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.

Last week’s thread

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

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

      I’m dead. At least the Rust Evangelism Strike Force finally got to have their theocracy

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    20·
    2 months ago

    from this post (archive)

    App developers think that’s a bogus argument. Mr. Bier told me that data he had seen from start-ups he advised suggested that contact sharing had dropped significantly since the iOS 18 changes went into effect, and that for some apps, the number of users sharing 10 or fewer contacts had increased as much as 25 percent.

    aww, does the widdle app’s business model collapse completely once it can’t harvest data? how sad

    this reinforces a suspicion that I’ve had for a while: the only reason most people put up with any of this shit is because it’s an all or nothing choice and they don’t know the full impact (because it’s intentionally obscured). the moment you give them an overt choice that makes them think about it, turns out most are actually not fine with the state of affairs

    • Florian Egermann@chaos.social
      9·
      2 months ago

      @froztbyte @jwz Not the biggest Apple fan, but you got to give them credit: with privacy changes in their OSs, they regularly expose all the predatory practices lots of social media companies are running on.

        • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          2 months ago

          That has been Apple’s model for a long time. Privacy restrictions for thee in my walled garden, but I am the benevolent overlord that sees all.

          Still, in the current system Apple is the only thing holding back the floodgates? If there was no Apple in the committee to tell Google to go fuck themselves on their insane browser proposals we’d all be stuck in the all-encompassing Google walled garden. It’s better for us to have two monarchs battling it out than one insane absolutist.

          I have no idea what could be done to break this walled bullshit altogether, though, much less what any of us individually could do. Like a completely open-source (both software and hardware) smartphone that is actually usable and multiple bank robberies to finance marketing and sales for it?

          • Cuban's Bullspit@mastodon.social
            4·
            2 months ago

            @fleg @froztbyte @jwz Yes, the “Only” allowable SMS app which also happens to replace SMS with rich and secure instant messaging, as long as you own an Apple device.
            I believe Apple play the Privacy card as it’s their best excuse to reduce intraoperatively and maintain their lockin/walled garden under the disguise of “we care about your privacy” (and don’t want to compete on features, UX an especially price)

    • Resuna@ohai.social
      9·
      2 months ago

      @froztbyte @blakestacey

      There are so many features of modern applications and platforms that I have to wonder why anybody would have thought it was a good idea, this is just one of them. Sharing your contacts shouldn’t even be an option. As somebody else in this thread put it, it’s not your data.

    • Olivier Roux (moose)@mastodon.social
      6·
      2 months ago

      @froztbyte exactly. I resisted for years using WhatsApp because it wouldn’t even run without full access to your address book (this has now changed). I mean, I have client contacts on my phone, I (and they) don’t want to share them with a random social network that will probably resell them. Also a dodgy legal situation, esp. re GDPR: those people in your address book didn’t give you permission to share their contacts with a 3rd party company.

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    2 months ago

    I’m just thinking about all the reply guys that come here defending autoplag, specifically with this idea:

    “GPT is great when I want to turn a list of bullet points into an eloquent email”

    Hey, you butts, just send the bullet points! What are you, a high schooler? Nobody has time for essays, much less autoplagged slop.

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      2 months ago

      No no no it’s fine! You get the word shuffler to deshuffle the—eloquently—shuffled paragraphs back into nice and tidy bullet points. And I have an idea! You could get an LLM to add metadata to the email to preserve the original bullet points, so the recipient LLM has extra interpolation room to choose to ignore the original list, but keep the—much more correct and eloquent, and with much better emphasis—hallucinated ones.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    2 months ago

    As previously mentioned, the “Behind the Bastards” podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I’m just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.

    This is something I’ve noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There’s a nostalgia for the “old” internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I’ve always thought that’s dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.

    This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      2 months ago

      I have a lot of time for nostalgia about older versions of the web, but it really ticks me off when people who actively participated in making the web worse start to indulge in nostalgia about the web. Doesn’t Yarvin get a lot of money from Peter Thiel?

      There were women and people of colour on the old web, and feminists and radical anti-racists too - they were just outnumbered and outgunned. One of the earliest projects listed on the cyberfeminism index are VNS Matrix, who were “corrupting the discourse” way back in 1991.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        2 months ago

        To be perfectly fair i was a very callow youth at the time and probably bounced off stuff like that had I come in contact with it.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest

      I’m thinking combination of you probably having set all your privacy settings to non serviam and most of their sponsors having opted out of serving their ads to non US listeners.

      I did once get some random scandinavian sounding ads, but for the most part it’s the same for me, all iheart podcast trailers.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest)

      Because they think you live in a real country, not the USA.

      old internet

      I wonder for how many people this is a reactionary impulse, wanting back to the ‘old internet’ they didn’t actually participate in. At least in modern days the flamewar posts are quite limited in length, in the old days they could reach novel sizes. Anyway sure we should go back to the old internet, where suddenly your whole university had no internet because there was a dos attack on the network to force a netsplit on an a random irc channel.

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    2 months ago

    Today in “Promptfondler fucks around and finds out.”

    So I’m guessing what happened here is that the statistically average terminal session doesn’t end after opening an SSH connection, and the LLM doesn’t actually understand what it’s doing or when to stop, especially when it’s being promoted with the output of whatever it last commanded.

    Shlegeris said he uses his AI agent all the time for basic system administration tasks that he doesn’t remember how to do on his own, such as installing certain bits of software and configuring security settings.

    Emphasis added.

    • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      2 months ago

      “I only had this problem because I was very reckless,” he continued, "partially because I think it’s interesting to explore the potential downsides of this type of automation. If I had given better instructions to my agent, e.g. telling it ‘when you’ve finished the task you were assigned, stop taking actions,’ I wouldn’t have had this problem.

      just instruct it “be sentient” and you’re good, why don’t these tech CEOs undersand the full potential of this limitless technology?

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      so I snipped the prompt from the log, and:

      ❯ pbpaste| wc -c
    2063

      wow, so efficient! I’m so glad that we have this wonderful new technology where you can write 2kb of text to send to an api to spend massive amounts of compute to get back an operation for doing the irredeemably difficult systems task of initiating an ssh connection

      these fucking people

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        2 months ago

        Assistant: I apologize for the confusion. It seems that the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet is not the correct one for your network. Let’s try to determine your network configuration. We can do this by checking your IP address and subnet mask:

        there are multiple really bad and dumb things in that log, but this really made me lol (the IPs in question are definitely in that subnet)

        if it were me, I’d be fucking embarrassed to publish something like this as anything but a talk in the spirit of wat. but the promptfondlers don’t seem to have that awareness

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            2 months ago

            it’s a classic

            similarly, Mickens talks. if you haven’t ever seen ‘em, that’s your next todo

        • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          2 months ago

          But playing spicy mad-libs with your personal computers for lols is critical AI safety research! This advances the state of the art of copy pasting terminal commands without understanding them!

          I also appreciated The Register throwing shade at their linux sysadmin skills:

          Yes, we recommend focusing on fixing the Grub bootloader configuration rather than a reinstall.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      OMG. This is borderline unhinged behaviour. Yeah, let’s just give root permission to an LLM and let it go nuts in prod. What could possibly go wrong?

  • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    2 months ago

    My current hyperfixation is Ecosia, maker of “the greenest search engine” (already problematic) implementing a wrapped-chatgpt chat bot and saying it has a “green mode” which is not some kind of solar-powered, ethically-sound, generative AI, but rather an instructive prompt to only give answers relating to sustainable business models etc etc.

    See my thread here https://xcancel.com/fasterandworse/status/1837831731577000320

    I’m starting to reach out to them wherever I can because for some reason this one is keeping me up at night.

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      2 months ago

      They’re from Germany and made the rounds on the news here a few years back. They’re famous for basically donating all their profits to ecological projects, mostly for planting trees. These projects are publicly visible and auditable, so this at least isn’t bullshit.

      Under the hood they’re just another Bing wrapper (like DuckDuckGo).

      I actually kinda liked the project until they started adding a chatbot some months back. It was just such a weird decision because it has no benefits and is actively against their mission. Their reason for adding it was “user demand” which is the same bullshit Proton spewed and I don’t believe it.

      This green mode crap sounds really whack, lol. So I really wonder what’s up with that. I gotta admit that I thought they were really in it because they believed in their ecological idea (or at least their marketing did a great job convincing me) so this feels super weird.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      2 months ago

      That is a good username. Also very scummy business practices. I have a quite big dislike for people who pull that kind of shit.

      • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        2 months ago

        Thanks! I thought it shows up on here too. Anyway, you can find me on all the places with that username

    • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      I have sent an email to their press enquiries contact asking for more information, but I don’t know if I have the “press” clout to warrant a response (I know I don’t)

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
    14·
    2 months ago

    Metal music festival Shell Shock II loses headliner, multiple bands after announcing Kyle Rittenhouse as guest

    Ex-headliners Evergreen Terrace: “Even after they offered to pull Kyle from the event, we discovered several associated entities that we simply do not agree with”

    the new headliner will be uh a Slipknot covers band

    organisers: “We have been silent. But we are prepping. The liberal mob attempted to destroy Shell Shock. But we will not allow it. This is now about more than a concert. This is a war of ideology.” yeah you have a great show guys

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      2 months ago

      Not a lawyer, but wouldn’t that be something her estate could kick up some legal dust about? That’s two dozen kind of fucked up.

  • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    2 months ago

    So, today MS publishes this blog post about something with AI. It starts with “We’re living through a technological paradigm shift.”… and right there I didn’t bother reading the rest of it because I don’t want to expose my brain to it further.

    But what I found funny is that also today, there’s this news: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-hololens-2-discontinuation-support

    So Hololens is discontinued… you know… AR… the last supposedly big paradigm shift that was supposedly going to change everything.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.

      It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

      Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!

      With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing life’s complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. […], while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.

      (Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)

      It’s interesting that someone thought “smoothing life’s complexities” is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.

      Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out life’s complexities without smoothing out people’s complexities, but it’s not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and that’s if it actually worked, which it doesn’t).

      I’ve felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole it’s hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but it’s a shame we couldn’t as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).

      Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        2 months ago

        tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

        call me when I can actually tange them

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 months ago

        perhaps… one of the most

        Load bearing words!

        life’s complexities

        I don’t think there’s an interpretation of this phrase in which AI actually helps.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        2 months ago

        re: how can a chatbot help with life?

        This just their brains on science fiction, they think chatbot can help like the independent AI agents could in the science fiction they half remember. Or at least they think marketing it like that will appeal to people.

        A lot less, ‘Copilot make this list of bullet points into an email’ and more ‘Copilot, lock on to the intruder, close the bulkheads after them and flush it to the nearest trash compactor’.

        I think that ‘giving microsoft the power to do things in my behalf’ is quite an iffy decision to make, but that is just me. Ow look it autorenewed your licenses for you, and bought a subscription Copaint, it even got you a deal not 240 dollars per year, but 120, a steal!

        E: I saw this image and because cursed eyeballs is the gift that keeps on giving, I will link it to yall as well, nsfw warning. This is the AI future microsoft wants

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          2 months ago

          I think it’s also a case of thinking about form before function. It’s not quite as bad a case as the metaverse nonsense was, but there’s still a lack of curiosity about the sci-fi they read. In most stories that treat AI as anything less than a god, the replacement of people with artificial tools is about either what gets lost (the I, Robot movie, Wall-E) or the fact that effectively replacing people requires creating something with the same moral worth (Blade Runner, I, Robot, the Aasimov collection, etc).

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          I am neutral on MSFT - to me it’s a bog standard transnational company with better than most working conditions because it’s not making stuff you can make in sweatshops. But it’s really impressive how they’ve gone from the beige-box tyranny of Apple’s 1984 ad, via the “Halloween Papers” era where they were every Linux weenie’s biggest boogeyman, to today’s bland backer of OpenAI. Note that they’re not really advertising it. How many people who are horrified by Copilot’s Recall feature also know they’re the biggest investor in the company that makes ChatGPT?

          From a corporate governance perspective, being so central to the tech industry for so long is kinda impressive.

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
            9·
            2 months ago

            this is why i keep hammering on how, functionally, OpenAI is a branch of MS and they’re only separate so OpenAI’s reputation doesn’t stain MS.

          • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            2 months ago

            Despite the industry’s deeply ingrained neophilia, I think it speaks to the importance of backwards compatibility and legacy systems.

            I can’t help but think that the genAI craze will end up being a regrettable side-quest along the path to “coding for non-programmers” akin to Visual Basic. But hey, I bet there’s a lot more legacy VB apps being kept alive out there than anyone would be comfortable with.

            • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
              4·
              2 months ago

              Despite having been one of those Linux weenies back in the day I have a lot of respect for the amount of work MS puts into backwards compatibility, dev tool upkeep, etc. And now they’re actually Open Source! Hell hath frozen over (or they realized no universities wanted to pay Visual Studio licenses and lost a couple of generations of coders to Linux)

              • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
                6·
                2 months ago

                And now they’re actually Open Source!

                Eh, kind of but also not. VS Code is proprietary, but you have the vscode:vscodium::chrome:chromium thing. Unlike in Chromium’s case, the proprietary version actually comes with some amenities one might actually care about (mainly in the plugin repository).

                You could say Open Source got some big wins in 2010s, leading to MSFT doing their fair share of contributions to Free software and openwashing as much of the rest as they can manage, but let’s not kid ourselves. They wouldn’t need to openwash if most of their stuff weren’t still proprietary. Last I checked MSVC, SQL Server, Azure, Copilot, IIS, Power BI, and the DirectX SDKs were all totally closed and jealously guarded.

              • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
                5·
                2 months ago

                And now they’re actually Open Source

                sorta, but it’s a veneer in furtherance of other goals (telemetry, market dominance, and control)

                one of the things I do with my computers is run LittleSnitch in always-prompt mode (LS is an app-level firewalling solution on macos), and hooo boy do I hate it when I end up having to open/touch vscode for some reason. the last time I did, I spent most of the first 5 minutes being prompted for (undeclared!) connections vscode attempted to make in the name of telemetry. similar experience with vscodium interacting with packages, and a bunch of their toolchains

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    2 months ago

    Small FYI, not a sneer or anything, you can stop reading if you don’t know what the godotengine is. But if you do and hear of the fork, you can just ignore the fork. (the people involved also seem to be rather iffy, one guy who went crazy after somebody mentioned they would like gay relationships in his game, and some maga conspiracy theory style coder. That is going by the 3 normal people the account follows (out of 5) who I assume are behind it).

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        2 months ago

        I have no idea what set the drama off btw, I have not really looked into it (could it be that this mod you are talking about was the unofficial mod the godot communication was talking about? Or is that a different mod? And did the redot (wait, re.? please tell me it isn’t a reference to the reeeee thing) people really pick the side of the n-word mod?)

        I did see that the guy who started redot basically only forked it and then went ‘any devs wanna take over this fork?’ Very I started the wiki, without even starting a wiki.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            13·
            2 months ago

            The bikeshed should be RED!

            Lol Edit (emp mine): “We need to remove the Godot branding from everything to differentiate this from Godot. For starters we can change the default IDE theme. I think a dark theme with red accents would make sense. Godot is associated with cooler colors, so warmer colors seem good.”

            Of course black with red. The engine for edgy 17 year olds. (I wanted to make a joke about Razer gaming peripherals here, but looks like they switched mostly to rainbows and greens, damn wokes!)

            • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
              9·
              2 months ago

              Apologies for crappy nitpicking on my part, but 4chan millennials really gotta learn to let go of impact font.

            • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
              5·
              2 months ago

              I think a dark theme with red accents would make sense.

              Oh HELL no that’s the same editor theme I’m using. How do I cast a spell to banish these people

              It was some Adobe-style theme I downloaded a long time ago but I guess I’m using the anti-woke theme now

          • self@awful.systemsEnglish
            8·
            2 months ago

            I want to pull quotes from that thread but it’s so satisfying in context to see the most toxic parts of a gaming community turn on each other

            and dear god are those some ugly fucking logos. my favorite is the one that’s just Redot Engine with a ridiculously overbearing letter R (not gonna repost them here for obvious trademark reasons — I’ve got the feeling these fellas might not have that part figured out)

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
          13·
          2 months ago

          apparently godot posted something about supporting LGBT in games? can’t find the original. then Grummz posted ragebait about it and the chuds flooded their github and discord with fuckwittery

          this is from like 5 min following links after reading your post

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            12·
            2 months ago

            Looked at Grummz twitter, and looks like Notch is also getting involved. With friends like that.

            Amazing how this new crop of outrage merchants who touched some game code in the past make Derek Smart look measured and well balanced.

          • self@awful.systemsEnglish
            11·
            2 months ago

            wait, the “pre-built” engine these little shits are trying to bully a developer for using is fucking Unreal Engine 5?

            all wokes want is to use a notoriously advanced and difficult game engine owned by a right-wing asshole and that’s how they’re gonna destroy gaming. with the engine that gigantic studios use because writing an engine from scratch is a fucking money pit that never ends and you have to have a good fucking reason to do it

            also I’ve been trying to force my hands to not start a Bevy project ever since Tiny Glade (a beautiful, cozy 3D sandbox builder running on the Bevy engine) launched and Bevy is manual as hell (but fun to work with), so this is a good reminder that Godot is cool and I should finally learn it too

            • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
              10·
              2 months ago

              A common pattern of the angry anti-‘woke’ gamers is that they don’t know how games are made on any level, and they are kept, I think intentionally, in the dark by the people who are stirring the anti-‘woke’ craziness who should know better. And it is about every level, npc ai, engines, financial, external organization structures, community management, how prerelease footage is work in progress, etc etc. It is almost impressive how blind people are towards how their hobby creation works.

            • self@awful.systemsEnglish
              7·
              2 months ago

              also, holy fuck the reply guys are a plague on that post. is bluesky normally like that, or is it the blast radius from the gamers deciding they have a problem?

              • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
                8·
                2 months ago

                dunno if i have an unusual amount of blocked posters, but the ones i can see are fine? bsky is largely le home of le wokisme

                • self@awful.systemsEnglish
                  9·
                  2 months ago

                  that’s probably it — logged out mastodon is probably just as bad. also the most aggressive reply guy’s take is “accounts for public projects should never block anyone and they should be required to debate the people yelling at them” which is, holy fuck, the most blockable thing I’ve ever seen

            • flavia@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              4·
              2 months ago

              Godot is really fun to use and to develop in. They basically gamified documentation writing: they show you tooltips for your custom elements just like the classes provided by the engine with their excellent documentation. The engine has hot code reloading too. I have a puzzle game project that I’m working on now.

              • self@awful.systemsEnglish
                4·
                2 months ago

                that sounds awesome! godot in general seems to be a very practical game engine, and at this point I definitely want to do my next little experimental game project in Godot (with Rust, if the tooling for that is at all ready for production) so I have experience with at least one normal object-oriented game engine that isn’t an old unreal engine or idtech under my belt

                like I mentioned, I really like how Bevy works, but in its current state it isn’t really ready for rapid development. a bare Bevy project is literally just the ECS and system scheduler but with no runloop. the defaults get you a lot of basics like a runloop, good renderer, input handling, audio, and such, but from there you still have to decide how everything works in terms of game logic — even with third-party plugins for stuff like physics for example, you still have to write logic for what a collision means to each entity involved. I also don’t think bevy has a unified editor or live code reloading at all yet? so for each game you have to write an editor (which the engine helps with a little bit) and potentially a live reload implementation (which sounds like hell)

            • s3p5r@lemm.eeEnglish
              3·
              2 months ago

              owned by a right-wing asshole

              Wait, what? Can I get some info or even just the right search terms to force Google to give me useful info? I know he’s done the eye-roll-worthy “no politics in my artform” bullshit but if there’s more I’ve missed, I’m keen to know.

              • self@awful.systemsEnglish
                6·
                2 months ago

                most of it’s on Twitter and therefore inaccessible to me, but Sweeney has a habit of falling all over himself to defend musk in nonsensical ways, and musk continuously returns the favor. the two of them boosting each other politically is something that keeps happening — a search for tim sweeney musk or similar should surface more recent examples without flooding you with “no politics in art” results (though that’s a dogwhistle too, so…)

                Sweeney has a wider track record of saying slimy fash shit on Twitter — it’s why he’s a meme on mastodon — but like I said, none of that’s accessible to me anymore. it fucking sucks that both of the programmers I idolized as a naive kid turned out to be huge fucking assholes though

                • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
                  9·
                  2 months ago

                  Carmack has always struck me as the kind of cishet white GenX dude that gets more and more pissed that everything’s “political”, I just wanna code, man, why is everyone mad at me that he more or less inevitably falls into fascism. Sure games can be coded as “countercultural” but the genres that Doom and Quake represent are quasi-fascist already.

                • s3p5r@lemm.eeEnglish
                  4·
                  2 months ago

                  Ugh. Thanks, yeah that’s good enough for me without even opening xcancel. My search for “Tim Sweeney conservative” only dredged up his land conservation purchases and the “stop being so divisive” / “no politics in art” dogwhistles which had previously made me suspicious, but I had mostly forgotten about. I quit Twitter many years ago so I missed that whole knobslobbering saga and didn’t think to include Musk after skimming today’s shitty Google “search” results.

                  Ah fuck, and Carmack too? Goddamn it. Twist the knife a little harder.

                  Fucking tech bros, always ruining tech.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            2 months ago

            Holy shit that is amazing. The thinnest skins. All of this over the promise by God not to flood the world again.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        2 months ago

        Of course it could get worse.

        Lol at them just removing the godot donation links/list of donors and just replacing it with their own. What a grift.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
      8·
      2 months ago

      from the godot discord:

      godotclayjohn • 20h ago •

      fund.godotengine.org!

      Obviously I can’t share access to the backend, but the numbers on the side are kept up to date. Last week we went down by about €5,000 when a corporate sponsorship expired.

      Since Friday morning we lost €170/month in sponsorships but gained €1,610/month in new sponsorships. In terms of numbers of people: 10 people have cancelled their donations so far and 74 new people have signed up.

      go woke, go 1400 EUR ahead and lose a pile of shitheads you never wanted

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 months ago

        the chuds have done their usual thing of throwing themselves on the ground and acting extremely injured by being blocked for violating the CoC of an open source project (via Liam at GamingOnLinux):

        what’s fucked is this is the exact same playbook as NixOS and Python, though this time Godot doesn’t seem to be taking any shit and that seems to be preventing those tactics from working. weird how easy it is to weather shit like this when you have a fucking spine and aren’t trying to retain fascist assholes

        image description

        Twitter posts by Rémi Verschelde (@Akien): I see misunderstanding around Godot blocking some users on its GitHub organization.

        • We’ve blocked 5 accounts so far
        • All opening issues with slurs, harassing contributors (breaching Godot’s CoC and GH’s ToS)
        • Blocking users does NOT prevent download of the engine or source

        —

        Blocking users doesn’t even prevent them from reading issues and PRs, just interacting with them. You can read and download anything from a GitHub repository as an anonymous (not logged in) user. *git clone https://github.com/godotengine/godot… works for anyone with an Internet connection.

        —

        Just adding as some asked - if you want to quote this to people who still believe we’re mass blocking people on GitHub and cutting them off their tech stack, feel free to grab a screenshot. I locked my account while the heat dies down, so you can’t easily link those tweets.

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        ahahaha that’s amazing

        it also pushed me to start learning Godot since its community seems awesome, and that’s definitely showing through on the docs so far — they go into so much depth on why Godot’s designed like it is, and what specifically it’s good for

        I’ve only just started, but it’s reminding me very positively of what Unreal Engine was for a brief period of time: a runtime for a powerful domain-specific scripting language that could be extended by native code when needed, targeting indie devs

        unfortunately Tim Sweeney kind of sucks at designing languages (though he used to do it a lot) so UnrealScript was a real fucking mess, and UE never really captured the indie market (cause you had to pay a fuckload for the privilege of writing native code) so UnrealScript got excised and the engine became “free” (as in free timeshare) and entirely refocused on developers pumping out AAA garbage and other whales (and, more charitably, anyone who needs an engine that can do state of the art graphics)

        Godot, so far, to me feels kind of like an Unreal Engine that didn’t fuck up with the indie market and also isn’t closed source greedware

        also apparently there’s a new Unreal scripting language? it’s got the Haskell guy behind it and it’s functional which is cool, but it’s also already bathed in horseshit:

        Verse is the new scripting language for Unreal Engine, first implemented in Fortnite.[11] Simon Peyton Jones, known for his contributions to the Haskell programming language, joined Epic Games in December 2021 as Engineering Fellow to work on Verse with his long-time colleague Lennart Augustsson and others.[12] Conceived by Sweeney,[13] it was officially presented at Haskell eXchange in December 2022 as an open source functional-logic language for the metaverse.[14] A research paper, titled The Verse Calculus: a Core Calculus for Functional Logic Programming, was also published.[15]

        The language was eventually launched in March 2023 as part of the release of the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) at the Game Developers Conference, with plans to be available to all Unreal Engine users by 2025.[11]

        so I guess Fortnite modders can weigh in on how good Haskell for Gaming is

        e: also, imagine if any of these pro gamers knew Godot is the Cassette Beasts and Cruelty Squad engine

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    2 months ago

    (Another post so soon? Another post so soon.)

    “Gen AI competes with its training data, exhibit 1,764”:

    exhibit 1764

    Also got a quick sidenote, which spawned from seeing this:

    This is pure gut feeling, but I suspect that “AI training” has become synonymous with “art theft/copyright infringement” in the public consciousness.

    Between AI bros publicly scraping against people’s wishes (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C), the large-scale theft of data which went to produce these LLMs’ datasets, and the general perception that working in AI means you support theft (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), I wouldn’t blame Joe Public for treating AI as inherently infringing.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      10·
      2 months ago

      I researched cool topics using ChatGPT, Claude, Google

      That’s not what research means, you embossed carbuncle.

      I linked NotebookLM to the Wikipedia entry of each topic and generated the podcast audio

      It’s fucking James Somerton with extra steps!

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 months ago

      “curated”

      it shouldn’t surprise me that the dipshit who was massively involved in “solving language” doesn’t understand the meaning of words, but grrrrr

      (and I say that as an armchair linguist who understands that language is as people use it (fuck prescriptivism))

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        2 months ago

        dipshit who was massively involved in “solving language”

        “In the what now?”, he said, voice trembling with a mixture of horror and excitement

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          2 months ago

          2015 - I was a research scientist and a founding member at OpenAI.

          proudly displayed on his blog timeline

            • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
              7·
              2 months ago

              no, that’s a personal extrapolation/framing characterising some of the shit I’ve seen from these morons

              (they engaged with very few linguists in the making of their beloved Large Language Models, instead believing they can just data-bruteforce it; this plan gone as well as has been observed)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 months ago

      The horror. Replacing the joy of looking into something and making your findings available in your own style to others replaced by autogenerated slop. And soon this will be all over the place, we will look back on the past period of low effort clickbait with nostalgia.