this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th January 2025 (awful.systems)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (9 children)

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_guy is unset." It's a fucking config file, my friends, can we just be explicit?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

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 unsafe keyword). 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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

For a fun 20 minutes or so, I recommend going through the recent enron “revival”. (It’s all satire)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

The New Antitrust is so goddamn meta, deep writing from the 2025 authors

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Its Yud I think. As someone from Canola-land this shit really grinds my gears.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

25475 O Jan 08 Duke University ( 42K) Help Us Evaluate New Personalized AI Learning Tool

groan

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

put an article in mdpi and you'll get 70 of these per month

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

OT: I remember linux on the desktop as a meme, but like, when did this actually happen? I don’t think ai noticed.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (11 children)

Maybe EAs should ditch malaria nets and start subsidizing bum ticklers

disclaimer

(not a claim made by linked OP)

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

LessWrongers find cool reception for translated HPMOR copies sent to Russia's highest IQ youth

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onyiPaxnmiDdHn7SR/no-one-has-the-ball-on-1500-russian-olympiad-winners-who-ve

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think it could be very valuable to alignment-pill these people.

Zoom and enhance!

alignment-pill

The inability to hear what their own words sound like is terminal. At this stage, we can only provide palliative care, i.e., shoving into lockers.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Man, now I'm bummed that I don't have a cult trying to distribute translations of my Daria fic in which Jane becomes Hell Priest of the Cenobites.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

big sending bibles to north korea energy

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

people in the Russian-speaking EA community are all busy with other things.

i.e. working for Putin, running from Putin, or dying for Putin

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Lmaou. "We need to alignment pill the Russian youth." Fast forward to the year 20XX and the haunted alignment pilled adults are now 'aligning' their bots to the world's top nuclear armed despot.

tony_soprano_how_could_this_happen.jpg (for some reason awful systems won't let me upload pictures anymore (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ)

Holy Moses in heaven, iirc both Sam and Dario have said that their urge to build the torment nexus came from being inspired by online RAT forums. Maybe alignment 'pilling' youths is counterproductive to human flourishing? As the LWers say, "update your priors fuckheads"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Apparently, the OpenMandriva folk (the inheritors of the venerable mandrake/mandriva Linux distro) are now best buddies with Bryan Lunduke (right wing tech grifter and q-anon fan) are decrying the left wing bias of Linux projects with a hilarious “wokeOS shell”

Archive of openmandriva forum post: https://archive.is/2025.01.11-001057/https://forum.openmandriva.org/t/came-here-from-lunduke/5516/1

Lovely juxtaposition of “let’s stick it to the gay fags” and “we’re accepting of everyone and there’s no hate here”. Seems like a classy community all round. It’s a little sad to see how mandrake ended up, but there you go.

WokeOS here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250110234818/https://lindev.ch/wokeos.cpp

It’s pretty tedious and unimaginative. No idea who lindev are.

(eta: wasn’t me who originally found this, but I’m never quite sure whether it’s ok to include sources for this sort of thing given the subject. on the other hand, the op has it as public post that’s been boosted a bunch of times, so here it is: https://tech.lgbt/@GeopJr/113807022917800887)

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