17

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

10

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.

18
submitted 3 months ago by self@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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.)

[-] self@awful.systems 58 points 4 months ago

if you post a thread about intolerable dickheads, the most intolerable dickheads on Lemmy will post some shit like “intolerable dickhead checking in, how fucking dare you”

it’s like catnip for the Reddit-brained, and by catnip I mean meth

59
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by self@awful.systems 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!

7

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

17

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!

18

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!

[-] self@awful.systems 123 points 11 months ago

jesus fuck

it’s not particularly gonna help or even make me feel better, but I’m probably gonna reopen that first Lemmy thread a little later and just start banning these awful fuckers from our instance. nobody attacking Asahi has a god damn thing to say to any member of our community.

17

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.

16

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.

[-] self@awful.systems 59 points 1 year ago

fucking wild you busted out a Dollar Tree word like abstruse but came here to brag about how you didn’t read the article because you couldn’t understand its extremely simply worded headline

[-] self@awful.systems 81 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

this is a gentle reminder to posters in this thread that the fediverse in general is nowhere near secure from an opsec perspective; don’t post anything that compromises yourself or us.

with that said, happy December 4th to those who celebrate. post commemorative cocktail recipes here.

e: remember, they call it the fediverse cause it’s full of feds

17

we have a WriteFreely instance now! I wrote up a guide to why it exists, why it's so fucking janky, and what we can do to fix it.

10

this is somewhat of a bigger update, and it's the product of a few things that have been in progress for a while:

email

email should be working again as of a couple months ago. good news: our old provider was, ahem, mildly inflating our usage to get us off their free plan, so this part of our infrastructure is going to cost a lot less than anticipated.

backups

we now have a restic-based system for distributed backups, thanks to a solid recommendation from @froztbyte@awful.systems. this will make us a lot more resilient to the possibility of having our host evaporate out from under us, and make other disaster scenarios much less lethal.

writefreely

I used some of the spare capacity on our staging instance to spin up a new WriteFreely instance where we can post long-form articles and other stuff that's more suitable for a blog. post your gibberish at gibberish.awful.systems! contact me if you'd like an invite link; WriteFreely instances are particularly vulnerable to being turned into platforms for spam and nothing else, so we're keeping this small-scale for instance regulars for now.

alongside all the ordinary WriteFreely stuff (partial federation, a ton of jank), our instance has a special feature: if you have an account, you can make a PR on this repository and once it's merged, gibberish will automatically pull its frontend files from that repo and redeploy WriteFreely. currently this is only for the frontend, but there's a lot you can do with that -- check out the templates, pages, less, and static directories on the repo to see what gets pulled. check it out if you see some jank you want to fix! (also it's the only way to get WriteFreely to host images as part of a post, no I'm not kidding)

what's next?

next up, I plan to turn off Hetzner's backups for awful.systems and use that budget to expand the node's storage by 100GB, which should increase the monthly bill by around 2.50 euros. I want to go this route to expand our instance's storage instead of using an object store like S3 or B2 because using block storage makes us more resilient to Hetzner or Backblaze evaporating or ending our service, and because it's relatively easy to undo this decision if it proves not to scale, but very hard to go from using object storage back to generic block storage.

after that, it'll be about time to carefully upgrade to the current version of Lemmy, and to get our fork (Philthy) in a better state for contributions.

as always, see our infrastructure deployment flake for more documentation and details on how all of the above works.

41

this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:

This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.

fucking masterful

an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol

[-] self@awful.systems 60 points 1 year ago

I love Blade Runner, but I don’t know if we want that future. I believe we want that duster he’s wearing, but not the, uh, not the bleak apocalypse.

there’s nothing more painful than when capitalists think they understand cyberpunk

[-] self@awful.systems 86 points 2 years ago

Copilot then listed a string of crimes Bernklau had supposedly committed — saying that he was an abusive undertaker exploiting widows, a child abuser, an escaped criminal mental patient. [SWR, in German]

These were stories Bernklau had written about. Copilot produced text as if he was the subject. Then Copilot returned Bernklau’s phone number and address!

and there’s fucking nothing in place to prevent this utterly obvious failure case, other than if you complain Microsoft will just lazily regex for your name in the result and refuse to return anything if it appears

[-] self@awful.systems 55 points 2 years ago

But don’t worry! Google’s AI summaries will soon have ads!

dear fuck, pasting ads onto the part of Google search that’s already known to be unreliable and annoying at best seems like a terrible idea. for a laugh, let’s see if there’s any justification for this awful shit in the linked citation

Ads have always been an important part of consumers’ information journeys.

oh these people are on the expensive drugs huh

[-] self@awful.systems 61 points 2 years ago

it’s time for you to fuck off back to your self-hosted services that surely aren’t just a stack of constantly broken docker containers running on an old Dell in your closet

but wait, what’s this?

@BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one

oh you poor fucking baby, you couldn’t figure out how to self-host lemmy! and it’s so easy compared with mail too! so much for common sense!

[-] self@awful.systems 60 points 2 years ago

At the same time, most participants felt the LLMs did not succeed as a creativity support tool, by producing bland and biased comedy tropes, akin to ``cruise ship comedy material from the 1950s, but a bit less racist''.

holy shit that’s a direct quote from the paper

[-] self@awful.systems 118 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

there’s this type of reply guy on fedi lately who does the “well actually querying LLMs only happens in bursts and training is much more efficient than you’d think and nvidia says their gpus are energy-efficient” thing whenever the topic comes up

and meanwhile a bunch of major companies have violated their climate pledges and say it’s due to AI, they’re planning power plants specifically for data centers expanded for the push into AI, and large GPUs are notoriously the part of a computer that consumes the most power and emits a ton of heat (which notoriously has to be cooled in a way that wastes and pollutes a fuckton of clean water)

but the companies don’t publish smoking gun energy usage statistics on LLMs and generative AI specifically so who can say

[-] self@awful.systems 86 points 2 years ago

the secret sauce is always hiding labor exploitation behind a thick layer of bad ideas

[-] self@awful.systems 63 points 2 years ago

for anyone who wants to increase Amazon’s GPT bill by generating dildo limericks, it looks like this is only enabled for Amazon’s app, not their website

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