer mode and choosing cluelessly as a result (and I sorely hope they learned something through this), 2) that Apple is too selfish to go hard on openai (because it means less money for them)

        #2 I’m a smidge more certain about

        But both of them are deeply “ugh, fuck” kinda feelings for me.

      • counteractor@pawoo.net
        6·
        5 months ago

        I seem to remember iTerm doing something weird about 10 years ago, like adding telemetry, but I can’t find it…

          • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
            8·
            5 months ago

            iTerm2’s leak issue was first discovered ten months ago. iTerm2’s creator initially reacted by adding an option to iTerm 3.0.13 that allowed users to disable DNS lookups. The feature remained turned on by default for new and existing installations.

            jfc

            • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
              9·
              5 months ago

              to get on my soapbox for a moment: iterm2 is in objc, which still has a lot of the ancillary problems that C has. testing properly is one of them - I can easily see such kind of fuckups slipping past by simple virtue of human error, possibly helped along by shitty tools/choices[0]. for example, I know of nothing in C-land that enables property-based testing, and from a quick check it seems that XCTest also runs on the human-enumerated-tests philosophy. so if no-one writes the test that’ll catch it, it could at best be caught by accident (through something else maybe triggering it).

              and people are also really fucking bad at thinking in/about side effects. even a lot of systems thinkers seem to fuck that up.

              /soapbox

              [0] - I was recently debugging why a particular piece of Go software wasn’t outputting anything I was expecting at the log level I had it set. quickly went to its repo, glanced at the code just to check if my expectation was right, then popped a message to a friend who deals with more Go than I do (which is near-nil, because it is a GARBAGE FUCKING LANGUAGE OF AND CAUSING NIGHTMARES, gah). he reminded me of the fact that Go had fairly recently fixed a bug in its stdlib logging library that had fucked up which levels it would handle things, due to an error in the fucking switch statement. for the stdlib goddamn logger. a bug which had been there for over 2y iirc.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      5 months ago

      Can you gaslight people into thinking burnout is good, actually? HN gives it the ol’ college try

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      5 months ago

      I mean, it is a “learning experience” in the same way a car crash is technically both an experience and something you probably didn’t know first hand before.

    • ebu@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      5 months ago

      NullBulge

      oh you know it was some furries

      edit: their website (now down, but up on the wayback machine) uses ai-generated furry art, which few self-respecting furries (much less hacktivist ones) would touch with a ten-foot pole. or at least, the ones in the furry circles i keep. so it could very well just be opportunists

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        5 months ago

        re your edit, well furry art could be traced back to the creator of the art/or the person who commissioned it, so using AI shit for opsec isn’t totally strange.

        • ebu@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          5 months ago

          that’s one possible reason, yeah. just seems like a really odd choice – much like the fact that they dislike “crypto promotion” but still accept payment for secrets in crypto. doesn’t feel like it would be that hard to find a sympathetic furry artist willing to draw in a nondistinct style or keep work under wraps. idk

          the only reason it seems odd to me is that the overwhelming majority of furries either actively dislike or hate “ai art”. maybe they’re the odd ones out, or they just don’t care for a throwaway group

  • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    5 months ago

    need a meme image that represents the way Apple is legitimising openai after all the crypto degens were desperate for apple to legitimise nfts. the jealous hot mess rejected for another hot mess

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      5 months ago

      degens

      Not your fault, but I really dislike this word and wish people wouldn’t start copying it from the cryptobros. Not a fan of calling people degenerates.

      • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        5 months ago

        fair shake. I never intended it as a shortened word, just a crypto word in itself. consider this my last use

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        5 months ago

        The response of the grant evaluator is even worse. Just excuses, no admission that they fucked up. Barely even a consideration that this is the sort of thing people have done with flash games, and created in literal weekends at game jams

        • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          5 months ago

          Obviously the most effective of altruisms is whatever is most likely to create more paperclip believers. The EA games (it’s in the game!) philanthropic singularity will allow us to reach the next stage of human evolution: all economic output devoted to mosquito nets and button press simulators.

        • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          5 months ago

          Nah man we had so much fucking dosh flowing in we had no idea what to even do with it! I mean, how could I possibly resist not allocating some of it to my friends?

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

      But wait, the game developer wrote a story called Singularity 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/20240302011145/https://singularity1999.tv/

      I’m not sure I’m brave / bored enough to read.

      The sim city clone looks like it could have been neat with some more love, it has a bit of a Streets of SimCity / SimCopter vibe to the aesthetics which was my jam back in the day. Though from the reviews it looks like it made the decision of shying away from low level management aspects or angry headlines yelling at you for your dumb city building choices (so I wouldn’t have played it for that reason, is it even sim city without being told “you’re going to regret this”??)

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

          I enjoyed it for what it was (helicopter crimes simulator), but lemme tell you the real fun to be had was in Streets of SimCity.

          From the level editor, to the soundtrack (I considered it to be edgy at the time), to the bugs (if you don’t create launchers by self-intersecting bridges in SCURK then what are you even doing?), to the ridiculous campaigns and the ability to blow up a nuclear reactor. I didn’t even mind that the graphics looked like sawdust.

          Come to think of it I always liked blowing up the nukes as a kid, so I also considered Recoil (the tank game) to be the peak of entertainment.