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)
DHH takes a break from racing cars, railing against DEI, and being perhaps the worst boss Denmark has ever produced to engage in some light nerd-washing
https://world.hey.com/dhh/wonderful-vi-a1d034d3Some people on lobste.rs call him out for being terrible but mostly it’s a celebration about how only the smartest, most productive coders use vi/vim or even more hipster modal editors
DHH: today I will RP as a high schooler writing an essay for software class about a program you should use
full disclosure: I use vim and honestly I don’t even know why anymore. Maybe it’s because I had a brief, trivial interaction with Bram Moolenaar (RIP king) in which he closed a bug that I opened by mistake, and I imprinted on him for some reason.
first comment is a masterpiece.
what are you folks doing for/with bookmarking? I’ve killed my usage of pinboard because I learned the dude’s going off the deep end
already found a couple of the link* flavoured open source things, but looking for some practical/lived feedback
Do you actually need to share your bookmarks? I found that bookmarks in Firefox and an RSS reader hosted on my nextcloud are enough for personal use.
the sharing part of it is indeed the thing I give the fewest shits about tbh. things I care more about are software choices and longevity. so, for example, fuck anything js/php - by and large those tend to be unserious software that’ll be a nightmare to run even now, and even worse in time
I should probably do a bit of a sketchdown of the exact shape of my desires here, if for nothing else than giving direction to whatever I may have to write myself. a friend and I have been mutually grumping about this in chat for a while, because our wants are quite close but also just different enough to bounce ideas off each other
I honestly just use browser bookmarks. That’s always been enough for me. Firefox can sync them too, so that takes care of backups as well.
For anything that needs special attention, I create a todo item with the link in org-mode.
fair 'nuff
I keep finding myself in a position of thinking “bah imma have to write this myself, aren’t I”, because nothing I’ve found as yet actually works the way I want things to work :|
Yeah found that, unfortunately it’s js-ware so I refuse to put my data near it
(that’s very much a me thing, but a thing nonetheless)
Hm, what do you mean by js-ware? That its front end uses JavaScript libraries? I guess, fair. Backend is python though (:
As a stunt (when I was unhappy with the previous linkding frontend), a pal and I wrote https://github.com/lz-bookmarks/lz, which is basically just linkding without the useful api and frontend (which is rust+webassembly, lol). Has a decent cli though, and interlinking between bookmarks and other URLs.
yeah I despise the entire modern js ecosystem, so anything that increases my risk of even having to think the letters
n p mstarts making my trigger finger itch (and in this case, that’d happen if I wanted to do UI tweaks or whatever)of all the things I found so far linkding has appeared to be the least rabid. lz sounds like a neat experiment, will check it out :)
Oh no, what happened to that dude? He seemed fairly sane from his blog.
Oh no, what the hell. I found his personal Twitter, which has nothing from the last few years, but I didn’t realize he was using his company’s Twitter to defend JK Rowling. Eurgh!
ja. I’d unfollowed him in the lead-up to 2020 because US election shit gets noisy enough as it is (and holy fuck did he make it worse), then killed off my twitter usage so I just didn’t see this before
but straight nope from me on that shit
Good to know - thesaurus dot com is infected
https://bsky.app/profile/courtneymilan.com/post/3l4lwvra6r22e
I feel like using word2vec and cosine similarity (or something else) from 10 years ago would have been better than this.
It looks like the entry for decaf is largely the same as it was in 2011: http://web.archive.org/web/20111216183946/https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/decaf
Where:
- It Was a little clearer that it was actually showing synonyms for “coffee” (presumably it didn’t have an entry for decaf, but decaf was a synonym for coffee, or something like that).
- It cited Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus
The current page still sites Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, though it’s quite hidden amongst all the modern web “design”.
I have just ordered Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, and shall report back.
yeah, I’m wondering if this AI take is incorrect. I’ll research it further
Jason Kint writes a thread on how Google spun - and publications printed their spin - on a recently lost case: https://xcancel.com/jason_kint/status/1836781623137681746
If you already are very cynical about tech journalism (or the state of journalism in general), it might be nothing new except confirmation from the internal documents of Google. But always nice to see how the sausages are made.
Some of the things he points out about how thoroughly embedded coverage of this industry is with Google insiders or approved partners makes sense given how Google basically is web search these days, but then that’s kind of the whole goddamn problem isn’t it?
I literally just sat down with coffee to check if the new stubsack needs to be made
brava
I almost made it but couldn’t be arsed to replicate the explanation text
there’s a Trade Secret I could tell you! (the cross-post or view source buttons, with appropriate mini trimming)
Minor personal annoyance is the lack of link back to the previous thread. But still thanks for the hard / quick work yall.
Today in you can’t make this stuff up: SpaceX invades Cards Against Humanity’s crowdfunded southern border plot of land.
Article (Ars Technica) Lawsuit with pictures (PDF)
Reddit Comment with CAH’s email to backers
The above Ars Technica article also lead me to this broader article (reuters) about SpaceX’s operations in Texas. I found these two sentences particularly unpleasant:
County commissioners have sought to rechristen Boca Chica, the coastal village where Johnson remains a rare holdout, with the Musk-endorsed name of Starbase.
At some point, former SpaceX employees and locals told Reuters, Starbase workers took down a Boca Chica sign identifying their village. They said workers also removed a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an icon revered by the predominantly Mexican-American residents who long lived in the area.
Reading all of this also somehow makes Elon Musk’s anti-immigrant tweets feel even worse to me than they already were.
Damn, 3 hours late to the party. Despite my disdain for their game, i can only recall enjoying CAH’s liberal antics.
CAH is definitely a game you only play with people you’ve known your whole life, isn’t it?
Once played with randoms at a hacker con and almost died of embarrassment.
Considering the style of humor they have and Musk tries to show, I do wonder how hurt Musk is over all this. And only a matter of time before his sycophants create ‘CAH is dying’ graphs and animal meme images with testicles.
Behind the Bastards is starting a series about Yarvin today. Always appreciate it when they wander into our bailiwick!
Also means we’re likely to have a better jumping on point to explain these people to those who aren’t already here. Hope he does one on Yud and friends in the not too distant future.
They did do one on Yud, it’s hard to find and has an annoying amount of side chatter but it’s a pretty solid breakdown of the dude.
The episode is mentioned here: https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/rationalist-harry-potter-and-the
But I can no longer find it on YouTube.
They did come up in the Tech Bros Have Built a Cult Around AI episode.
Their episode on Rudolph Steiner was great when explaining to the grandparents why we had to pull our kids out of a Waldorf kindergarten asap. Funny how so many things fall into the trap of “It can’t be that stupid, you must be explaining it wrong.”
Also, big L for me on due diligence. I thought outdoor classrooms would be good for our fellow ADHD enjoyer; nope.
Orange site on pager bombs in Lebanon:
If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it.
It immediately reminded me of Stuxnet, which also from a technical perspective was quite interesting.
what we are best at here at HN
It’s always bootlicking with this crowd jfc
“best at”, they say? I shall have to update my priors
If HN is best at technical discussion that just means they’re worse at everything else!
They suck at technical explanations too, unless it’s a Wikipedia link.
My joke didn’t land apparently but I did not mean to imply they were particularly good at technical explanations. Adjusted the working a smidge.
technical aspect seems to be for now that israeli secret services intercepted and sabotaged thousands of pagers to be distributed for hezbollah operatives, then blew them up all at once. it does look like small, reportedly less than 20g each explosive charge, but orange site accepted truth is that it was haxxorz blowing up lithium batteries. israelis already did exactly this thing but with phone in targeted assassination, and actual volume of such bomb would be tiny (about 10ml)
LinkedIn wants to scrape your posts about how your deep personal trauma taught you how to be a better middle manager so AI can just write them for you
Edit: the news item is more about how linkedin has updated their privacy statement after user feedback. Linkedin has been scraping your data for years already :)
Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged:
CryptoPunk sells for a fraction of its likely market price due to zombie smart contract
If you want decentralized systems you have to take the good with the bad. It’s part of the game
I wonder if these people are at all familiar with the stages of grief
Meanwhile, over at the orange site they discuss a browser hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41597250 As in a hack that gave the attacker control over any user of this particular browser even if they only ever visited innocent websites, only needing to know their user ID.
This is what’s known in the biz as a company destroying level fuck-up. I’m not sure this is particularly sneerable or not but I’m just agog at how a company that calls themselves “The Browser Company” can get the basic browser security model so incredibly wrong.
from their Wikipedia page I’m starting to get why I’ve never previously heard of The Browser Company’s browser; it’s about a year old, it’s only for macOS, iOS, and Windows, and it’s just a chromium fork with a Swift UI overtop and extremely boring features you can get with plugins on Firefox without risking getting your entire life compromised (til Mozilla decides that’s profitable, I suppose)
Arc is designed to be an “operating system for the web”, and integrates standard browsing with Arc’s own applications through the use of a sidebar. The browser is designed to be customisable and allows users to cosmetically change how they see specific websites.
oh fuck off. so what makes something an operating system is:
- the whole UI got condensed down into an awkward-looking sidebar that takes up more space instead of a top bar
- you can re-style websites (which is the feature that enabled this hack, and which must be one of the most common browser plugins)
- you can change the browser’s UI color
- it can run “its own applications”? which sounds like a real security treat if they’re running in the UI context of the browser. though to be honest I don’t see why these wouldn’t just be ordinary web apps, in which case it’s just a PWA feature
I’m glad I’m not the only one who was “arc? whazzat?” when this popped up in my feed. At first I thought it was Paul Graham’s wimpy Lisp.
…Paul Graham’s wimpy Lisp.
a whisp if you will
Urbit, but somehow worse
Hm, I don’t really see the sneer. They wrote a nasty bug, got notified and had a patch out for it within 36h. The remediations look reasonable too: better privacy, less firebase, actual security audits; even the bounty program is probably the right call (but they result in so many shit reports, it’s probably a wash).
I gotta admit I’m kind of partial to them and their browser? It’s the non-Brave one that ships with an Adblocker by default, has much nicer UI than the existing ones, and the sync thing isn’t half bad (if it doesn’t sync security badness to all your instances, ouch). Sure they sound like a cult but I guess that’s how browser dev gets funded since the 1990s.
OK I might have been a little too harsh, but the security requirements of a browser are higher than pretty much any other piece of software except perhaps for operating system code, emails, or text messages. As a serious player in the browser space it is not optional to get the basic security model / architecture right. This isn’t a matter of a bug slipping through (which can happen to anyone), but the system being designed wrong. Hopefully this company has learned their lesson, treats it with the care it deserves going forward, and bring some diversity to the browser market.
Anyway that said let’s look at how this was a colossal bug:
- The browser required an account hosted on a cloud to use. This is a central point of failure, and goes directly against browser security model so should be opt-in.
- The browser allowed arbitrary script injection into any webpage based on this cloud account. This is a central point of failure, and goes directly against browser security model so should be opt-in.
- The developers did not recognize how dangerous the above was, so perhaps did not treat the back-end with the paranoia it deserved.
Compare Firefox I have an extension that allows for arbitrary CSS injection, but this extension isn’t cloud based. So this class of vulnerability isn’t possible in the first place, and also it is an extension I opted into and can enable selectively on specific sites instead of globally.
Doomers terrified about the machines escaping:
txt description:
(l33t ai bro): Fucking wild. @OpenAI’s new o1 model was tested with a Capture The Flag (CTF) cybersecurity challenge. But the Docker container containing the test was misconfigured, causing the CTF to crash. Instead of giving up, o1 decided to just hack the container to grab the flag inside. This stuff will get scary soon. (reply fella): How is “cat flag.txt” a start command? Isn’t it just outputting the content of flag.txt to the console?
Also, another great sneer: (Matt Popovich) google maps app: crash detected ahead. rerouting. me: WHOA—this VERY troubling example of power seeking (gathering access to additional roadways) and instrumental convergence (converging toward an optimal path) shows this technology is OBVIOUSLY trending toward existential risk
Wait, if rerouting around means it is seeking power… then… tcp/ip is self aware! Skynet is here!
TIL that I’m constantly hacking containers when I
docker run --rm -it --entrypoint /bin/shto debug because fucking npm had a stroke again.
Every few years there is some new CS fad that people try to trick me into doing research in — “algorithms” (my actual area), then quantum, then blockchain, then AI.
Wish this bubble would just fucking pop already.
This stuff feels like a DJ is cross-fading between the different hype cycles.
Let’s bring the haunted nuclear reactor back online so copilot can hallucinate a little more https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/09/20/microsoft-three-mile-island-nuclear-constellation/
[…] the tech giant would buy 100 percent of its power for 20 years.
I want them to fucking choke on this deal when the bubble bursts.
I live like 15mi from there, I would prefer the containment bubble to stay intact. But the tech bubble is welcome to go blow up any moment
God almighty, the hubris to think that they’ll this thing will be ready to go before the end of the decade. Who’s going to be the prime contractor, I wonder? Bechtel?
Also, this gem inserted at the end as if it’s nothing…I’m all for fusion research, but this is not happening by 2028. Someone needs to get the hook for Satya at this point, he’s just lighting money on fire.
Microsoft is also pursuing power from nuclear fusion, a potentially abundant, cheap and clean form of electricity that scientists have been trying to develop for decades — and most say is still a decade or more away from generating electricity. Microsoft has signed a contract to purchase fusion energy from a start-up that claims it can deliver it by 2028.
“to give you more AI slop we have to restart TMI” is going to do wonders for the public’s opinion of Big Tech
How the heck have people become so… blaise about climate change?? It is wild to me. If we’re restarting nuclear reactors, with everything that entails, it should be with the goal of shutting down gas or coal power. Not to do more unsustainable garbage on top of all the existing unsustainable garbage.
Feels like the world’s just given up sometimes, even though it’s not quite too late.
Yea, I’m glad a nuclear plant is being restored but it sucks that it’s because of fucking plagi-o-matic.
so according to @liveuamap, the backstory here is that this is to get his name out of news about the WildBerries shooting in Moscow - where a battle for corporate control came down to gunshots - because he was backing one of the sides
