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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    what’s the over/under on the spruce pine thing causing promptfondlers and their ilk to suddenly not be able to get chips, and then hit a(n even more concrete) ceiling?

    (I know there may be some of the stuff in stockpiles awaiting fabrication, but still, can’t be enough to withstand that shock)

    • ShakingMyHead@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      Building 5-7 5GW facilities full of GPUs is going to be an extremely large amount of silicon. Not to mention the 25-35 nuclear power plants they apparently want to build to power them.
      So on the list of things not happening…

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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        6 months ago

        that would be 25-35 reactors, as long as cooling is available you can just put them in one place. 5GW is around size of largest european nuclear powerplants (Zaporozhian, 5.7GW; Gravelines, 5.4GW; six blocks each) or around energy consumption of decently-sized euro country like Ireland, Hungary or Bulgaria. 25GW is electricity consumption of Poland, 30GW UK, 35GW Spain

        this is not happening hardest because by the time they’d get permits for NPP they’ll get bankrupt because bubble will be over

        • ShakingMyHead@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          The theoretical Three Mile Island datacentre is probably the end-point of all of this. I think that what they build there (should it actually happen) has to be AGI. Like, unambiguously AGI. Where even the most hardline AI skeptics will react with “Holy shit they actually did it.”

          Anything less and it’ll be nearly impossible to justify building 5 nuclear reactors to just power one of these datacentres.

          So even if it is happening, it’s still not happening.

        • bitofhope@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          Gonna build enough clean energy to power a medium sized industrialized nation just to waste it all on videos of babies dressed up as shrimp jesus.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      If we’re lucky, it’ll cut off promptfondlers’ supply of silicon and help bring this entire bubble crashing down.

      It’ll probably also cause major shockwaves for the tech industry at large, but by this point I hold nothing but unfiltered hate for everyone and everything in Silicon Valley, so fuck them.

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

      I’m dead. At least the Rust Evangelism Strike Force finally got to have their theocracy

  • maol@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    I didn’t realize I was still signed up to emails from NanoWrimo (I tried to do the challenge a few years ago) and received this “we’re sorry” email from them today. O can’t really bring myself to read and sneer at the whole thing, but I’m pasting the full text below because I’m not sure if this is public anywhere else.

    spoiler

    Supporting and uplifting writers is at the heart of this organization. One priority this year has been a return to our mission, and deep thinking about what is in-scope for an organization of our size.

    National Novel Writing Month To Our NaNoWriMo Community:

    There is no way to begin this letter other than to apologize for the harm and confusion we caused last month with our comments about Artificial Intelligence (AI). We failed to contextualize our reasons for making this statement, we chose poor wording to explain some of our thinking, and we failed to acknowledge the harm done to some writers by bad actors in the generative AI space. Our goal at the time was not to broadcast a comprehensive statement that reflected our full sentiments about AI, and we didn’t anticipate that our post would be treated as such. Earlier posts about AI in our FAQs from more than a year ago spoke similarly to our neutrality and garnered little attention.

    We don’t want to use this space to repeat the content of the full apology we posted in the wake of our original statements. But we do want to raise why this position is critical to the spirit—and to the future—of NaNoWriMo.

    Supporting and uplifting writers is at the heart of what we do. Our stated mission is “to provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page”. Our comments last month were prompted by intense harassment and bullying we were seeing on our social media channels, which specifically involved AI. When our spaces become overwhelmed with issues that don’t relate to our core offering, and that are venomous in tone, our ability to cheer on writers is seriously derailed.

    One priority this year has been a return to our mission, and deep thinking about what is in-scope for an organization of our size. A year ago, we were attempting to do too much, and we were doing some of it poorly. Though we admire the many writers’ advocacy groups that function as guilds and that take on industry issues, that isn’t part of our mission. Reshaping our core programs in ways that are safe for all community members, that are operationally sound, that are legally compliant, and that are mission-aligned, is our focus.

    So, what have we done this year to draw boundaries around our scope, promote community safety, and return to our core purpose?

    We ended our practice of hosting unrestricted, all-ages spaces on NaNoWriMo.org and made major website changes. Such safety measures to protect young Wrimos were long overdue.

    We stopped the practice of allowing anyone to self-identify as an educator on our YWP website and contracted an outside vendor to certify educators. We placed controls on social features for young writers and we’re on the brink of relaunch.

    We redesigned our volunteer program and brought it into legal compliance. Previously, none of our ~800 global volunteers had undergone identity verification, background checks, or training that meets nonprofit standards and that complies with California law. We are gradually reinstating volunteers.

    We admitted there are spaces that we can’t moderate. We ended our policy of endorsing Discord servers and local Facebook groups that our staff had no purview over. We paused the NaNoWriMo forums pending serious overhaul. We redesigned our training to better-prepare returning moderators to support our community standards.

    We revised our Codes of Conduct to clarify our guidelines and to improve our culture. This was in direct response to a November 2023 board investigation of moderation complaints.

    We proactively made staffing changes. We took seriously last year’s allegations of child endangerment and other complaints and inspected the conditions that allowed such breaches to occur. No employee who played a role in the staff misconduct the Board investigated remains with the organization.

    Beyond this, we’re planning more broadly for NaNoWriMo’s future. Since 2022, the Board has been in conversation about our 25th Anniversary (which we kick off this year) and what that should mean. The joy, magic, and community that NaNoWriMo has created over the years is nothing short of miraculous. And yet, we are not delivering the website experience and tools that most writers need and expect; we’ve had much work to do around safety and compliance; and the organization has operated at a budget deficit for four of the past six years.

    What we want you to know is that we’re fighting hard for the organization, and that providing a safer environment, with a better user interface, that delivers on our mission and lives up to our values is our goal. We also want you to know that we are a small, imperfect team that is doing our best to communicate well and proactively. Since last November, we’ve issued twelve official communications and created 40+ FAQs. A visit to that page will underscore that we don’t harvest your data, that no member of our Board of Directors said we did, and that there are plenty of ways to participate, even if your region is still without an ML.

    With all that said, we’re one month away! Thousands of Wrimos have already officially registered and you can, too! Our team is heads-down, updating resources for this year’s challenge and getting a lot of exciting programming staged and ready. If you’re writing this season, we’re here for you and are dedicated, as ever, to helping you meet your creative goals!

    In community,

    The NaNoWriMo Team

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      I don’t have the broader context to comment on the changes they discussed regarding child endangerment and community standards apart from “Wait… oh my God you weren’t already doing that???”

      But it’s such a huge pull back to go from “hating AI is ableist and basically Hilter” to “uhhhh guys we’ve had our plates full cleaning up the mess and the most we’ll say about AI is to stop being assholes about it on our forums.” Clearly there’s still a lot of cleaning up to do at some level.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      God that’s exhausting. Wasn’t Nanowrimo supposed to be a fun thing at some point? Is there anyone in the world who thinks this sort of scummy PR language is attractive?

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    as seen via jwz, the tail wagging the dog continues (archive) at mozilla

    “if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em” but the wrong way around. I guess they got tired of begging google for money?

    And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet

    this tracks analogously to something I’ve been saying for a while as well, but with some differences. one of the most notable is the misrepresentation here of “the internet”, in the stead of “all the entities playing the online advertising game to extract from everyone else”

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      Thanks I hate it.

      [Advertising is] the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.

      Content is a scarce resource y’know. Heaven forbid the content farms go out of business; or we might end up having to read Sherlock Holmes isekai fanfiction rather than a content farm’s two paragraphs and three screen-fulls of ads surrounding the tweet du jour. That would be terrible actually quite nice.

      We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history

      WTF. How is it possible for a company to be this self-congratulatory about entering the advertising space?! Someone needs to fork Firefox.

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      I guess they got tired of begging google for money?

      If the stars come right soon, there may not be a Google to beg for money

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      i … have no idea whatsoever what the use case is here … you make the chatbot generate the code instead of cloning the repo? or it’s like generating an API that doesn’t work or something?

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        Think it is an attempt to make it easier to feed somebodies work into a LLM. So you know, stealing.

        • Steve@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          Yeah it just collates everything in the repo into a single text file so you can upload that to the shit machine

            • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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              6 months ago

              Ok I found a similar tool in the tweets replies and here’s what it suggests prompting the chatbot with

              This file contains my entire codebase. Please review the overall structure and suggest any improvements or refactoring opportunities, focusing on maintainability and scalability.

              Based on the codebase in this file, please generate a detailed README.md that includes an overview of the project, its main features, setup instructions, and usage examples.

              Analyze the code in this file and suggest a comprehensive set of unit tests for the main functions and classes. Include edge cases and potential error scenarios.

              Review the codebase for adherence to coding best practices and industry standards. Identify areas where the code could be improved in terms of readability, maintainability, and efficiency. Suggest specific changes to align the code with best practices.

              This file contains the entire codebase of library. Please provide a comprehensive overview of the library, including its main purpose, key features, and overall architecture.

              These people use chatbots daily yet still seem to be under the impression that LLMs are competent. I don’t even know what to say.

          • self@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            fucking… that’s all? some shit you can do moments after learning about the GitHub API for the first time? and I shouldn’t be surprised, but this is the code that people were fellating in the Twitter comments and/or using to advertise their own shitware?

            Been waiting for this since i opened my github account. 🙏🏼

            fucker, how are you like this?

  • Steve@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    My current hyperfixation is Ecosia, maker of “the greenest search engine” (already problematic) implementing a wrapped-chatgpt chat bot and saying it has a “green mode” which is not some kind of solar-powered, ethically-sound, generative AI, but rather an instructive prompt to only give answers relating to sustainable business models etc etc.

    See my thread here https://xcancel.com/fasterandworse/status/1837831731577000320

    I’m starting to reach out to them wherever I can because for some reason this one is keeping me up at night.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      That is a good username. Also very scummy business practices. I have a quite big dislike for people who pull that kind of shit.

      • Steve@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        Thanks! I thought it shows up on here too. Anyway, you can find me on all the places with that username

    • Steve@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      I have sent an email to their press enquiries contact asking for more information, but I don’t know if I have the “press” clout to warrant a response (I know I don’t)

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      They’re from Germany and made the rounds on the news here a few years back. They’re famous for basically donating all their profits to ecological projects, mostly for planting trees. These projects are publicly visible and auditable, so this at least isn’t bullshit.

      Under the hood they’re just another Bing wrapper (like DuckDuckGo).

      I actually kinda liked the project until they started adding a chatbot some months back. It was just such a weird decision because it has no benefits and is actively against their mission. Their reason for adding it was “user demand” which is the same bullshit Proton spewed and I don’t believe it.

      This green mode crap sounds really whack, lol. So I really wonder what’s up with that. I gotta admit that I thought they were really in it because they believed in their ecological idea (or at least their marketing did a great job convincing me) so this feels super weird.

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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    6 months ago

    Metal music festival Shell Shock II loses headliner, multiple bands after announcing Kyle Rittenhouse as guest

    Ex-headliners Evergreen Terrace: “Even after they offered to pull Kyle from the event, we discovered several associated entities that we simply do not agree with”

    the new headliner will be uh a Slipknot covers band

    organisers: “We have been silent. But we are prepping. The liberal mob attempted to destroy Shell Shock. But we will not allow it. This is now about more than a concert. This is a war of ideology.” yeah you have a great show guys

  • nightsky@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    So, today MS publishes this blog post about something with AI. It starts with “We’re living through a technological paradigm shift.”… and right there I didn’t bother reading the rest of it because I don’t want to expose my brain to it further.

    But what I found funny is that also today, there’s this news: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-hololens-2-discontinuation-support

    So Hololens is discontinued… you know… AR… the last supposedly big paradigm shift that was supposedly going to change everything.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.

      It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

      Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!

      With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing life’s complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. […], while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.

      (Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)

      It’s interesting that someone thought “smoothing life’s complexities” is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.

      Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out life’s complexities without smoothing out people’s complexities, but it’s not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and that’s if it actually worked, which it doesn’t).

      I’ve felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole it’s hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but it’s a shame we couldn’t as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).

      Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

        call me when I can actually tange them

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        re: how can a chatbot help with life?

        This just their brains on science fiction, they think chatbot can help like the independent AI agents could in the science fiction they half remember. Or at least they think marketing it like that will appeal to people.

        A lot less, ‘Copilot make this list of bullet points into an email’ and more ‘Copilot, lock on the the intruder, close the bulkheads after them and flush it to the nearest trash compactor’.

        I think that ‘giving microsoft the power to do things in my behalf’ is quite an iffy decision to make, but that is just me. Ow look it autorenwed your licenses for you, and bought a subscription Copaint, it even got you a deal not 240 dollars per year, but 120, a steal!

        • gerikson@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          I am neutral on MSFT - to me it’s a bog standard transnational company with better than most working conditions because it’s not making stuff you can make in sweatshops. But it’s really impressive how they’ve gone from the beige-box tyranny of Apple’s 1984 ad, via the “Halloween Papers” era where they were every Linux weenie’s biggest boogeyman, to today’s bland backer of OpenAI. Note that they’re not really advertising it. How many people who are horrified by Copilot’s Recall feature also know they’re the biggest investor in the company that makes ChatGPT?

          From a corporate governance perspective, being so central to the tech industry for so long is kinda impressive.

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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            6 months ago

            this is why i keep hammering on how, functionally, OpenAI is a branch of MS and they’re only separate so OpenAI’s reputation doesn’t stain MS.

          • istewart@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            Despite the industry’s deeply ingrained neophilia, I think it speaks to the importance of backwards compatibility and legacy systems.

            I can’t help but think that the genAI craze will end up being a regrettable side-quest along the path to “coding for non-programmers” akin to Visual Basic. But hey, I bet there’s a lot more legacy VB apps being kept alive out there than anyone would be comfortable with.

            • gerikson@awful.systems
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              6 months ago

              Despite having been one of those Linux weenies back in the day I have a lot of respect for the amount of work MS puts into backwards compatibility, dev tool upkeep, etc. And now they’re actually Open Source! Hell hath frozen over (or they realized no universities wanted to pay Visual Studio licenses and lost a couple of generations of coders to Linux)

              • froztbyte@awful.systems
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                6 months ago

                And now they’re actually Open Source

                sorta, but it’s a veneer in furtherance of other goals (telemetry, market dominance, and control)

                one of the things I do with my computers is run LittleSnitch in always-prompt mode (LS is an app-level firewalling solution on macos), and hooo boy do I hate it when I end up having to open/touch vscode for some reason. the last time I did, I spent most of the first 5 minutes being prompted for (undeclared!) connections vscode attempted to make in the name of telemetry. similar experience with vscodium interacting with packages, and a bunch of their toolchains

              • bitofhope@awful.systems
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                6 months ago

                And now they’re actually Open Source!

                Eh, kind of but also not. VS Code is proprietary, but you have the vscode:vscodium::chrome:chromium thing. Unlike in Chromium’s case, the proprietary version actually comes with some amenities one might actually care about (mainly in the plugin repository).

                You could say Open Source got some big wins in 2010s, leading to MSFT doing their fair share of contributions to Free software and openwashing as much of the rest as they can manage, but let’s not kid ourselves. They wouldn’t need to openwash if most of their stuff weren’t still proprietary. Last I checked MSVC, SQL Server, Azure, Copilot, IIS, Power BI, and the DirectX SDKs were all totally closed and jealously guarded.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          I think it’s also a case of thinking about form before function. It’s not quite as bad a case as the metaverse nonsense was, but there’s still a lack of curiosity about the sci-fi they read. In most stories that treat AI as anything less than a god, the replacement of people with artificial tools is about either what gets lost (the I, Robot movie, Wall-E) or the fact that effectively replacing people requires creating something with the same moral worth (Blade Runner, I, Robot, the Aasimov collection, etc).

      • swlabr@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        perhaps… one of the most

        Load bearing words!

        life’s complexities

        I don’t think there’s an interpretation of this phrase in which AI actually helps.

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    nasb, fedi is for losers

    been feeling this for a while too and wondering how to put it into words. especially in light of all the techfash, pressing climate and general market problems, etc

    one of the things I’ve been holding onto (hoping in?) is my estimation/belief that I don’t think the current state of all the deeply-fucked systems is inherently stable, or viable. as I’ve said here before, that very instability is part of why so many of them are engaged in trying to set things up to protect those self-same systems, as they know the swingback is coming and they want to make it as hard as possible to claw things back from them

    but how long until it breaks, and with how much splash damage, are things I haven’t really been able to estimate

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      You know that famous Keynes quote, right. To paraphrase: “the tech sector can remain irrational for longer than the planet can remain habitable”.

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      My computer crashed as I was writing a response. In short:

      I think fedi existing and having the userbase it has is “victory” enough. Capitalism and fascism push us to think “winning” and “success” are the greatest thing to aspire to. To “win” over capitalism and fascism will require an unlearning and disavowal of those aspirations.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        This is absolutely an important idea, but in the context of anti-capitalism I think there’s a kind of catch-22 at play. The alternative systems that operate under a capitalist paradigm have serious externalities that come back to bite us whether we engage or not with them. My wife and I have spent some late nights over the last week trying to help family and friends in North Carolina keep track of which roads are usable, who is or isn’t confirmed to be alive yet, etc. Maybe I’m a little extra feisty about climate change today, but it seems like while the alternative doesn’t have to “win” in the same way that capitalists want to we do still need them to lose. Existing independently in parallel isn’t a sustainable end goal, though I do agree that parallel structures are an important part of the solution.

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        oh yeah, I agree quite strongly with that sentiment too (and that’s why I didn’t re-use the words of the post I linked)

        the fedi has some pretty dire threats (shit like threads etc) that I do think it needs to deal with by way of more teeth (consider it self-protective boundary setting), but in general I think a lot of the current state of it satisfying people just for being happy to be themselves is perfectly fine and good

        side note: part of my problem is that my thinking on matters is a bit waterlogged due to shortage of knowledge/references, and backfilling that is … well, hard to find the right resources for reading, and perpetual spoon shortage. I’ve been working my way through some Graeber and some other stuff, but very slowly and need more things. also doesn’t help that ZA is, functionally, a desert island

        • o7___o7@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          Side note:…

          Man I feel this. A constant, nagging feeling of “I should read theory,” but man, I hate reading theory.

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        musk… chess… post… ?

        actually, forget I asked. I’ve had an eventful enough week of bullshit, and am going to close my friday off with some careless daydrinking and relaxation

        (e: I would add: good god “musk chess post” must be one of the craziest strings of words I’ve seen in a while)

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    I’m just thinking about all the reply guys that come here defending autoplag, specifically with this idea:

    “GPT is great when I want to turn a list of bullet points into an eloquent email”

    Hey, you butts, just send the bullet points! What are you, a high schooler? Nobody has time for essays, much less autoplagged slop.

    • zogwarg@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      No no no it’s fine! You get the word shuffler to deshuffle the—eloquently—shuffled paragraphs back into nice and tidy bullet points. And I have an idea! You could get an LLM to add metadata to the email to preserve the original bullet points, so the recipient LLM has extra interpolation room to choose to ignore the original list, but keep the—much more correct and eloquent, and with much better emphasis—hallucinated ones.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      6 months ago

      Cloudflare is such a weird company in various ways. Saying loudly that they can’t judge groups when people ask them not to support the neo-nazis, harassers and worse (they have moved on this under pressure, but it takes a lot of pressure). But then they do this.

      • FredFig@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        Wasn’t the first time he shut down 8chan (or was it Kiwifarms? Something along the lines), he immediately came out to say “It’s really bad that I have the power to take down a website of shitheads.” Just seemed like everything about his ideology is confused.

        • bitofhope@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          Nobody told him to make his CDN so dominant in the market. He kinda chose to have this power. If you think Cloudflare’s services are some kind of a universal inalienable right, make them free, you pussy. Be a philantropist, share that sweet bandwidth with the poor. Gimme a /24, coward. Why are you taking money for a basic necessity, you monster?

          Y’all can thank me for taking down 8ch and KF, because I also do not run hosting infrastructure for either of them. Same goes to all of you who do not run a CDN that welcomes nazi websites. Thank you for your service.

        • rook@awful.systems
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          6 months ago

          There’s nothing confused about his ideology. Anything to do with porn or sex work will get kicked to the curb without a second thought, but fascists and bigots will be defended up to the point where they try to restart sectarian violence in Ireland (which was the final act of kiwi farms, from recollection. Presumably even the ceo couldn’t defend them at that point, though I bet he tried).

          Dude doesn’t give a shit about free speech, or lament the power he’s ended up with. He just really loves fascism.

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            Anything to do with porn or sex work will get kicked to the curb without a second thought

            can’t say why but I can say this is not completely/100% true; however

            but fascists and bigots will be defended up to the point where they try to restart sectarian violence

            yup

            please don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to bat for cloudflare. the company is detestable and problematic in extremely many dimensions

            in this particular case and wrt the dude himself, it indeed appears to be much about the power. in the case of the commentary FredFig references, I suspect that came through a lens of “it is bad that I can do this [where “this” is “acquiesce to societal pressure to silence people I don’t wish to silence”]”. didn’t see the comment at the time though, so I have no idea if it was dogwhistled or what at the time

      • Steve@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        I guess I should be clear this is not an endorsement of cloudflare, just fun to see dickheads being dickheads to each other

  • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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    6 months ago

    Small FYI, not a sneer or anything, you can stop reading if you don’t know what the godotengine is. But if you do and hear of the fork, you can just ignore the fork. (the people involved also seem to be rather iffy, one guy who went crazy after somebody mentioned they would like gay relationships in his game, and some maga conspiracy theory style coder. That is going by the 3 normal people the account follows (out of 5) who I assume are behind it).

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        Of course it could get worse.

        Lol at them just removing the godot donation links/list of donors and just replacing it with their own. What a grift.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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      6 months ago

      from the godot discord:

      godotclayjohn • 20h ago •

      fund.godotengine.org!

      Obviously I can’t share access to the backend, but the numbers on the side are kept up to date. Last week we went down by about €5,000 when a corporate sponsorship expired.

      Since Friday morning we lost €170/month in sponsorships but gained €1,610/month in new sponsorships. In terms of numbers of people: 10 people have cancelled their donations so far and 74 new people have signed up.

      go woke, go 1400 EUR ahead and lose a pile of shitheads you never wanted

      • self@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        ahahaha that’s amazing

        it also pushed me to start learning Godot since its community seems awesome, and that’s definitely showing through on the docs so far — they go into so much depth on why Godot’s designed like it is, and what specifically it’s good for

        I’ve only just started, but it’s reminding me very positively of what Unreal Engine was for a brief period of time: a runtime for a powerful domain-specific scripting language that could be extended by native code when needed, targeting indie devs

        unfortunately Tim Sweeney kind of sucks at designing languages (though he used to do it a lot) so UnrealScript was a real fucking mess, and UE never really captured the indie market (cause you had to pay a fuckload for the privilege of writing native code) so UnrealScript got excised and the engine became “free” (as in free timeshare) and entirely refocused on developers pumping out AAA garbage and other whales (and, more charitably, anyone who needs an engine that can do state of the art graphics)

        Godot, so far, to me feels kind of like an Unreal Engine that didn’t fuck up with the indie market and also isn’t closed source greedware

        also apparently there’s a new Unreal scripting language? it’s got the Haskell guy behind it and it’s functional which is cool, but it’s also already bathed in horseshit:

        Verse is the new scripting language for Unreal Engine, first implemented in Fortnite.[11] Simon Peyton Jones, known for his contributions to the Haskell programming language, joined Epic Games in December 2021 as Engineering Fellow to work on Verse with his long-time colleague Lennart Augustsson and others.[12] Conceived by Sweeney,[13] it was officially presented at Haskell eXchange in December 2022 as an open source functional-logic language for the metaverse.[14] A research paper, titled The Verse Calculus: a Core Calculus for Functional Logic Programming, was also published.[15]

        The language was eventually launched in March 2023 as part of the release of the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) at the Game Developers Conference, with plans to be available to all Unreal Engine users by 2025.[11]

        so I guess Fortnite modders can weigh in on how good Haskell for Gaming is

        e: also, imagine if any of these pro gamers knew Godot is the Cassette Beasts and Cruelty Squad engine

      • self@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        the chuds have done their usual thing of throwing themselves on the ground and acting extremely injured by being blocked for violating the CoC of an open source project (via Liam at GamingOnLinux):

        what’s fucked is this is the exact same playbook as NixOS and Python, though this time Godot doesn’t seem to be taking any shit and that seems to be preventing those tactics from working. weird how easy it is to weather shit like this when you have a fucking spine and aren’t trying to retain fascist assholes

        image description

        Twitter posts by Rémi Verschelde (@Akien): I see misunderstanding around Godot blocking some users on its GitHub organization.

        • We’ve blocked 5 accounts so far
        • All opening issues with slurs, harassing contributors (breaching Godot’s CoC and GH’s ToS)
        • Blocking users does NOT prevent download of the engine or source

        Blocking users doesn’t even prevent them from reading issues and PRs, just interacting with them. You can read and download anything from a GitHub repository as an anonymous (not logged in) user. *git clone https://github.com/godotengine/godot… works for anyone with an Internet connection.

        Just adding as some asked - if you want to quote this to people who still believe we’re mass blocking people on GitHub and cutting them off their tech stack, feel free to grab a screenshot. I locked my account while the heat dies down, so you can’t easily link those tweets.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        6 months ago

        I have no idea what set the drama off btw, I have not really looked into it (could it be that this mod you are talking about was the unofficial mod the godot communication was talking about? Or is that a different mod? And did the redot (wait, re.? please tell me it isn’t a reference to the reeeee thing) people really pick the side of the n-word mod?)

        I did see that the guy who started redot basically only forked it and then went ‘any devs wanna take over this fork?’ Very I started the wiki, without even starting a wiki.

          • self@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            I want to pull quotes from that thread but it’s so satisfying in context to see the most toxic parts of a gaming community turn on each other

            and dear god are those some ugly fucking logos. my favorite is the one that’s just Redot Engine with a ridiculously overbearing letter R (not gonna repost them here for obvious trademark reasons — I’ve got the feeling these fellas might not have that part figured out)

            • o7___o7@awful.systems
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              6 months ago

              Apologies for crappy nitpicking on my part, but 4chan millennials really gotta learn to let go of impact font.

            • hrrrngh@awful.systems
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              6 months ago

              I think a dark theme with red accents would make sense.

              Oh HELL no that’s the same editor theme I’m using. How do I cast a spell to banish these people

              It was some Adobe-style theme I downloaded a long time ago but I guess I’m using the anti-woke theme now

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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          6 months ago

          apparently godot posted something about supporting LGBT in games? can’t find the original. then Grummz posted ragebait about it and the chuds flooded their github and discord with fuckwittery

          this is from like 5 min following links after reading your post

          • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            Looked at Grummz twitter, and looks like Notch is also getting involved. With friends like that.

            Amazing how this new crop of outrage merchants who touched some game code in the past make Derek Smart look measured and well balanced.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            Holy shit that is amazing. The thinnest skins. All of this over the promise by God not to flood the world again.

          • self@awful.systems
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            6 months ago

            wait, the “pre-built” engine these little shits are trying to bully a developer for using is fucking Unreal Engine 5?

            all wokes want is to use a notoriously advanced and difficult game engine owned by a right-wing asshole and that’s how they’re gonna destroy gaming. with the engine that gigantic studios use because writing an engine from scratch is a fucking money pit that never ends and you have to have a good fucking reason to do it

            also I’ve been trying to force my hands to not start a Bevy project ever since Tiny Glade (a beautiful, cozy 3D sandbox builder running on the Bevy engine) launched and Bevy is manual as hell (but fun to work with), so this is a good reminder that Godot is cool and I should finally learn it too

            • self@awful.systems
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              6 months ago

              also, holy fuck the reply guys are a plague on that post. is bluesky normally like that, or is it the blast radius from the gamers deciding they have a problem?

              • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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                6 months ago

                dunno if i have an unusual amount of blocked posters, but the ones i can see are fine? bsky is largely le home of le wokisme

                • self@awful.systems
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                  6 months ago

                  that’s probably it — logged out mastodon is probably just as bad. also the most aggressive reply guy’s take is “accounts for public projects should never block anyone and they should be required to debate the people yelling at them” which is, holy fuck, the most blockable thing I’ve ever seen

            • s3p5r@lemm.ee
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              6 months ago

              owned by a right-wing asshole

              Wait, what? Can I get some info or even just the right search terms to force Google to give me useful info? I know he’s done the eye-roll-worthy “no politics in my artform” bullshit but if there’s more I’ve missed, I’m keen to know.

              • self@awful.systems
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                6 months ago

                most of it’s on Twitter and therefore inaccessible to me, but Sweeney has a habit of falling all over himself to defend musk in nonsensical ways, and musk continuously returns the favor. the two of them boosting each other politically is something that keeps happening — a search for tim sweeney musk or similar should surface more recent examples without flooding you with “no politics in art” results (though that’s a dogwhistle too, so…)

                Sweeney has a wider track record of saying slimy fash shit on Twitter — it’s why he’s a meme on mastodon — but like I said, none of that’s accessible to me anymore. it fucking sucks that both of the programmers I idolized as a naive kid turned out to be huge fucking assholes though

                • s3p5r@lemm.ee
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                  6 months ago

                  Ugh. Thanks, yeah that’s good enough for me without even opening xcancel. My search for “Tim Sweeney conservative” only dredged up his land conservation purchases and the “stop being so divisive” / “no politics in art” dogwhistles which had previously made me suspicious, but I had mostly forgotten about. I quit Twitter many years ago so I missed that whole knobslobbering saga and didn’t think to include Musk after skimming today’s shitty Google “search” results.

                  Ah fuck, and Carmack too? Goddamn it. Twist the knife a little harder.

                  Fucking tech bros, always ruining tech.

                • gerikson@awful.systems
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                  6 months ago

                  Carmack has always struck me as the kind of cishet white GenX dude that gets more and more pissed that everything’s “political”, I just wanna code, man, why is everyone mad at me that he more or less inevitably falls into fascism. Sure games can be coded as “countercultural” but the genres that Doom and Quake represent are quasi-fascist already.

            • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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              6 months ago

              A common pattern of the angry anti-‘woke’ gamers is that they don’t know how games are made on any level, and they are kept, I think intentionally, in the dark by the people who are stirring the anti-‘woke’ craziness who should know better. And it is about every level, npc ai, engines, financial, external organization structures, community management, how prerelease footage is work in progress, etc etc. It is almost impressive how blind people are towards how their hobby creation works.

            • flavia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              6 months ago

              Godot is really fun to use and to develop in. They basically gamified documentation writing: they show you tooltips for your custom elements just like the classes provided by the engine with their excellent documentation. The engine has hot code reloading too. I have a puzzle game project that I’m working on now.

              • self@awful.systems
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                6 months ago

                that sounds awesome! godot in general seems to be a very practical game engine, and at this point I definitely want to do my next little experimental game project in Godot (with Rust, if the tooling for that is at all ready for production) so I have experience with at least one normal object-oriented game engine that isn’t an old unreal engine or idtech under my belt

                like I mentioned, I really like how Bevy works, but in its current state it isn’t really ready for rapid development. a bare Bevy project is literally just the ECS and system scheduler but with no runloop. the defaults get you a lot of basics like a runloop, good renderer, input handling, audio, and such, but from there you still have to decide how everything works in terms of game logic — even with third-party plugins for stuff like physics for example, you still have to write logic for what a collision means to each entity involved. I also don’t think bevy has a unified editor or live code reloading at all yet? so for each game you have to write an editor (which the engine helps with a little bit) and potentially a live reload implementation (which sounds like hell)