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.)

  • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    4 hours ago

    Does anyone else get tired of “read documentation and edit this text file to configure your app” Unix shit? I have no problem with the underlying configuration being a text-file (makes for a straightforward API), but do I really need to navigate to https://mpv.io/manual/master/#configuration-files and go through the rigamarole of figuring out which options I need to edit/include[0] because I misplaced (read: sudo rm -rf /) my config file?

    [0]: And there is always so much implicit bullshit. “By default, we summon Cthulhu on Tuesdays and Thursdays if the variable summon_octopus_guy is unset.” It’s a fucking config file, my friends, can we just be explicit?

    • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      4 hours ago

      Oh yeah. I recently wanted to configure something in pipewire… the idea was simple: just creating a boot-persistent audio loopback, i.e. connecting an audio input to an output. I gave up for now after looking at the config examples for that in the documentation. How can such a simple thing need such complex configuration?

      As for losing configs, I’ve started to put all my hand-edited config files in a git repo on my NAS so at least I only have to figure out things once.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      4 hours ago

      Surely it’s better to specify those defaults in the config file and have the system just fail if the necessary flags aren’t present. Having worked in support I can vouch for the amount of suffering that could be avoided if more systems actually failed if some important configuration isn’t in place.

      • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        4 hours ago

        Surely it’s better to specify those defaults in the config file and have the system just fail if the necessary flags aren’t present.

        Completely agree. I think this may just be an extension of the “you gotta know what you’re doing to code correctly in C” old school bullshit.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          48 minutes ago

          This is my biggest gripe with that nonsense. If you make it hard to do something well, you won’t end up with an elite series of uber-coders because there aren’t enough of those people to do all the programming that people want to be done. Instead you’ll see that much more software engineering done really goddamned badly and despite appearances at the time it turns out there is a maximum amount of shitty software the world can endure.

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    14 hours ago

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

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    1 day ago

    Zuck wants to get back to his roots

    It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do: […] 5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.

    Narrator: this announcement did not, in fact, ease concerns about bias.

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    1 day ago

    the worst Nix project has finally been announced: behold crypto NixOS

    I’m starting a paradigm shifting, open and new human / computer interface system that is global, multi device and privacy focused.

    […]

    DISCLAIMER: You are not my exit liquidity, I have the best performing long term spot crypto portfolio in the world - I’m a early adopter with 100% hit rate on geniuses. So, I don’t have to work, I’m not building this to become rich. I want to build something paradigm changing - truly mind-blowing, because now we have the tech and I’m annoyed how computer work. It is a lot of work, but it will reward us all.

    my “this isn’t a grift and I’m not a grifter” disclaimer is prompting a lot of questions already answered by the disclaimer. but speaking of prompting, what goes with crypto?

    ChatGPT-1o thinks, after some reinforced asking, that the MC of such a coin can reach 300-1000M; I think it could easily go higher - it solves so fundamental problems in a much more elegant way. In my opinion, it will be the same step as the command line to the windowed systems was. Or dump phone to smart phone. It will just span devices and span users while keeping the data under control and of companies.

    of course. after some reinforced asking, gpt told me you’re all haters if you don’t think I’m as important as Xerox PARC!

    there’s lots more in the OP to sneer at, but here’s the worst part of the thread:

    Mod note: I’m glad to see doubt and scepticism about crypto-based claims. However, that point has now been made; please avoid any further posts in that vein to avoid a pile-on dunkfest, and leave the thread for any potential on-topic discussion.

    thanks for nothing as usual NixOS discourse!

    e: via mastodon, archive

  • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    Reading through announcements of new hardware from CES and the endless series of products containing “AI” is so tiring. Not suprising, but still… ugh. Claims of AI in everything.

    My favourite so far: USB controller with “AI enhancements” because… uuh… if I understand it right, you could theoretically use it to connect an external GPU and use that for AI, so that’s why “AI” is in the marketing for the USB controller…?

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      22·
      2 days ago

      I just want to harp on this one:

      “Existing methods for testing are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for developers nor for users.”

      Wtf, can you imagine saying something like this about literally any other profession than software engineering? “Existing methods for checking brake pressure are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for mechanics nor for users”. “Existing methods for sterilising surgical equipment are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for surgeons nor for patients”. “Existing methods for checking voltage are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for electricians nor for users”.

      The lack of any fucking standards that devs are held to is insane, so the excuse for accessibility in the web being shit is that it’s TOO TECHNICAL and kinda annoying for web devs??? Again, can you fucking imagine saying this about anything else, “ye, cars kinda suck because making sure they don’t is all technical and kinda boring for mechanics to do”.

      It’s YOUR JOB. Literally YOUR PROFESSION. PROFESSIONALS ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE STANDARDS you fucking piece of shit, have you no honour, not a single care in the world for your craft, you fucking babies. “Oh but it’s very technical” YOU’RE A TECH SPECIALIST. THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU GET YOUR SALARY FOR???

      • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
        15·
        2 days ago

        The worst bit is, the devs who aren’t like this are basically forced to comply anyway. Whenever I justify a delay in some release with that testing/bugfixing takes time, I get slapped with release it anyway, you can patch it later, and although I am lucky to be in a privileged position where I can fight this for some amount of time, every young programmer who comes into a job with a good mindset is not and has to bend over or face shit like negative performance reviews because they’re too slow.

        This is so fucking infuriating. I don’t want to release shit software, I want to make sure the stuff I ship works. Back when patching meant you had to ship a physical medium to a non-trivial amount of users, that was how things worked, but apparently only because IT HAD TO and not because it’s good fucking work ethics to have. Now that you can just zero-day patch everything it’s apparently okay to ship unfinished shit and use your customers as beta testers.

        I hate this so much and I try to avoid doing this as much as I can professionally. And whenever I can’t I actually feel bad and want to apologize to everyone who has to use that shit release.

    • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      Thanks, that was infuriating to read.

      Whenever techbros use the word “storytelling”, some disaster follows…