[–] 32 points 1 day ago (2 children)

update: the patch set from Linus Torvalds, Boy Genius, went into review and the reviewers immediately found a race condition: https://woof.tech/@techokami/117446164348546588

wow! it's really easy to write fast kernel code when it's wrong

and now he's apparently just dumping it on someone else because he's "going on vacation", a move that post-LLM commercial developers on most teams will be extremely familiar with

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  • [–] 10 points 1 day ago

    I mean, given that I'm typing this from an X window managed by emacs emulating vim...

    both vim and emacs are really good editors with an ecosystem of modern features (and a bunch of stuff that goes beyond what IDEs usually provide too). unlike an LLM, an editor is a tool that rewards learning. the problem is, guys like Torvalds are so unwilling to learn a new way of working that they turned the horrible way of working they started with into a fetish, and they made that fetish everyone else's problem. there's a lot of horrible development practices in the kernel that stem from conservatism and an unwillingness to learn.

    and as it turns out, LLMs are perfect in so many ways if you're an overwhelmed conservative trying to hold onto power without ever having to learn a damn thing again.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    oh and who can forget:

    at that same fucking summit he talked about how LLMs were irreplaceable tools for modifying the callers of a function whose signature you changed, a thing that IDEs have been able to do much, much more reliably and faster than LLMs since... the 80s I think? possibly the 70s? and they don't drink several bottles of water doing it. they don't even spike your CPU. it's such a basic thing for an IDE or an editor plugin to do. ctags is a command line tool for this that came with fucking BSD 2.0.

    but torvalds famously used to only use a version of microemacs from 1987 to work on the kernel, an ultra cool choice that doesn't even support syntax highlighting and later forked to become... nano of all god damn things

    so now he's ultra-impressed by the basic shit you can do, because like a lot of programming dickheads he never learned any of his tools properly and made it everyone else's problem

    and now like an MBA who thinks he can slop out a billion dollar app, his fried brain thinks it's so impressive when the LLM does the basic editing tasks he never learned to do himself but much slower and much worse than an editor. and like that same MBA when his project's burning to the ground, he's shouting that it's his underlings' faults for not learning the LLM properly, for not prompting it right. no he won't share his setup, because if he did it'd become very obvious he's out of his fucking depth.

    godlike programmer my ass

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  • [–] 35 points 1 day ago (6 children)

    but it's so much harder to glaze the guy if you pay any attention to anything he's done in the current decade:

    • receiving a gigantic paycheck from the Linux Foundation, almost all of which comes from AI corporations and their affiliates
    • failing to learn basic frontend Python for a side project and getting overly impressed with Google Antigravity (whatever the fuck that is) slopping it out for him
    • changing the kernel's LLM policy based entirely on that experience to force engagement with a (reputedly horrible, but that goes without saying) LLM review bot and slop commits and responding to the pushback with "Linux isn't a social warrior project", a sentence that's fractally incorrect and also a callback to the old SJW right-wing conspiracy theory
    • entirely slop-coding core kernel features, tests, and docs because Claude Code rewrote an old patch in a way that impressed him and that sole experience was all the excuse he needed to decide that LLMs are good at kernel code, in spite of all other projects to write less complex systems code with LLMs (Anthropic's slop browser, Anthropic's slop C compiler, bun, rsync, the open source firmware for the Xteink X4, MeshOS, that one disaster System 7 clone, probably more) ending in disaster
    • deciding at a closed doors maintainer summit that LLM commits no longer need to be tagged as such, eliminating documentation stating that the tagging was done as a quality control measure and making it impossible to tell if the coming shitstorm of issues for the kernel are due to LLM code (but they absolutely are)
    • declaring at the same summit that the kernel no longer wants inexperienced maintainers; that all maintainers are expected to either have the wealth to pay for Claude Code or to educate themselves (the latter learning path being by bashing their heads against LLM-generated PRs and the LLM CI nagbot that flags human code much more frequently than LLM code until they burn out, from long personal experience with slopified projects)
    • declaring at that same cursed fucking summit that LLMs work great if you set them up right and using the old patch as "proof" (a common blame-shifting move in corporate teams using LLMs) then refusing to share his setup or the steps he took to clean up the old patch (also a common move in corporate teams using LLMs)

    but if you paid any attention to any of these things, you might think he's an asshole accepting money and tokens (he doesn't pay for any of his own LLM usage) from some of the most corrupt corporations in the world in order to wrench control over Linux away from its own community

    and that would be crazy!

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    I'm purging the worst of the conspiracy theorists (which I'm sure they'll love)

    I considered posting a reminder that we do analysis here, not weirdo daydreaming, but fuck it anyone who doesn't know where the line is deserves a ban

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  •  

    3 days ago on the 12th I pushed a new version of the awful.systems infrastructure flake and our production ruggedized Lemmy fork to try and fix the problem where AI scrapers would come in and push over the instance, resulting in a bunch of 503s and general slowness. I'm happy to announce we're now running with iocaine, which seems to have fixed things nicely -- though as always, let me know if anything seems off and ping me on Mastodon if the instance goes down. in addition to iocaine, I've added a suite of live metrics available to instance admins and moderators. if I haven't sent you credentials for this yet and you think you should have them, shoot me a message. I apologize that these changes took me so long to get working, but I'm very happy they seem to be effective. I've also got some notes on running iocaine in production I can share with any interested parties, and I'll be reaching out to iocaine's developer with some suggestions around making it a little bit easier to work with, since at this point it's a crucial part of running an independent web site.

    the treat

    is still in the oven

     

    the instance is going down for a bit at 8 AM GMT on November 12th to finally put us behind iocaine, which should hopefully reduce or eliminate the amount of 503 errors we're seeing (since all of them are scrapers pushing over the instance) and expose some metrics for admins trying to keep track of how our instance is performing

    I'm also working on a bit of a treat for our regulars who've been putting up with the 503s for a while. that will probably be announced a bit after the downtime completes.

     

    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.)

    submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by to c/techtakes@awful.systems
     

    (adapted from a series of mastodon posts that somewhat blew up, so the format's going to be weird)

    why not embrace fashtech! they’ve got:

    • terrible Fisher-Price CSS
    • the most toxic part of the Wayland ecosystem, and that’s saying something
    • the worst part of the X11 ecosystem, and that’s saying something
    • suckless tools and they all fucking suck
    • corporate control over the packages you wrote, for your own protection
    • distributed functional programming that doesn’t function or distribute
    • a non-working web browser moving to a proprietary language that only supports macs, which appears to exist purely to divert funding away from Servo (for anyone posting to tell me Swift technically isn't proprietary, here's how that's going)
    • a working chromium fork whose only business purpose is to push slop extruders and a scam cryptocurrency
    • a web browser which runs single-process so that if a single website freezes or crashes then the entire session freezes or crashes (credit: 2something)
    • “diverse sponsorship” but it’s all MilTech companies; you’re surrounded by a rich market! of drone and other murder manufacturers (credit: @froztbyte@awful.systems)
    • slop extruders
    • cryptocurrencies

    if you're puzzled by the above vaguepost, I've written a little answer key:

    answer key and further discussion, in order of urgencythe package repositories currently being taken over are RubyGems and NixOS' nixpkgs. it's quite well known that DHH, a Shopify board member, is behind the corporate takeover of RubyGems. he's also coordinating openly on Twitter with the defense contractor Anduril and other actors to ensure that nixpkgs meets an even worse fate. this is the culmination of a long project to make Nix fascist.

    DHH and the fascists taking over Nix being in league might seem too convenient to be true, so here's some links. these are just analysis, but if you click through to Twitter you're going to get hit in the face with bare bigotry so fair warning:

    https://fedi.slightly.tech/@joepie91/statuses/01K6AHA0BNBBX616JGDJHYET36

    https://fedi.slightly.tech/@joepie91/statuses/01K6E3G2Z19M82BWRB3SPADHP9

    https://mstdn.games/@KFears/115286316219357517

    the tactics the fascists used to take over nixpkgs and RubyGems are old, and they worked. now that they know their tactics work, they'll be coming for other projects.

    also publicly coordinating with DHH on Twitter are the guy who started Tailwind (terrible Fisher-Price CSS) Adam Wathan and the leader of the Ladybird web browser Andreas Kling; both are actively brainstorming with DHH ways to make their projects more hostile to non-fascists. while the Tailwind guy turning fash might be surprising, Andreas has a bunch of fash shit on his Twitter and a history.

    now's maybe the time to stop advocating for that unserious non-working web browser

    the fash papertrail for Ladybird really shouldn't have to go much farther than them receiving money from fascists in a group that included other fascists but here's more anyway:

    https://possum.city/notes/a504c0e7vwdj000h

    I legitimately do not know how this shitty browser got so popular on fedi, but Andreas controls it so tightly he pretty much single-handedly switched all future development to Swift over his own community's objections

    anyway, hyprland is the most toxic part of Wayland. no I won't dig up links, type "hyprland toxic" into a search engine of your choice. other parts of Wayland fucking suck too.

    but speaking of fucking sucking, XLibre is a fash X server that also barely works, because the point of fash tech isn't that it works, the point is that it's metaphorically and sometimes literally a weapon. see also the defense contractor currently taking over Nix, but see also the OG fash language, Urbit, the worst functional programming language I've ever known

    Urbit is fractally wrong; every part of it that claims to be original isn't, every time it claims to be distributed it's a lie, and when it claims to work it's almost definitely broken, though you wouldn't know cause it was written by an asshole trying to convert Hacker News types to neoreaction and it worked

    ask me about Urbit, I have so many notes

    the Chromium fork is Brave, a browser by an asshole that claims to be privacy-focused but which is there to push LLMs and cryptocurrencies

    the single-process browser is PaleMoon, whose developers seem like real pieces of work

    please "enjoy" the suckless developers doing a torchlight hike in coordination with the nazi Unite the Right rally. one of their core devs says this was just a coincidence! two of the links are that same guy ranting about fucking cultural marxism!

    https://tilde.team/%7Eben/suckmore/

    there's more but if you don't see it from this, you don't give a fuck about fascism, you're here to do evangelism

    deep breath

    LLMs are slop extruders made by fascists that further fascist goals [citation not needed]

    if you scratch a guy who's really into cryptocurrencies, you find a guy who's really into turning the world into a Bitcoin Citadel, a neoreactionary form where anyone who isn't cryptowealthy is a slave: https://decrypt.co/84125/the-bizarre-rise-of-the-bitcoin-citadel

    got a favorite I didn’t list? comment with your receipts!

     

    we're finally on Lemmy 0.19.12! check out the changes here:

    here's a quick summary of what changed:

    • our instance fork is now in line with the stable upstream version of Lemmy, 0.19.12. big shoutout to @froztbyte@awful.systems for their significant labor in documenting the upstream changes we could expect from 0.19.3 to the new version, in figuring out what the stable version of Lemmy even is (the 0.20.0 and 1.0.0 series of releases don't even talk to their own frontends), and to froztbyte, @fasterandworse@awful.systems, and @dgerard@awful.systems for moral support during the upgrade process.
    • all our instance features merged fine into the new version (this, shockingly, wasn't the hard part).
    • our Lemmy Nix module configuration has been moved out of the infrastructure repo, flakeified, and brought in line with the current state of the Lemmy NixOS module. in the process, I fixed two major bugs in the Lemmy NixOS module around secret handling and federation. I will not be upstreaming these changes because the Nix people like murderbots and fascists more than they like having contributors.
    • we're now running on the latest stable NixOS, 25.05.
    • I've removed the infrastructure code for the now-unused staging instance; now we just have prod and dev.
    • we've migrated to PostgreSQL 16, the version currently in use by the Lemmy Docker container.

    as always, post here or in the testing thread if anything seems extremely broken

     

    the good news: we're now on the newest stable lemmy!

    the bad news: federation feels a little off to me? sometimes this is a federation queue thing that resolves itself, sometimes it's an indication of a problem.

    things to test if you want to help out:

    • see if you can see your posts on other lemmy and mastodon instances
    • post here from other instances
    • see if you can load communities, threads, and comments in non-local communities (this is a big one)
    • see if you can load our communities from other instances and see up-to-date threads and comments
    • make sure your own profile settings are as they should be
    • if you aren't getting email notifications and should be, let me know

    I'll push all my changes and post a full changelog once we know 0.19.12's running stable!

     

    our version of lemmy is old enough that clients like mlem are starting to break due to API drift, so I’m finally upgrading us to the latest stable version of lemmy. this will involve a bit of downtime and potentially a number of breakages; keep an eye out for anything that doesn’t look right after the upgrade and let us know!

     

    after some extended downtime, I rolled out the following changes to our instance:

    • pict-rs was migrated to version 0.4 then 0.5. this should hopefully fix an issue where pict-rs kept leaking TCP sockets and exhausting its resources, leading to our image uploads and downloads becoming non-functional. let me know if you run into any issues along those lines!
    • NixOS was updated to 24.11.
    • the instance's storage was expanded by 100GB. this increased the monthly bill for our instance by €1.78 per month. to keep the bill low, I disabled an automated backup feature that became unnecessary when we started doing Restic backups.

    I have one more thing I want to implement before our big Lemmy upgrade; I expect I should be able to fit it in tomorrow. I'll update this thread with details when I start on it.

     

    since we’ve been experiencing a few image cache breakages, I’m scheduling some maintenance for January 24th at 8AM GMT to upgrade our pict-rs version, increase the total amount of storage available to our production instance, and do a handful of other maintenance tasks. this won’t include a lemmy upgrade, but I plan to do one soon after this maintenance round. I anticipate the maintenance should take around 2-4 hours, but will post updates on the instance downtime page and Mastodon if anything changes.

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