this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week's thread

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

(page 6) 38 comments
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (4 children)

from the (current?) prick-in-chief at YC in this post:

and everyone in our industry owes a debt to open source builders

nice of you to admit it. now maybe pay down some of that debt by using sending of your piles of money to those projects

oh, what's that, you only want to continue taking from it and then charging other people service rent, without ever contributing back? oh okay then

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (12 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

basilisk save us from breathless idiocy by rubes

Altman’s investors will have had to get comfortable with at least four levels of intricacy.

ah yes the four-fold path of investing, the true religion

More head-scratching is OpenAI’s governance. Altman was ousted last year, then swiftly returned.

“I cannot look at this and analyse the power structure, and thus I am very confused as to how this happened”

But investors making that call today must surely be powered more by instinct than intelligence.

“must surely”? call the builders, we’ve found a new ultra-strong load bearing phrase

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

from this post (archive)

App developers think that’s a bogus argument. Mr. Bier told me that data he had seen from start-ups he advised suggested that contact sharing had dropped significantly since the iOS 18 changes went into effect, and that for some apps, the number of users sharing 10 or fewer contacts had increased as much as 25 percent.

aww, does the widdle app's business model collapse completely once it can't harvest data? how sad

this reinforces a suspicion that I've had for a while: the only reason most people put up with any of this shit is because it's an all or nothing choice and they don't know the full impact (because it's intentionally obscured). the moment you give them an overt choice that makes them think about it, turns out most are actually not fine with the state of affairs

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

@froztbyte @jwz Not the biggest Apple fan, but you got to give them credit: with privacy changes in their OSs, they regularly expose all the predatory practices lots of social media companies are running on.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

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"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

This particular bit of news has me so down. :(

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Maybe not the right place, not really a sneer but anyways. The Smile (aka Yorke & Greenwood from Radiohead) made a music video with StableDiffusion and I’m pretty bummed out. 😔

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

For real, I can’t find info about this. Can you share a source?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Here’s the video.

You can look up the "Creative Programmers" mentioned in the description too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Well to be fair, this kind of weird picture melding is the correct way to use the technology. Though it's hardly groundbreaking at this point is it, I feel I've seen it a million times.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

As previously mentioned, the "Behind the Bastards" podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I'm just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It's like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.

This is something I've noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There's a nostalgia for the "old" internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I've always thought that's dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.

This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.

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