this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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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.

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 21 points 7 months ago (9 children)

Go check your privacy settings in Firefox - they've switched on sending data to advertisers by default as of Firefox 128. Even Google sent this setting out default off, probably having spoken to an actual lawyer who mentioned the GDPR.

[–] mii@awful.systems 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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.systems 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

(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.systems 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

this is not people's laziness; it's that the practice is deceptive. don't reinforce the business narrative.

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[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 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?”

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[–] zbyte64@awful.systems 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 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?

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 7 months ago (3 children)

we've reached some zenith of insane facebook AI slop

hot Japanese cabin crew, barefoot, on a farm, with Jesus

(image)

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 14 points 7 months ago (2 children)

a deficiency of tractors in the training data

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 20 points 7 months ago (1 children)

a deficiency of tractors in the training data

Just one more dataset bro, i promise bro just one more dataset and it'll fix everything bro. bro just one more dataset

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago

I'm also glad to see that whatever incremental improvements have been made the system is still unable to consistently do hands.

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 12 points 7 months ago (1 children)

with south california band reject jesus, no less

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

we think that's supposed to be Korean or Japanese Jesus, insofar as anything out of an AI is supposed to be anything

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 7 months ago

🎶 reach out and touch fAIth / your own personal jesus 🎶

(....sorry)

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 7 months ago

🎶 Three ladies! / deedle-dee-dee-dee-deet / Three ladies! / And I'm the Son of Man, Ja! 🎶

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

If Books Could Kill back with Hanania's piece of work https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/afe6b965e80359c1edbb86f78bde3997

opening line "This book's so fucking stupid, I regret choosing it"

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[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 13 points 7 months ago (3 children)

https://t.co/rBxJwxtqDl

Medium article about Yud came across my dash (I hope the link works).

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 17 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Here's a link that bypasses the URL shortener.

Also: ew.

Perilous Waif follows the story of its narrator Alice Long, a cybernetically enhanced orphan with a variety of superhuman powers in the 25th century. One of these enhancements causes Alice’s body to grow very fast, giving her the body of a thirteen year old at just age six.

nopetopus

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 7 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.systems 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

My god this sounds boring as shit

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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".

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 11 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

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.ee 12 points 7 months ago (2 children)

"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.systems 11 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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.systems 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 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.systems 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.ee 11 points 7 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.systems 10 points 7 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.de 9 points 7 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

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)
[–] sinedpick@awful.systems 12 points 7 months ago

The "Thank you Grock" at the bottom made my day

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)
[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

That feels like a too perfect tweet, which I also couldn't find a direct link to. So I'm going to assume it was faked. Did find these prophetic words however, Xcancel

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

friend mentioned that dril has posted that it's a fake (but don't have link handy)

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 7 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.systems 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.systems 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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