Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
A hackernews sells an AI powered toy to let kids “talk to Santa.” $100 for 60 min, then $1 every additional minute.
Available at walmart dot com
hi peeps! the first episode of the podcast i posted about last week is up now. it’s called odium symposium and it’s about historical misogynist or otherwise bigoted texts. i don’t know how long until i get to one of our favorites but its inevitable
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pilot-misogynist-141164947
rss:
So they made an AI restaurant! It has a manifesto!
It’s… a printer for QR codes. That a guy who is reallly not equipped for sticking QR codes to bowls has to peel and stick onto bowls. And then they get filled by hilariously imprecise cereal dispensers.
They’re building an empire, yall.
(Via Jonty)
So this is literally a rehash of Spyce, a CambridgeMA based startup whos first restaurant was in the old chipotle in harvard square. They had a similar setup but one that was able to make actually-hot food instead of salad bowls which were decent. (they ironically sold to sweetgreen in 2021)
Most restaurant origin stories involve someone sharing their favorite taco recipe or whatever. These guys start off with a bad pop-history explanation of the battle of Alesia. That’s how you know their food is great.
There’s more where the founder of the company talks about how he really hated working at his family’s restaurant while growing up (good sign). Knowing that his family came from China adds another layer of weirdness, in my opinion. The characters where the company name comes from (改革) can be read in both Chinese (gǎigé) and Japanese (kaikaku) and mean the same thing (reform) in both languages. It just feels so weird that he talks so much fluff about Julius Caesar, mentions his family from China and then, out of the blue, uses a Japanese name for the company. What is with these people fetishizing ancient Rome and Japan so much?
Also the random Bernard Arnault mention (CEO of LMVH occasionally the richest man in the world depending on how strong the stocks are) at the end is a bit odd, I’m guessing added by an LLM because of the Alesia (~Paris) angle.
Yeah, one is tempted to search for a historical throughline here, an axis if you will
Alesia was the turning point. With the fall of Gaul, Julius Caesar became the most powerful man in the Roman world.
We conveniently forgot about all the civil wars that happened afterwards that resulted in the dismantling of the Roman republic and Caesar taking absolute power. Oh yeah, I see it now.
There’s also a village in
aquitaineArmorica that he never properly conquered…
Translator’s note: kaikaku means flan
fresh openwashed proprietary license hell just (well as of 2 years ago, but I’m sneering at it now) dropped:
Harmful free-riding is the sort of free-riding that leads to the free-rider problem
[…]
Examples of such goods are public roads or public libraries or services or other goods of a communal nature. Free riders are a problem for common pool resources because they may overuse it by not paying for the good (either directly through fees or tolls or indirectly through taxes).
from the fucking asshats who made Sentry proprietary under the BUSL but wanted an even more nonsensical license:
Sentry started life in 2008 as an unlicensed, 71-line Django plugin. The next year we began publishing it under BSD-3, and ten years later we switched to the Business Source License (BSL or BUSL)
fyi: some fellow forked all of the sentry stuff from when it was bsd and made it less shit to run yourself. I’d been running sentry as self hosted since it came out effectively and they made some real
questionableoutright bad architecture decisions over the years that made running sentry super annoying to get you to use the saas product. Like yes I want to use Cassandra and elastic search for my one user error loggingregardless https://glitchtip.com/
Examples of such goods are public roads or public libraries or services or other goods of a communal nature.
This is literally railing against the concept of altruism, kill this license with hammers (and sickles)
That Wikipedia article is cursed:
For instance, in discussions on climate change mitigation, countries with lesser contributions to greenhouse gas emissions might still benefit from global efforts to reduce emissions, enjoying a stable climate without proportionally shouldering the costs of emission reductions.
hi peeps! just put up the first episode of the podcast that i posted about in last week’s thread. it’s called odium symposium and it’s about historical misogynist or otherwise bigoted texts
the first episode is about stephen leacock:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pilot-misogynist-141164947
rss:
To provide some good news for this week, the Fediverse is reporting a spike in users (thanks to David Gerard for finding this):
Whilst accurate fedi stats are pretty difficult to get, I’m inclined to believe the influx is genuine - after the CEO Meltdown on Bluesky, its clear people are jumping ship.
I did not know how much right-wing media is outrage-farming wikipedia. With AI slop invasion, UK Safety Act nonsense and US government probing I’m getting worried
Its just so tiring. Now a rather prominent KDE dev is also valiantly defending the fashtech flagship projects from being accurately described as fascist.
I scrolled down two toots and found this
dunno this person at all but that’s a pretty telling start
Fosstodon does not have a good history in this regard. It took some effort to get them to drop a far-right mod earlier this year, and even with a shuffle of leadership they’re clearly all about the centrist acceptance of the right wing and the repeated assertion that tech isn’t political and that all this is just so much drama.
yep. there’s a couple communities out there that mistake “growth” for “good”, and I get the sense that’s one of the problems fosstodon has. not the only one, mind - other stuff also appears to be impactful. I don’t have enough spoons to make a good thorough analysis of it tho :|
hyprland is not fascist. Ladybird being fascist is IMO very debatable. But on the whole, the idea of having your OS itself tell you not to use software for political reason is not going to work in our favor and, if done in an hyperbolic way like this, it will make the left look really dumb
this charlie kirk saga is teaching me that the left-wing community is roughly just as bad as the right-wing one when it comes to fact-checking and not providing convenient but uncertain possibilities as correct
it’s really weird how this asshole needs us to believe fascists aren’t fascist and keeps going out of his way to talk about how dumb the left is, isn’t it.
for anyone wondering what the rest of the toxicity in the Wayland ecosystem that isn’t hyprland looks like, it’s dickheads like this controlling every conversation and technical decision. if you dig into the accounts this dickhead interacts with, you’ll see plenty of KDE and GNOME profiles clapping along to this shit. Wayland isn’t the way it is by accident.
Its a shame really because his video on Lunduke wasn’t too bad but as it turns out he is the worlds most laughable centrist.
It’s only real fascism if the dev runs around the streets of Rome carrying a bundle of sticks, come on.
AI slop has been discovered in an anatomy textbook (the news originally broke on TikTok, but I discovered this through Bluesky):
Tag your favorite name for a Star Wars background character. Mine is enodopmisch reticulum.
Scal-Palin Skywalker, was that the guy 100 years in the future who kept smoking death sticks so Luke’s Force ghost would stop bothering him?
smouth
Obituaries are being run for John Searle. Most obituaries will focus on the Chinese Room thought experiment, an important bikeshed in AI research noted for the ease with which freshmen can incorrectly interpret it. I’m glad to see that Wikipedia puts above the Chinese Room the fact that he was a landlord who sued the city of Berkeley and caused massive rent increases in the 1990s; I’m also happy that Wikipedia documents his political activity and sexual-assault allegations.
Every time an academic who featured in my education is posted about here I learn some new Horrible.
And in related news, worldwide ecosystems are already getting perma-fucked by billionaires’ repeated and relentless wrecking of our planet for personal gain.
I mention billionaires specifically because the average Joe, the 99% of humanity being told to cut down their carbon footprint and delete emails to save water, is completely fucking blameless in this.
They didn’t choose to have car-centric architecture forced on them for the past goddamn century, they didn’t choose to have planet-wrecking crypto farms/NFTs forced on them a few years ago, and they sure as hell didn’t choose to have planet-killing AI slop extruders forced on them, either.
(Anyways, unrelated hot take of the day: taking responsibility for something you’re not responsible for is a moral failing, and needs to be treated as such)
(Anyways, unrelated hot take of the day: taking responsibility for something you’re not responsible for is a moral failing, and needs to be treated as such)
wat
this has been previously sneered on, but only now i’ve clocked this: AI2027 is another name for, or elaboration* of “san francisco consensus”, from april this year or so, “named so because everyone who believes in it is in san francisco”, more precisely timeline roughly matches and it hinges on iterative self-improvement
* which might just mean it was laundered through chatbots to bulk it up initially. what i mean to say is even openai’s dooming might not be original
so if anyone’s counting then this thing is a couple of months older
and apparently spotify has found a new low
I killed my sub years ago because of the rogan shit along with disliking what they were forcing the product to become (and clearly indicated all of this in the why-leaving input field) but this makes me wish I could kill it even harder
This has been a problem for a while esp with podcast providers, who put ice ads in podcasts and then the podcasts get blamed. (Despite having very little control over it, and the control also often being ignored).
I fell off Spotify years ago and never subbed, nice to see I made the right call.
I’ve been wanting to go back to some sort of DAP full time but I’m not a huge fan of Android being the experience. Anyone got recommendations of a non-Android based DAP so I can cut the streaming services out for good?
I miss my Creative Zen back in 2008.
I miss mp3s being widely available. The lack of easy piracy also coincided with me just spending less money on music at all. (Lot of other factors as well).
However I think some of those other streaming services provide lot better rates per song for the artists than Spotify.
If you buy from BandCamp, you get lossless and lower quality audio files. Only really good for smaller newer artists though. Also you can get a seedbox for like 10 dollars a month and then pirating is easier than ever.
also Bandcamp Friday (which somehow thank fuck has not yet been killed by the Epic acquisition juggle) exists, and is a further boon to artists
I try to stick to bc a lot but it also has downsides - one of the most notable issues for me is that discovery on it isn’t nearly as good as other things, and I really wish they’d work on it some more, even as I know the impacts and drivers that make it hard to do well
the various kinds of corporate culture capture everywhere just results in a pretty fucking frustrating experience in multiple dimensions in the current year :|
last analysis I saw (which, admittedly, was almost ~2y back now I think) said Apple Music was the best by a pretty wide margin, with the rest falling with lower marks after
probably need to look around for updated data soon
I just got a cheap-ass Sandisk MP3 player, as part of my efforts to both stop streaming and stop depending on a phone so much when I’m outside. It has an audiobook function which didn’t work but after a firmware update it does, mostly. It’s not a good device by any stretch but it cost me 20€ and I consume a lot of audiobooks, and it’s extremely calming to not be exposed to a smartphone when I read.
On the music side of things the biggest change wasn’t so much the devices but getting more into bandcamp, with a healthy supplementation of stuff downloaded from soulseek, torrents, and on a pinch, youtube. I make wishlists of small bands I like and buy full albums on bandcamp friday. Listening to these offline made me able to listen to entire albums again, like in the physical media days, which again I find to be incredibly calming compared to hopping between the same favourites on shuffle.
Spotify actually helped me discover music, both through user-created playlists and algorithmic suggestions. I hear it’s all full of “AI”-generated music and lists, though, and I found a much more powerful algorithm to discover music, called “asking people”.
Got a couple of these sandisk players for my boys. Theyre solid!
Tangara is an open source project made by a fediverse hardware hacker with contributions from other fediverse personalities. it’s reputedly pretty good, though all the reviews I’ve seen are from other fediverse posters so it may be worth looking at some independent reviews to confirm it’s not just homegrown optimism.
at the risk of going open source reply guy and making a recommendation you can’t follow up on, I’ve had a lot of success with Jellyfin as a media library/local streaming host and the beta version of Jellyfin as an app that lets me stream FLACs on my local network and seamlessly download them onto my phone. a VPN or a Jellyfin library on a VPS can let you stream your stuff almost anywhere in much higher quality than Spotify.
I don’t own a Tangara though I do want one, and I’m fairly sure they don’t support the Jellyfin API yet, but if you end up missing a more Spotify-style listening experience then it might be worth inquiring if there’s any Jellyfin client projects in progress.
I can speak for the tangara, lovely hardware but it is an mp3 player first and foremost. the hardware is technically capable of network stuff but their software stack is mostly focused on recreating that iPod experience and keeping the battery life to days of playback. It does take some getting used to if you’ve been living in musical algoworld for a minute
I miss my old Sansa Fuze running rockbox and absolutely wouldn’t mind a new device in that class
I feel that if you are an USian who thinks that accepting US government contracts has become morally incorrect then fretting over swedish audio streaming companies is a waste of your time.
edit: free market solutionism as a response to having a dollarstore sturmabteilung running the streets in the USA just rubs me the wrong way. Sorry if the original post reads a bit coy, I just feel it would be incredibly cringe of me to make overt recommendations on how to handle things from the relative safety of living in a first world country on the other side of the world.
Swedish audio streaming companies who recruit for ethnic cleansing militia squads, and whose profits are reinvested in “AI” murderdrone arms dealer Helsing.
This wasn’t a pro-spotify post, it was a your government isn’t something you can just boycott away post.
Like, your taxes are already paying for ICE directly.
That’s like “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism so I’ll get an Amazon Prime subscription” thinking.
You can’t boycott away a government, you can’t even boycott away a corporation for that matter. That doesn’t mean we should just give up and be complicit.
Governments are toppled, not opted out of, is all I’m saying.
Also not sure I agree that all consumer activism is inherently in vain.
@Architeuthis @froztbyte if someone built, say, social housing with money from the US government, I wouldn’t care who was currently president. Guns guns guns, WMDs and Gestapo recruiting, OTOH 😬
(As long as they deliver, and aren’t just lining their pockets, ofc)
