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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Just want to share this great term & definition “hyperkludge” coined by Jonathan Korman (@miniver on bsky and masto)
ehh. even in the original text it rapidly decays into anything that annoys him is a hyperkludge. Successful things have problems that are only problems of success.
Saying that Excel is not and never was a good solution for any problem feels like a rather blinkered, programmer-brained technique.
I love the word, the definition, but I agree with so few of his examples.
I latched on to it because it fit so well with my regular criticisms of tech products, particularly saas shit
After reading some of the counterpoints here, I began thinking about how I considered Excel a hyperkludge if you qualify it enough. I realized the qualifications apply to every programming language (good ol’ Turing Completeness). I think, in my case, the common scenario of
- this tool[1] is just a proof of concept/prototype
- it costs less to maintain our tool than to write a more appropriate solution from scratch
- our infrastructure is now the tool
had me erroneously criticizing the tool instead of its application[2]. In the case of Excel, I worked a few jobs where the spreadsheets used when the company was small led to an absolute nightmare after the company grew.
I appreciate the thoughtful responses from everyone. <3
1: Usually a spreadsheet, in my experience.
2: Noting that, while “it’s not the tool, it’s the application” is a common refrain from people using tools in shitty ways, there is a distinction between “this is the wrong tool for the job” and “this tool will hurt people”.
Examples off the top of my head:
- Almost everything about TCP/IP stack
- NETCONF
- YAML
- Most things related to cars and car infrastructure
- Alcohol
- Chiclet keyboards
- Unicode Han unification
- Layer 2 SDN
- Kubernetes
- JavaScript
- Disk partitioning
- UEFI
- Public transit fares
Edit: checked the link and was surprised our lists didn’t have any ones in common (though I considered including MS Excel).
- MS-DOS and Windows, of course…
- but, and this will get some boos, Unix as a workstation OS compared with every other non-windows workstation OS
@self @bitofhope UNIX is arguably the canonical example, see The UNIX-HATERS Handbook
If you step back and think about it, it is rather absurd that a time-sharing multi-user OS essentially took over for personal devices
I’m surprised that alphabetical lists are included. Maybe my brain has completely rotten, but keeping the data sorted is pretty neat for efficient processing
yeah that is an interesting example. I immediately applied the term to commercial products. Like Notion for example - funny because I always say Notion takes wikis which are well established in their usefulness and just slaps them into saas product with other things like docs and spreadsheets (also well established in their usefulness) - but he calls wikis themselves a hyperkludge but what superior thing did wikis kill by network effects?
this rules <3
Counterpoint: to what extent are hyperkludges actually a unique thing versus an aspect of how technologies and tools are integrated into human context? Like, one of the original examples is the TCP/IP stack, but as anyone who has had to wrangle multiple vendors can attest a lot of the value in that standardization necessarily comes from the network effects - the fact that it’s an accepted standard. The web couldn’t function if you had a bespoke protocol stack hand-made to elegantly handle the specific problems of a given application not just because of the difficulty in building that much software (i.e. network effects on the design and construction side) but because of how unwieldy and impractical it would be to get any of those applications in front of people. The fit of those tools for a given application is secondary to how much more cleanly the entire ecosystem can operate because they are more limited in number.
The OP also talks about how embedded the history of a given problem is in the solution which feels like the central explanation for this trend. In that sense a hyperkludge isn’t a unique pattern that some things fall into and more a way of indicating a particularly noteworthy whorl in the fractal infinikludge that is all human endeavors.
oh that’s pretty great
25475 O Jan 08 Duke University ( 42K) Help Us Evaluate New Personalized AI Learning Tool
groan
put an article in mdpi and you’ll get 70 of these per month
“The Publisher of the Journal “Nature” Is Emailing Authors of Scientific Papers, Offering to Sell Them AI Summaries of Their Own Work”, by Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism:
Springer Nature, the stalwart publisher of scientific journals including the prestigious Nature as well as the nearly 200-year-old magazine Scientific American, is approaching the authors of papers in its journals with AI-generated “Media Kits” to summarize and promote their research.
In an email to journal authors obtained by Futurism, Springer told the scientists that its AI tool will “maximize the impact” of their research, saying the $49 package will return “high-quality” outputs for marketing and communication purposes. The publisher’s sell for the package hinges on the argument that boiling down complex, jargon-laden research into digestible soundbites for press releases and social media copy can be difficult and time-consuming — making it, Springer asserts, a task worth automating.
ah yeah exactly what i needed: a button that burns a square km of rainforest with every press, that might generate an abstract (that i’ve already wrote) but wrong, or fake press release that goes nowhere and also is wrong, while at the same time sending what might be restricted data fuck knows where with pinky promise that they won’t blend it and force feed their imagined machine god
Earlier this week, for instance, the massive publishing body announced in a press release that it would be deploying a “new AI-driven tool” crafted to automate “editorial quality checks” and notify editors to “potentially unsuitable manuscripts”. The announcement adds that manuscripts may be held back from peer review if the AI tool deems them editorially unfit.
watch this to be used as a bludgeon against ESL authors. oh noes poor country people, go somewhere else because Computer Says No. then they decrease acceptance rate on their website
A Guy in India (specialist) approach to detection of slop will still work, but it’s not resistant to office politics of complaining that it’s not web scale and such. i can’t wait for collapse of this bubble
Does anyone else get tired of “read documentation and edit this text file to configure your app” Unix shit? I have no problem with the underlying configuration being a text-file (makes for a straightforward API), but do I really need to navigate to https://mpv.io/manual/master/#configuration-files and go through the rigamarole of figuring out which options I need to edit/include[0] because I misplaced (read:
sudo rm -rf /) my config file?
[0]: And there is always so much implicit bullshit. “By default, we summon Cthulhu on Tuesdays and Thursdays if the variable
summon_octopus_guyis unset.” It’s a fucking config file, my friends, can we just be explicit?Oh yeah. I recently wanted to configure something in pipewire… the idea was simple: just creating a boot-persistent audio loopback, i.e. connecting an audio input to an output. I gave up for now after looking at the config examples for that in the documentation. How can such a simple thing need such complex configuration?
As for losing configs, I’ve started to put all my hand-edited config files in a git repo on my NAS so at least I only have to figure out things once.
Personally I think it’s fine to have implicit defaults if you can make them sensible. Maybe ideally have a system-wide config like
/etc/someapp.confwith all the options included and set to defaults out of the box and then allow overrides in~/.config/someapp/someapp.confwhere you only need to specify whatever you want to differ from the system conf file.I personally disagree. I think in the era of “a megabyte is big,” this made sense, but in my opinion after parsing a config file with missing config data, we should print something indicating they are missing then error out. The existence of a reference config file with all options included would definitely help, but I think it’s no coincidence that there is no such config for mpv — why bother creating and maintaining one if the program will use the default value anyway?
tl;dr explicit is better than implicit
I dunno, MPV has like a million config options and I’ve set like three of them in my config. I would not prefer to maintain an enormous config file where I need to include a bajillion options I don’t care about just to play a video. Would I have to update my config every single time MPV adds, removes or renames an option, too?
At the end of the day you shouldn’t have to maintain anything in order to use a program, in my opinion (at least ideally). I think a “everything must be present in the file” type of config would require
lessno extra maintenance (assuming devs don’t do anything too silly). Additionally, while noting that my primary programming language is TeX and also that I am a dipshit, this just strikes me as an API-design problem. Alternative solutions could be:- multiple config files (I think mpv already supports this)
- semver style config (idk if this would be practical)
- a config-editing tool (i.e., what the overwhelming majority of applications do, by hiding the implementation details from the user)
I have thought about doing #3 for Sway (a sort of Sway-config editor). This does give me an idea, though: define a meta-format for specifying the variables, default values, allowed values, etc., for an arbitrary[0] program’s config file, and create a program that reads a meta-format file and presents a GUI for editing the config.
tbh i just lost my config file, forgot what i changed, and now i have to read documentation (and figure out which file the mpv flatpak uses for config)
[0]: maybe not too arbitrary
define a meta-format for specifying the variables, default values, allowed values, etc., for an arbitrary[0] program’s config file, and create a program that reads a meta-format file and presents a GUI for editing the config.
I’d kinda love this even if I’m editing config files in a text editor. emacs could use this with a major-mode or LSP to provide suggestions, validity checking, various rendered versions of the config, and guarantee interoperability with graphical tools (so that changes you make in an editor don’t get trampled by the UI, and vice versa)
I need an excuse to learn Rust and have wanted to do a “parse, don’t validate / make invalid states unrepresentable” project for a while. I will definitely share it if I get anything done.
definitely! that sounds like a great first Rust project.
Surely it’s better to specify those defaults in the config file and have the system just fail if the necessary flags aren’t present. Having worked in support I can vouch for the amount of suffering that could be avoided if more systems actually failed if some important configuration isn’t in place.
Surely it’s better to specify those defaults in the config file and have the system just fail if the necessary flags aren’t present.
Completely agree. I think this may just be an extension of the “you gotta know what you’re doing to code correctly in C” old school bullshit.
This is my biggest gripe with that nonsense. If you make it hard to do something well, you won’t end up with an elite series of uber-coders because there aren’t enough of those people to do all the programming that people want to be done. Instead you’ll see that much more software engineering done really goddamned badly and despite appearances at the time it turns out there is a maximum amount of shitty software the world can endure.
What’s great is even the very best “just use valgrind lol, lmao” folks make these errors all the time. It’s basically impossible to write correct C code generally — the best we can do is verify subsets of code (c.f. Rust’s
unsafekeyword). The memory-safety CVEs in EXT3/4 are proof of this, IMO, as if there were anyone able to write correct C code today, it would be Ted Ts’o.
Yud is against seed oils, right? Or was that Siskind? I have a vague memory of the topic coming up but was unable to substantiate it in the 22 seconds of archive-searching that I was willing to do.
yud, a technofascist, recently forming opinions against seed oils forms a poop ouroboros with the wellness to fascism pipeline.
Its Yud I think. As someone from Canola-land this shit really grinds my gears.
Ah, here’s the post I was thinking of; I missed it somehow.
Thiel has fully lost it, and as I assume nobody around him has warned him about how crazy this
manifesto found after the shootingoped in the ft makes him sound, so do the people around him.i don’t know how much experience thiel has in actual politics, but chances are that he’ll be given dead in the water projects that will just keep him busy and distracted enough to not do anything, should trump admin choose so, like this https://youtu.be/xxVsS9ZNUOU?t=193 (start from beginning for nuclear grade sneer on musk)
jesus christ
the amount of doublethink and newspeak this is attempting to push is remarkable
also afaik thiel isn’t one to regularly demean himself to writing tidbits such as this, is he? I don’t recall seeing nearly as many words from mr likes-it-private as I have from andreesen et al
Dindt he write a book on how democracy is over? Or incompatible with the modern world or something.
i hope thiel keeps writing these, because every minute he does he doesn’t spend on horrible shit like implementing them
That reads like some bullshit you’d find on r/iamverysmart on Reddit.
Maybe side effects of all the substances he uses to become the Übermensch.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s, also
There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.
did you get sucked up your ass so deep you forgot who’s on the reactionary side?
Depends on your perspective I guess, like if you imagine there are really ‘we should destroy the internet and go back to the imaginary golden age before the internet’ people those would be reactionary on that subject. I have never seen anybody honestly like that however.
On his reactionary side: I don’t get how his allies, he can stand them. I mean he must know they will come after him next. We know what they think of lgbt people.
i think it’s reasonable to say that his influence campaigns and wealth will keep him safe for at least some time. guilty until proven rich and all that
I mean he must know they will come after him next
big piles of money, and all the power bases he’s accrued
there’s long precedent of collaborators who were instrumental in the projects of harm and suppression still being able to flourish throughout selfsame projects
for someone that runs a surveillance company he sure as fuck can’t help yapping about his plans
they’re all just so fucking … smug
it appears they don’t think anything can possibly go wrong
i also like that implied statement that no other country than us has any agency at all, and internal affairs of a couple mentioned countries were really result of american activities
Well, all tech shit is inevitable after all. (In their minds) see how they talk about the slop generators. (Or that ‘if I don’t steal the home somebody else will’ guy).
For a fun 20 minutes or so, I recommend going through the recent enron “revival”. (It’s all satire)
My favorite quote from flipping through LessWrong to find something passingly entertaining:
You only multiply the SAT z-score by 0.8 if you’re selecting people on high SAT score and estimating the IQ of that subpopulation, making a correction for regressional Goodhart. Rationalists are more likely selected for high g which causes both SAT and IQ
(From the comments for “The average rationalist IQ is about 122”.)
<insert rant about lizardman constant here again>, and I say that as a person with a sat score of 1650!
E: ow god the first comments are ‘actually you and scott underestimate the derived IQ’
I bet if they restricted the survey entrants to people who actually write on LW, the score would have been far lower. Has a single article on there contained even a twinge of a useful idea?
Yes it has had good ideas. As rationalwiki said. The good ideas are not new, and the new ideas are not good.
even some of their bad ideas aren’t original
Molly White on one of the more obvious problems with betting markets
Tried to add the screenshot in the post but it won’t work for some reason.
With betting markets I often think, so they have all just forgotten the idea of assassination markets?
OT: I remember linux on the desktop as a meme, but like, when did this actually happen? I don’t think ai noticed.
At some point in the last years, playing games on Linux turned from fiddling three hours with a Wine config to maybe get an hour of 30fps before the next crash into a legit better experience than Windows that works out of the box in most cases. That did sell a lot of people on giving it a try.
I guess it happened when Valve went all-in on Proton. And Microsoft first adding ads into Windows and now forcing their autoplag on everyone helped a bit, too.
That seems reasonable.
The New Antitrust is so goddamn meta, deep writing from the 2025 authors
Reading through announcements of new hardware from CES and the endless series of products containing “AI” is so tiring. Not suprising, but still… ugh. Claims of AI in everything.
My favourite so far: USB controller with “AI enhancements” because… uuh… if I understand it right, you could theoretically use it to connect an external GPU and use that for AI, so that’s why “AI” is in the marketing for the USB controller…?
Maybe EAs should ditch malaria nets and start subsidizing bum ticklers
disclaimer
(not a claim made by linked OP)
su;dr
(saw URL; didn’t read)
Re: disclaimer
Not OP indeed, butt …
The comments are something else alright:
The part about kids is wrong. Per Aella’s survey, many people report having masturbated well before puberty. Breeding and pregnancy were actually one of my earliest kinks when I was 7.
Oof ouch
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
yeah I wasn’t sure about what to post either but this about gets it
feels bad when “Per Aella’s survey” is the high point of a post
I’m sure her surveys are immune to sampling bias and therefore perfectly represent the general population. /s
There even is a SSC post talking about how even professionally ran surveys have a 5% rate of bullshit (the lizardman constant, mentioned by Scott in 2013, and now in a lot more places (I think the idea is fine, just that Scott seems to draw a few to generalizing conclusions (in the article, not the conclusion) about classifying people as trolls/malicious vs 'sometimes people give a trollish/malicious answer. I also don’t think the percentage is constant)). (Yes, SSC style Rationalists not internalizing the SSC lore is one of my pet peeves). And as Amoeba_girl said, this is the highlight of the post.
E: and as the LC was written in 2013, I really don’t want to know how often Rationalists/LWers/etc have referred to a poll after that as being important. (And how often they have used the LC to dismiss polls used as arguments by others).
Im going ro pretend i never saw that.
just when you think you’re at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the rationalists take you lower
Starting off with a weapons-grade sneer: How to Dehumanize Accessibility with AI
I just want to harp on this one:
“Existing methods for testing are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for developers nor for users.”
Wtf, can you imagine saying something like this about literally any other profession than software engineering? “Existing methods for checking brake pressure are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for mechanics nor for users”. “Existing methods for sterilising surgical equipment are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for surgeons nor for patients”. “Existing methods for checking voltage are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for electricians nor for users”.
The lack of any fucking standards that devs are held to is insane, so the excuse for accessibility in the web being shit is that it’s TOO TECHNICAL and kinda annoying for web devs??? Again, can you fucking imagine saying this about anything else, “ye, cars kinda suck because making sure they don’t is all technical and kinda boring for mechanics to do”.
It’s YOUR JOB. Literally YOUR PROFESSION. PROFESSIONALS ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE STANDARDS you fucking piece of shit, have you no honour, not a single care in the world for your craft, you fucking babies. “Oh but it’s very technical” YOU’RE A TECH SPECIALIST. THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU GET YOUR SALARY FOR???
A great example of ‘we are bad at our jobs and if you rely on us everybody will die’
The worst bit is, the devs who aren’t like this are basically forced to comply anyway. Whenever I justify a delay in some release with that testing/bugfixing takes time, I get slapped with release it anyway, you can patch it later, and although I am lucky to be in a privileged position where I can fight this for some amount of time, every young programmer who comes into a job with a good mindset is not and has to bend over or face shit like negative performance reviews because they’re too slow.
This is so fucking infuriating. I don’t want to release shit software, I want to make sure the stuff I ship works. Back when patching meant you had to ship a physical medium to a non-trivial amount of users, that was how things worked, but apparently only because IT HAD TO and not because it’s good fucking work ethics to have. Now that you can just zero-day patch everything it’s apparently okay to ship unfinished shit and use your customers as beta testers.
I hate this so much and I try to avoid doing this as much as I can professionally. And whenever I can’t I actually feel bad and want to apologize to everyone who has to use that shit release.
Thanks, that was infuriating to read.
Whenever techbros use the word “storytelling”, some disaster follows…
the worst Nix project has finally been announced: behold crypto NixOS
I’m starting a paradigm shifting, open and new human / computer interface system that is global, multi device and privacy focused.
[…]
DISCLAIMER: You are not my exit liquidity, I have the best performing long term spot crypto portfolio in the world - I’m a early adopter with 100% hit rate on geniuses. So, I don’t have to work, I’m not building this to become rich. I want to build something paradigm changing - truly mind-blowing, because now we have the tech and I’m annoyed how computer work. It is a lot of work, but it will reward us all.
my “this isn’t a grift and I’m not a grifter” disclaimer is prompting a lot of questions already answered by the disclaimer. but speaking of prompting, what goes with crypto?
ChatGPT-1o thinks, after some reinforced asking, that the MC of such a coin can reach 300-1000M; I think it could easily go higher - it solves so fundamental problems in a much more elegant way. In my opinion, it will be the same step as the command line to the windowed systems was. Or dump phone to smart phone. It will just span devices and span users while keeping the data under control and of companies.
of course. after some reinforced asking, gpt told me you’re all haters if you don’t think I’m as important as Xerox PARC!
there’s lots more in the OP to sneer at, but here’s the worst part of the thread:
Mod note: I’m glad to see doubt and scepticism about crypto-based claims. However, that point has now been made; please avoid any further posts in that vein to avoid a pile-on dunkfest, and leave the thread for any potential on-topic discussion.
thanks for nothing as usual NixOS discourse!
e: via mastodon, archive
Must be rich indeed, the disclaimer is pure gold.
i forced chatgpt to say that my idea will make you a billion dollars but i think it can go higher
after some reinforced asking
Shit chatgpt is self aware, it did the ‘if i agree with you will you shut the fuck up’ thing.
E: while i shouldn’t speak on that subject, weird typos.
