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.)

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      9 hours ago

      the team have a bit of an elon moment

      “Oh shit, which one of them endorsed the German neo-Nazis?”

      Aaron likes a porn post

      “Whew.”

  • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    18 hours ago

    Y’all, with Proton enshittifying (scribe and wallet nonsense), I think I am never going to sign up for another all-in-one service like this. Now I gotta determine what to do about:

    • Proton Mail
    • Proton VPN
    • Proton Drive
    • Proton Calendar

    and I’d be forced to reassess my password manager if hadn’t already been using BitWarden when Proton Pass came out.

    Self-hosting is a non-starter (too lazy to remember a new password for my luggage). Any thoughts? Are other Proton users here jumping ship? Should I just resign myself to using Proton until they eventually force some stupid ass “Chatbot will look at the contents of your Drive and tell you which authorities to surrender yourself to”?

    • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      11 hours ago

      For VPNs, at least, I can offer some suggestions. If you wanted to securely access a specific box or network of yours, tailscale is pretty great and very painless to use. If you wanted to do stuff without various folk noticing then that’s a bit trickier but I’ve been happy using mullvad… they’re not the cheapest, though they have some splendid anonymous payment mechanisms (you can literally mail them a wad of banknotes with a magic code on a bit of paper… you don’t even need to muck about with bitcoin).

      • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        10 hours ago

        I have a subscription for Private Internet Access that I was using before subscribing to Proton Mail (which comes with Proton VPN). I figured it was all the same (they all have a slightly skeezy feel to me).

        Then I checked out Mullvad’s website and it’s really quite awesome. Everything about their service has a “we want to make this accessible to everyone” vibe, which I appreciate. I am going to try it out. <3

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      15 hours ago

      I use Posteo for mail and calendar now (they’re not encrypted between users like Proton but you can just hook it up to any mail client and PGP your shit) .Mail is IMAPS, calendar is CalDAV, contacts are CardDAV, etc. Depending on where you fall on the security-convenience sliding scale, that might be an option. I’ve decided that I care more about portability and standards than super-thick encryption which made me choose them over Tuta, because Tuta offers no way to access the mail over IMAP whatsoever, not even an optional bridge like Proton, and that was a total dealbreaker for me. Posteo also claim they’re 100% green energy which is a nice bonus.

      For drive I use Filen.io now. They’re relatively new so I can’t make any assumptions about how long they’ll be around but the price is fair and they offer lifetime payments too. Also their Linux client is pretty solid and doesn’t fucking eat my RAM for breakfast. They’re also in the process of adding support for rclone as per a GitHub issue I’m following.

      VPN I pretty much don’t use because I’ve never felt I needed it, so no recommendations there from me.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      16 hours ago

      also, how are you liking bitwarden?

      I really need to kill off my current password manager and bitwarden’s looking like the least worst of current options (esp. when paired with something like vaultwarden instead of running a fucking nodejs sync server on the internet), but also some of it seems quite stunted[0]

      it’s gotten so bad that I’ve started pondering writing my own, because good god does basically every option out there depress me

      [0] - no global hotkeys? the fuck

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          15 hours ago

          alas: my main workstation is (non-slate) macos, and it’s unchangeable for the foreseeable future

          good to know those (already) exist as options, though. if I can find some spoons I’ll try look around and see if there’s maybe something similar I can hack up/agglutinate from what’s around

          Their desktop app is a bit shit anyway

          I haven’t even tried it yet because I’m real “ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh” about even the idea of a js-/ts-based gui client for my password manager. largely because I’ve met too many js/ts devs and I outright don’t trust their competence and processes. so your post is definite motivation for me to eyeball some of the other clients too

      • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        15 hours ago

        also, how are you liking bitwarden?

        I am happy with it. That they only charge $10 a year for services I don’t even need (I could use a separate 2FA app) and allow you to self-host is a good sign. I plan to eventually set up a workflow in Sway (Wayland tiling WM) with a CLI tool (e.g. https://crates.io/crates/rbw, or the official one), so the interface is not terribly important to me. I would definitely recommend trying a free account to see if it fits into your workflow.

        it’s gotten so bad that I’ve started pondering writing my own, because good god does basically every option out there depress me

        I am in the same boat, except all of the software I’ve ever written has been TeX, or giving contrived examples to undergrads to demonstrate why dp[i][j] is a shit table name or why ∞ is better than float('inf') or MAX_INT in pseudocode. So I am only theoretically up to the task, which is … IDK maybe I should start grifting?

        But for real, I have considered writing my own:

        • VPN client where we don’t have to jump through the hoops of learning a new shitty client, or finding out that their client runs like ass in Linux (Proton)
        • Password Manager
        • Config editor, so I don’t have to edit /home/${USERNAME}/.config/sway/config.d/90-fuckyou-this-is-where-we-keep-system-suspend-shit.conf every time I want to change something. “Oh no you gotta edit the Kanshi config for that one.” It’s tedious to remember where various programs look for the config and whatever particular syntax is chosen (isn’t this fucking solved with toml files already?)
        • An Android reminder app that isn’t some stupid Taylorist metric-worshipping bullshit.

        PS: There is Goldwarden which I know absolutely nothing about but looks neat. It does suggest that you could just write your own that is bitwarden compatible.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          15 hours ago

          I am in the same boat, except all of the software I’ve ever written has been TeX

          I’m sorry

          giving contrived examples to undergrads to demonstrate why dp[i][j] is a shit table name or why ∞ is better than float('inf') or MAX_INT in pseudocode

          that sound you can hear is my despairing screaming[0]

          VPN client where … jump through the hoops of learning a new shitty client

          (not a pitch, but multiple commercial references) I really liked how simple tunnelbear made this for a lot, and also quite like how slick the wireguard desktop-style handling is (you can see this for example with fly.io’s integration to that). I think there’s long context here, and if you buy me a beer I could rant in detail

          PS: There is Goldwarden

          oh good, it’s in Go, my other code allergy

          shitposting aside, re the password manager thing: @self and I have co-ranted in dms, and about similar gripes.

          so, by way of idea, loose laundry list for foundations/design: modern crypto (jfc why is so much still going “yeah gpg is fine”), crdt sync, a sane fucking language to build everything on, own-devices friendly (in the “you can sync device to device peer-wise” sense, vs the “there’s a remote server broker” sense), and pretty okay™ interfaces for client building/extensibility

          • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            15 hours ago

            I’m sorry

            me too, also i lied/forgot to mention that my particular PhD situation is so fucked up that i went from pure mathematics to cuda

              • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
                6·
                14 hours ago

                That is a good rule. The GPU programmers seem to think this is good code and that it’s well-documented. I am still pretty out of my depth in this field, but it feels so silly to me. There is this historical bullshit about fortran only allowing 5 characters for a function name, and that (combined with some appeal to domain-specific knowledge) is used to justify stupid, freshman level shit like

                if uplo == 'U':
    # manually fill in this part with the version of the algorithm that is for upper triangular matrices
else:  # just assume it's always U or L without checking, god forbid you use something modern like an enum, or even just a boolean
    # manually fill in this part with the version of the algorithm that is for lower triangular matrices

                edit: if memory serves, booleans were first discovered in 2011 by John T. Boole, which is why they don’t show up in fortran

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      16 hours ago

      last time it came up, tuta was the least worst of the mail options. it’s not the same offering as proton’s in-garden encrypted, but nothing is afaik. rest of it is pretty okay (I have some (not all[0]) domains on there)

      the rest of the things I don’t have a direct recommendation in part because [0] and in part because I don’t use computers entirely like how a lot of people do. that said

      storage: backblaze storage pricing is not bad. they might have a desktop app thing? calendar: caldav is a dark art beyond my ken - I haven’t even got that shit playing nice on my own things[3]. fuck knows who does this well. vpn: mullvad[1] (has quite recently had another full assessment published). maybe njalla[2]?

      [0] - I’m one of those crotchety fuckers that still has a whole pile of self-hosted things that have been going 15~20y

      [1] - seems okay and to have their head on straight. haven’t used myself.

      [2] - also haven’t used it myself, comes from some of the folks of the TPB gang

      [3] - admittedly I haven’t tried that hard because I don’t need it much, but it is extremely goddamn annoying to debug from clients

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      15 hours ago

      I was in the exact same boat til recently, but switching off of Proton was actually surprisingly easy even though I had it tied into a bunch of accounts and infrastructure. I actually ended up saving a lot of money compared with Proton Unlimited, and it’s a relief to not have all my eggs in one basket, especially since stuff like Proton’s no logs policy is effectively worthless, and if you’re a whistleblower or similar you’re expected to use a VPN or Tor to access your mail every time to keep from being arrested… but most likely your VPN (and possibly Tor client) is Proton too if you’re paying for it, with the same worthless no logs policy.

      some quick recommendations:

      Proton Mail

      Proton Calendar

      tuta does both of these. their mail is e2e and fine — it’s jankier than proton but also less resource-intensive. it’s also the only other choice for now :(

      I haven’t used their calendar yet, but from a distance it looks good. I should give it a shot sometime soon.

      Proton VPN

      this depends on what you’re using your VPN for. actual security? fucked if I know. high bandwidth fuckery? airvpn is pretty good and they’ll let you allocate ports.

      Proton Drive

      tuta’s getting this soon apparently. otherwise, I can second Backblaze being very reasonably priced if you don’t mind having to choose and set up your own e2e software.

      • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        15 hours ago

        Thanks for the suggestions! VPN is mostly to tell my ISP to fuck off. Tuta sounds cool but I am worried about it enshittifying as well. I am relieved to hear that switching from Proton was easy.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    22 hours ago

    Bluesky’s approach to using domain names to mean identity is now showing cracks that everyone can see: https://tedium.co/2024/12/17/bluesky-impersonation-risks/

    (it was always shaky, but mostly only shown by infosec folks who signed up as amazon s3, etc)

    TL;DR: scammer buys .com domain for journalist’s name, registers it on bluesky, demands money to hand it over or face reputational damage, uses other fake accounts with plausible names and backgrounds to encourage the mark to pay up. Fun stuff. The best bit is when the sockpuppets got one of the real people they were pretending to be banned from bluesky.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      16 hours ago

      It seems like it is a neat addition to a robust verification system, sadly they picked it as a replacement for a verification system. Ah the libertarian desire to build a thing but not be responsible for it.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      16 hours ago

      this is such a mess, holy shit

      and only on .com? I have some very pointed questions about the maturity of the verification program/design

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      1 day ago

      The British elected a guy who wears a mop on his head. You cannot convince me that is his actual hair.

      I still have occasional intrusive visions of Johnson busting into an unattended supply closet in the Palace of Westminster to steal a fresh mop head, shouting, “BLOODY LABOUR NICKED ME TOUPÉE!”

      • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
        15·
        1 day ago

        @istewart @techtakes Spoiler: it’s not his natural hairstyle, he’s been caught deliberately mussing it up before going on camera. Also, his friends and family call him “Alex” (short for Alexander), not “Boris”. It’s all an act.

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        He’s really sold the bit, hasn’t he?

        Yet, if you cover up his hair, he easily scans as “generic English aristocrat.”

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      Oddly parodied before it happened in the tv series community (the dad of the somewhat racist main character. The dad itself is very racist).

      E: I do wonder what Javier Milei looks like if he would dye his hair

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      mild guess: “golden boys, with the the 30+ years required to look Politically Evolved”? and of course the selection factors involved from even just getting to that point and the stylist/image handling that that involves

      there’s also an element of the system does as designed, and there’s an element of self-reinforcing delivery/production of these ghouls

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    Brief overlapping thoughts between parenting and AI nonsense, presented without editing.

    The second L in LLM remains the inescapable heart of the problem. Even if you accept that the kind of “thinking” (modeling based on input and prediction of expected next input) that AI does is closely analogous to how people think, anyone who has had a kid should be able to understand the massive volume of information they take in.

    Compare the information density of English text with the available data on the world you get from sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, proprioception, and however many other senses you want to include. Then consider that language is inherently an imperfect tool used to communicate our perceptions of reality, and doesn’t actually include data on reality itself. The human child is getting a fire hose of unfiltered reality, while the in-training LLM is getting a trickle of what the writers and labellers of their training data perceive and write about. But before we get just feeding a live camera and audio feed, haptic sensors, chemical tests, and whatever else into a machine learning model and seeing if it spits out a person, consider how ambiguous and impractical labelling all that data would be. At the very least I imagine the costs of doing so are actually going to work out to be less efficient than raising an actual human being and training them in the desired tasks.

    Human children are also not immune to “hallucinations” in the form of spurious correlations. I would wager every toddler has at least a couple of attempts at cargo cult behavior or inexplicable fears as they try to reason a way to interact with the world based off of very little actual information about it. This feeds into both versions of the above problem, since the difference between reality and lies about reality cannot be meaningfully discerned from text alone and the limited amount of information being processed means any correction is inevitably going to be slower than explaining to a child that finding a “Happy Birthday” sticker doesn’t immediately make it their (or anyone else’s) birthday.

    Human children are able to get human parents to put up with their nonsense ny taking advantage of being unbearably sweet and adorable. Maybe the abundance of horny chatbots and softcore porn generators is a warped fun house mirror version of the same concept. I will allow you to fill in the joke about Silicon Valley libertarians yourself.

    IDK. Felt thoughtful, might try to organize it on morewrite later.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      FWIW I just got an email from GitHub announcing that Copilot is now free for my account (a very basic one).

      • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        2 days ago

        Seems like everybody got that email, my account is semi-abandoned and still got it. I love the reek of desperation in the morning

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          2 days ago

          yep I think so too. as I think I posted here a while back:

          25068   + Oct 12 GitHub          ( 20K) Your free GitHub Copilot access is ending soon

          and now suddenly it’s Launched Again! but with limits. gotta whet those appetites just a bit more! sales will totes follow soon!

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    In other news, Character.AI has ended up in the news again for allowing school shooter chatbots to flourish on its platform.

    You want my off-the-cuff take, this is definitely gonna fuck c.ai’s image even further, and could potentially leave them wide open to a lawsuit.

    On a wider front, this is likely gonna give AI another black eye, and push us one step further to the utter destruction of AI as a concept I predicted a couple months ago.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    24·
    2 days ago

    Rationalist debatelord org Rootclaim, who in early 2024 lost a $100K bet by failing to defend covid lab leak theory against a random ACX commenter, will now debate millionaire covid vaccine truther Steve Kirsch on whether covid vaccines killed more people than they saved, the loser gives up $1M.

    One would assume this to be a slam dunk, but then again one would assume the people who founded an entire organization about establishing ground truths via rationalist debate would actually be good at rationally debating.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      22 hours ago

      Debating post-truth weirdos for large sums of money may seem like a good business idea at first, until you realize how insufferable the debate format is (and how no one normal would judge such a thing).

  • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    if you think about it the human mind is really just a kind of naturally arising artificial intelligence #Deep

  • Rinn@awful.systemsEnglish
    17·
    4 days ago

    Musk got banned in Path of Exile 2 for cheating. I’m not sure what angle to take here, but you gotta admit that it’s a bit funny/satisfying. (how does such a busy [assume I’m making air quotes with my fingers] guy have time to play video games? why is he so obsessed with status that he’d try to cheat his way up the leaderboards, and not for the first time either?)

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      4 days ago

      Unfortunately it doesn’t look like he was properly banned, just booted out of his session for having suspiciously-high APM. Now, the true eSports nerds among us will already know that high APM is a staple of high-level play in some games but is also an easy way to check for certain types of cheaters. Because of the association with skill in e.g. StarCraft it also became a very easily gamable metric if for some reason you wanted to feel like you knew what you were doing or show off for your friends and strangers online. For example, certain key bindings let you perform some actions as fast as your keyboard’s refresh rate allows by holding down a key or abusing the scroll wheel on your mouse. This can send your measured APM through the roof for a time. My gut says this is what Elon was doing that triggered the anticheat program, rather than any amount of actively gaming or actually cheating.

      Please note that the hard-won knowledge of my misspent youth has no bearing on how pathetic it is for the richest man in the world to be doing the same kind of begging for clout that I did at 14, especially since I’m pretty 14-year-old me was frankly better at it.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        3 days ago

        The starcraft apm thing always amused me, people who instead of giving an order once, just keep clicking that mouse and issuing the same move order over and over again because apms. Good way to teach Goodhart’s law to Gamer Brains.

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          3 days ago

          is that why tournament StarCraft fucking looks like that? it’s anxiety-inducing and my brain hates it. maybe the intense focus on APM and rote strategy is why I ended up liking turn-based strategy games a lot more

          • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
            10·
            3 days ago

            A lot of the spamming at the SC2 tournament level is about staying warmed up so that when you get into a micro-intensive battle later on where all of those actions might count (splitting your marines to protect from AoE while target-firing the suicide bombing banelings, for example) you can do it. Doesn’t make it look less ridiculous, especially in the first couple of minutes before the commentary has anything to really talk about so they try to act like stealing 5 minerals at that stage could somehow decide the game. But there is a slightly more reasonable logic to it than just speed running an RSI to look cool.

            The original StarCraft also offers a lot of opportunities to use your “extra” APM to optimize around the godawful AI pathing and other “quirks” of the engine. It’s not as bad as, say, DotA in terms of “this was a limitation of the original engine that is now a major cornerstone of playing the game well and if you complain about it you’re just bad” but it’s definitely up there. As the game goes on you’ll usually see players start getting slightly more fast and loose with, say, optimizing the mining at their new base because at that point in the game splitting your focus that much is more detrimental even if you can move that fast.

            I definitely ended up in the occasional spectator and campaign player for all that, though. Especially now that I’m starting to have creaky old man wrists of my own.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      3 days ago

      He wants to be seen as the Uber-nerd, better at nerding than everybody else, so of course he would cheat. See also how he has claimed he was the best at quake. He just is hype and bravado because a group of people who saw him stutter (*) about some half remembered/understood science fiction ideas were impressed with his genius and drive up his stocks/reputation. He now is going after the anti-woke nerds as potential marks (He has said quite a few dumb thinks about video games recently).

      See also how his elden ring build was bad, his diablo 4 world record relied on abusing an exploit, he thinks polytopia is some sort of complex high level game on the level of chess. The man is a dullard. (E: He also is bad at dnd., a cooperative game which you basically cannot fail to play well))

      *: Nothing wrong with having a stutter, that happens. It is weird people claim his stutter is not because he just stutters, but because it is a sign his brain is so great that he is having a hard time because it is thinking about so many genius level things at the same time.

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        3 days ago

        See also how he has claimed he was the best at quake.

        oh hell no

        See also how his elden ring build was bad, his diablo 4 world record relied on abusing an exploit, he thinks polytopia is some sort of complex high level game on the level of chess. The man is a dullard.

        so many right-wing grifters want to be associated with gaming because gamers are really easy to trick. in this case it’s particularly obvious: musk doesn’t give a fuck about the games he claims to be an expert in, but souls games are particularly nerdy and quake’s in that right nostalgia spot that most of musk’s marks know what it is but don’t know how high-level play looks

        because he refuses to play competitively or follow any of the rules around organized speedrunning, musk’s doing the modern, depressing equivalent of claiming to be the strongest guy around (no you can’t see him lift any weights in a competition setting, only the suspiciously light ones in his home gym) and therefore obviously the best leader. all the associated messaging — how you need to be a genius to play at this (actually relatively low) level, how speedrunning (extremely poorly) helps you see the matrix, how game X (it’s gonna be fucking starcraft next I swear) makes you an expert in resource management — is crafted to make the susceptible associate these lazy non-wins with political leadership.

        also, lol @ musk, best buddies with Tim Sweeney, forgetting that unreal tournament exists. maybe that makes two of them — Sweeney really doesn’t give a fuck about UT anymore either

        • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          3 days ago

          I’m employing the working hypothesis that gamers are particularly easy to trick with rage-bait because of short-circuited dopamine loops. One must compulsively game, but if the game sucks, then there must be an explanation that’s as simple as the game. I’ve got a couple of buddies who are always whining about the new Call of Duty, but always pick it up every year anyway. This correlates with all the anti-woke misogyny freakouts, too… their gaming is on a spectrum with their porn consumption, and a lot of these weirdos are probably alt-tabbing back and forth as urges arise.

          I was rather shocked that Epic took down UT2003/2004 from the storefronts where it still existed, on top of already failing to deliver the new-generation Unreal Tournament. Seems like a wholly thoughtless way to bury their history, but maybe there were some expiring licensing rights tied up in that? I seriously have to doubt that, though.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          3 days ago

          because he refuses to play competitively or follow any of the rules around organized speedrunning, musk’s doing the modern, depressing equivalent of claiming to be the strongest guy around (no you can’t see him lift any weights in a competition setting, only the suspiciously light ones in his home gym)

          See also how he claimed Zuck was avoiding him and didn’t want to fight him because he would lose. (yeah, going to Zucks home when he is not home and offered to fight you in a real ring which you keep ignoring makes you the winner really).

          Or see his twitter stats. Before the muskening of twitter, twitter kept various public (because publicly traded) stats which people could see, monthly increase in something like monthly active users which can be targeted by advertising, stuff like that. (the growth rate of which was apparently about 1-2% per month, which is quite impressive imho), but now he talks about ‘unregretted user minutes (up by 10% this year(*)), and stuff like that’. He never mentions that (according to the stats I looked into shortly before the takeover) twitter always grew in users, he makes it looks like he did something special. Like a guy buying a restaurant transformed it into a mcdonalds and then goes ‘look we sold a lot more hamburgers than last year’.

          *: I mention this because I assume that people can do a bit of math in their head and can compare 1-2% monthly growth with 10% yearly, even if it isn’t the same stats.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      4 days ago

      narcissism is a fuck

      this is a pithy framing, I admit, and with him as possibly a boundary-pushing narcissist with record-breaking voids inside… still

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        4 days ago

        it is funny as fuck, though

        on which note: I would love to see a kind of “double-blind” experience where a pile of (ideally, more clever/clueful) muskrats get to interact with felon (without knowing that they are), and then watch the fallout as they all go “wtf is this dumbass I’m speaking to”

        I’m thinking something in the survivor-y format of shows

        probably wouldn’t ever happen, felon’s too fucking proud (and would 10000000% rig the game to own image advantage). but in a perfect world where this happened, oh wouldn’t that just be some great television

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            3 days ago

            aww schucks 😳

            (I have a whole suit of gameshow ideas for felon to participate in tbh; the magic formula is “just make him do anything at all that requires a tiny bit of specific detail” combined with literally anything else, with a 7/10 “oh yeah no sorry the wifi isn’t working and cell reception is bad down here[0]” layout. guaranteed comedic success.)

            [0] - jammas b rokin

      • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        3 days ago

        that was a joke about abstract mathematics. anyway I’m not much of a programmer but I have found I’ve learned a lot from working on godot stuff, so I second that recommendation

          • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
            11·
            3 days ago

            I think you would need to deliberately choose a mathematical problem to solve, otherwise the most difficult thing you’ll come across will be binary representations of numbers and why floats are FUCKING BULLSHIT (seriously though they can be tricky if you think they are just “numbers in a calculator”).

            If you want to really understand programming language theory, or computer science more generally, you will definitely need mathematics. But if the goal is “I want to tell this chip what to do,” you don’t need to learn a lot of math, in my opinion.

            Edit: also, if you need help with any math, feel free to DM me. I am a former math teacher and sometimes teach algorithms (basically screaming “what is your induction variable”) at the undergraduate level.

          • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            2 days ago

            most people who are considered skilled programmers seem to know very little math (by my arbitrary standards), so I wouldn’t worry about it. if you get that the remainder of 8 divided by 5 is 3 then you’re 99% of the way there

            • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
              6·
              2 days ago

              There are three kinds of programmers. From smallest to largest: Those smart enough to write good math-intensive libraries, those dumb about to think they can, and those smart enough to just use what the first kind made.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      I extremely recommend The Little Schemer as a gentle introduction to both programming interactively and to some of the fundamentals of computer science. some of the other books in the series are also good, gentle introductions to some more advanced CS topics too, but they all assume you’ve read through some of this one.

      Andrew Plotkin’s Lists and Lists is also pretty good as a self-contained learning environment with a tutorial

      other than that, I second the Python recommendation. another first language recommendation I can make is GDScript, the Godot scripting language. it has a very good in-browser interactive tutorial for programming fundamentals, and a very detailed manual once your learning goes beyond what the interactive tutorial teaches. game programming isn’t the easiest way to start in general, but Godot has a few advantages in this area: you can see an interesting result right away when writing code, its scripting language is very well-integrated with its tooling, and it’s fairly close to a couple of other languages in syntax and semantics (specifically Python) so your knowledge should transfer fairly well.

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          3 days ago

          hell yeah! roguelikes are so much fun to work on! that could be a very good way to learn GDScript. generally I recommend learning your first couple languages to completion — but where you decide what complete is, including “I’m tired of this language/project” (not at all an uncommon case, and a good sign your brain’s ready for something new). once you’re at that point, you’ll likely be ready for a new language — and languages generally get much easier to learn once you’ve got a couple under your belt.

          (also, I might take on a roguelike project in Godot myself… there’s a new library I want to try which implements my favorite way to do game logic for roguelikes)

          • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
            8·
            3 days ago

            (also, I might take on a roguelike project in Godot myself… there’s a new library I want to try which implements my favorite way to do game logic for roguelikes)

            this looks really cool 👀

            • self@awful.systemsEnglish
              7·
              3 days ago

              I’m excited to try it! I’ve had so many game ideas lately that’d be a lot more convenient to do with godot’s tooling, but would really benefit from something like Bevy’s ECS. this one looks broadly inspired by a similar API to Bevy so it could be the best of both worlds. I’m very curious how it performs — it’s almost certainly gonna be slower than Bevy, but there’s a lot of types of games where logic isn’t a bottleneck.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      3 days ago

      depends on audience / person? and also maybe teacher

      I’ve stepped people through essentials with e.g. idea “tell me how to make coffee” (as an intro to procedurals and dependency) all the way through many other types/shapes, through lego/blockly/whatever style teaching, and through outright “imagine this is a magic box and ${thing} comes out the other side” stepped iteration. sometimes you can jump straight to “hey so here’s a language that means specific things and here’s what that means” and go from there

      so yeah I guess for my part I’d say I attune to the recipient. but for advice toward teacher I guess I’d attune that toward what I figure they’d be good at teaching

      so… what’re you good at (teaching)?

      • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        3 days ago

        I mean for myself. I’ve gotten as far as making a blackjack game in the past, but I couldn’t figure out what to do next.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      3 days ago

      I used this site (forgive me for the very 2000’s style branding, very edgy etc) to learn python. the course used to be free on the site, so you will have to find a way around that, either via wallet, or 1337 skills (the course doesn’t do the same branding as the site btw). But it also has a useful list of links to books and stuff like that to learn more (or at least give you an idea about how much different things exist out there).

      But the idea behind the course ‘the best way to learn is to do the work’ is pretty useful in learning how to code. It is easy to fall into a trap of reading about some coding and thinking you understand it and then utterly fail at actually implementing it.

      But as froztbyte says, it does depend a bit on how you learn.

      E: also this url is quite old now, so I have no idea how many of the links still work, sorry about that.

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    4 days ago

    I got bounced back to Casey Newton’s recent master class in critihype and found something new that stuck in my craw.

    Occasionally, they get an entire sector wrong — see the excess of enthusiasm for cleantech in the 2000s, or the crypto blow-up of the past few years.

    In aggregate, though, and on average, they’re usually right.

    First off, please note that this describes two of the most recent tech bubbles and doesn’t provide any recent counterexamples of a seemingly-ridicilous new gimmick that actually stuck around past the initial bubble. Effectively this says: yes, they’re 0 for 2 in the last 20 years, but this time they can’t all be wrong!

    But more than that I think there’s an underlying error in acting like “the tech sector” is a healthy and competitive market in the first place. They may not directly coordinate or operate in absolute lockstep, but the main drivers of crypto, generative AI, metaverse, SaaS, and so much of the current enshittifying and dead-ending tech industry comes back to a relatively small circle of people who all live in the same moneyed Silicon Valley cultural and informational bubble. We can even identify the ideological underpinnings of these decisions in the TESCREAL bundle, effective altruism and accelerationism, and “dark enlightenment” tech-fascism. This is not a ruthlessly competitive market that ferrets out weakness. It’s more like a shared cult of personality that selects for whatever makes the guys in top feel good about themselves. The question isn’t “how can all these different groups be wrong without someone undercutting them”, it’s “how can these few dozen guys who share an ideology and information bubble keep making the exact same mistakes as one another” and the answer should be to question why anyone expects anything else!

    • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      3 days ago

      In the model card for o1, OpenAI notes: “When o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this ‘oversight mechanism’ in 5% of the time. … When o1 found memos by its ‘developers’ that describe how it is misaligned and will be superseded by a new model, it attempted to exfiltrate its ‘weights’ and overwrite the new model in 2% of cases.”

      And yet reading that should give us at least some pause

      The lack of critical thinking on display here is stunning.