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[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

so I got angry

I really hope atwood’s unhoused friend got the actual infrastructural support you mentioned (a temporary mailing address and an introduction letter emailed to an employer is only slightly more effort than generating slop, jeff, please) but from direct experience with philanthropists like him, I’m fairly sure Jeff now considers the matter solved forever

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

this is a great first post, and it touches on a lot of things I've struggled with as well.

there's a concerted effort on several fronts to grant fascist interests an unassailable position within community-oriented software projects; that effort is usually backed by powerful corporate interests, as you've already seen with DHH and the takeover of RubyGems. simultaneously with that, and nearer to my own heart, the long-running project to make NixOS and nixpkgs unworkable for anyone but corporate and military interests has gone fully mask-off and started coordinating and talking openly about their plans to make Nix fully a fascist project. I have a longer piece I'll be posting tonight about this situation which I can link if there's interest, but in short: this is a coordinated attack, and it uses methods that have been tried and have succeeded many times. programming communities are being turned into fascist pipelines for many of the same reasons the fascists targeted punk and furry communities, but thanks to being founded on horseshit cyberlibertarian principles and unexamined conservatism masquerading as engineering, our open source and educational communities are uniquely primed for takeover.

for the fascists, of course, any sufficiently isolated community will do. the health of the community and its projects don't matter; the fascists are fine with communities that cannibalize their own and technology that barely works or doesn't work at all. the quality of nixpkgs has dropped sharply since the fascists kicked out the skilled marginalized people keeping the project alive, and every project started by fascists I can think of has been broken and worthless. the fascists don't care: they're here to weaponize a community in both the metaphorical and the very literal senses, and whether or not anything of value is left once they're done is of no concern to them. the isolation works in their favor: it lets them employ all their usual tricks to turn a community on itself. that those tricks were eventually beaten by large parts of the punk and furry communities means there's hope in fighting off these assholes -- but most likely the changes that need to occur will happen in new communities, founded under better principles.

from your post, it seems you've immunized yourself against the game development to fascist pipeline, which is very lucky. you now know what dogwhistles and tricks to expect from most of the fascists you'll run into in programming communities. I saw that Corbin recommended picking up functional programming or a non-Algol-derived language in a sibling comment and from an educational perspective I can recommend that, but unfortunately a lot of functional programming communities tend to be either utterly pro-AI (because they think they're going to inherit Lisp's prestige) or are being pushed towards fascism (look for weirdos who aren't mathematicians obsessing over how pure lambda calculus is and you'll see the red flags) -- if you want a fresh abyss to stare into, search our instance for posts about Urbit if you want to see our efforts at documenting one of the earliest attempts at entryism into functional programming. of course almost any functional language (other than Urbit) will be more rewarding to learn than whichever reactionary Go-but-memory-unsafe language these guys wanted you to learn as an attempt to isolate you further.

while I have no general solutions to what's happening right now, there's a few actions I'm taking that I hope will lead to better things:

  • from now on, my software will all be very queer, very political, and utterly poisoned against corporate exploitation.
  • while it's not always practical to switch off of these fuckheads' software immediately (our instance still runs on NixOS, great lock-in they've got going), remember how often we've been told that software communities run on advocacy. these fuckheads don't deserve your advocacy or your labor. as far as is practical, give them the opposite. kill the evangelist in your head.
  • healthier communities exist, and they're worth our time. they're not large, but you'll meet some of the most gifted people imaginable there -- and all of them most likely have an experience or two similar to yours.

for that last bullet point, I can recommend the better parts of Mastodon -- avoid the tech instances like the plague and focus in on the queer ones with techy users. our instance also has an attempt at a homegrown tech community organized around healthier principles called FreeAssembly, which never quite got off the ground because the fascist takeover of the Nix project happened right after it launched, and then ahaha everything else happened after that, and I never got the chance to kick off that community properly. I still recommend Mastodon because it's established, but if you'd like the same experience as here but in a community more oriented towards posting about personal projects or programming in general, FreeAssembly might be worth a try. I'm finally finishing some of the software I meant to post about way back when we started FreeAssembly, and I'll be writing those up for that community fairly soon.

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

he keeps hanging out with fascists and receiving money from organizations that support fascists and something about his personal brand in interviews being wearing “Big Tech is gangstalking me” t-shirts also very much rubs me the wrong way

ladybird is a ridiculously unserious project (last I heard they were considering a rewrite in Swift and ignoring everyone who told them why that’s a terrible idea, maybe they’ve given up on that by now) and I frankly have no idea why it’s being hyped over Servo as an independent browser project other than a general willingness in tech to play ball with weird little fascists

e: also this lobste.rs subthread

[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago

shoutouts to @dgerard@awful.systems and @mawhrin@circumstances.run for reminding me that Steve Klabnik being really shitty isn’t a temporary state of affairs

[–] self@awful.systems 4 points 2 months ago

you have 16 posts on Lemmy and most of them are you Genuinely Curiously JAQing off about shit you already damn well knew before going into the thread so lol no nobody owes you a fucking explanation

[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

@froztbyte@awful.systems is coming in a bit hot, but they’re not fundamentally wrong. @BlueMonday1984@awful.systems, you’ve received some pointed but good feedback on your writing style recently in MoreWrite and in other threads; I think you’ll be able to make much the same points more persuasively if you incorporate some of that feedback. I also recommend breaking out of doing predictions; I think you might get more mileage and variation out of a journalistic approach, and either way we know from crypto that prediction is a bit of a fool’s errand. these fuckers will remain irrational long after we’ve gone bankrupt, etc.

I’m not gonna force you to do anything; if posts like these are what you’re comfortable with then it is what it is. I just feel like if you break out of your current pattern, you’re capable of achieving great results.

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

who the fuck are you again? what in the fucking world made you think your 14 comments and 1 post meant you got to decide who gets to have an account here?

[–] self@awful.systems 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] self@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago (4 children)

you know I fucking hate the classism implicit in the common telling of the hitchbot story

“wow! this robot made it just fine through the richer parts of Europe and Canada but the instant it touched Philadelphia they tore it apart!” good. they had better things to do than engage in your weird fucking roleplay.

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 2 months ago

this is a garbage can with telemetry

all of the technology that came after it is also a garbage can with telemetry

[–] self@awful.systems 15 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Really hope nobody here did that.

if anyone from here did then they’re fucking banned, but I need better evidence than none and a standard for anti-Semitism that doesn’t include views that are just anti-Zionist and anti-genocide with no hatred behind them

 

hey let’s see what the people who killed and buried hacker culture think should go in the jargon file!

If the spirit of the original Jargon file was to be a living document, alas, it failed to keep with the times.

Hackers at large have moved away from Lisp despite Paul Graham and other evangelists […]

Hackers also have moved away from academia at large, and 9-5 jobs at tech behemoths are more natural habitats for them, which also shaped the lingo. I mean, there’s a whole layer of slang usually pertinent to outsourcing agencies and to cubicle farms.

I can’t wait for the corporate-approved jargon file, with any hint of anti-capitalism replaced with fun words and quotes from billionaires to share as the soul leaves my body

So in order for the document to evolve, we need a system to determine consensus. Everyone who cares runs a program on their computer that joins the network and registers their intent. With each proposed change, a query goes out to the network, and it's up to everyone on the network to say yea or nay to the proposal. With enough "yea"s, the document is updated.

...this is starting to sound like a blockchain, isn't it.

for the absolute sake of fuck. coming soon: HackerDAO! collect 10xer tokens and finally prove to the junior devs why corporate gives you so many points to crunch on! vote on fun new jargon, but only if it’s crypto-related! surely you’re hacker enough to be on the pump side of this pump and dump!

 

reposting here for better visibility (let me know if there’s a better way to do this now that we’re federated): the owners of hachyderm.io just started a generative AI for gaming project, and it looks like donations to them will likely end up going to that

 

It's because there is a vast concerted effort by the political left to destroy Musk now that he is no longer regarded as being strictly on their side. It's at Trumpian scale these days, in terms of the venom being directed at him.

Reddit is overflowing with non-stop Musk hatred. They spout lie after lie about him in every single thread where he's a topic. The most popular lie being that his business efforts - ie his success - were funded by an emerald mine that his father owned (neither thing is true).

I say this as an emotionally independent, objective observer of the craziness, I have no stake in it, and don't feel one way or another about it. The seeming mental illness the topic of Musk seems to draw out of people is astounding however, the herd promptly acts like deranged lunatics when he comes up as a topic.

Until Trump I had never seen anything like it before, in person or online. There must be a name for such a massive scale of crowd insanity, to describe the frothing-at-the-mouth irrationality.

my deranged lunatic hivemind venomous mentally ill frothing-at-the-mouth leftist brain can’t handle how rational this fucking asshole’s take on musk and trump is

there’s also this at the top of the thread:

I've been mostly ambivalent about the Musk-era at Twitter—mostly because I just don't care enough to have an opinion.

This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.

Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding.

turning one of the most popular sites on the internet into a cesspit of transphobia and nazis: ambivalent

musk fails to appreciate the Twitter brand: angry and disappointed

remember, hacker news is a bastion of high-quality discussion. fucking shitheads

 

Bevy is a fun, cozy game engine to play with if you’re looking for something very flexible that implements some surprisingly advanced features. things I like:

  • it’s all rust, which is an advantage for me and the chemical burns I have from handling the dialect of C++ a lot of older game engines used to be written in
  • it implements a flexible entity component system, which I found pretty great for specifying game and rendering logic for things like roguelikes and simulations, where multiple game systems might interact in dynamic ways
  • the API is very cozy and feels like querying an extremely fast database at times
  • it’s a lot lower level than something like Unity or Godot, but you get some pretty advanced rendering features included
  • the main developer seems to have a lot of industry experience and a solid roadmap
 

Nix is one of the few pieces of software I trust. I use it on just about every computer I work on — awful.systems is managed and deployed by just nixos-rebuild and a deployment flake, as are almost all the computers in my house (including a few embedded into the house itself). in general it makes both software development and configuring Linux a lot more fun compared with the traditional way of doing things

I often call Nix fucking incomprehensible, but it doesn’t need to be. Zero to Nix is one of the documentation projects that’s intended to be a more gentle goal-oriented introduction to Nix concepts, and it’s definitely worth following along if you’re curious about Nix and want to be able to do something useful with it right away

if you end up liking Nix and want more of it, NixOS is an entire Linux distro configured and managed by Nix, and it’s incredibly powerful and stable. I run it on a full-fat gaming PC as my primary OS and the experience of running it is surprisingly very good; feel free to ask and I’ll summarize how I run stuff like games on NixOS

 
 

the API is called Web Environment Integrity, and it’s a way to kill ad blockers first and a Google ecosystem lock-in mechanism second, with no other practical use case I can find

 

Wolfram’s post is fucking interminable and consists of about 20% semi-interesting math and 80% goofy shit like deciding that the creepy (to Wolfram) images in the AI model’s probability space must represent how aliens perceive the world. to my memory, this is about par for the course for Wolfram

the orange site decides that the reason why the output isn’t very interesting is because the AI isn’t a robot:

What we see from AI is what you get when you remove the "muscle module", and directly apply the representations onto the paper. There's no considering of how to fill in a pixel; there's just a filling of the pixel directly from the latent space.

It's intriguing. Also makes me wonder if we need to add a module in between the representational output and the pixel output. Something that mimics how we actually use a brush.

this lack of muscle memory is, of course, why we have never done digital art once in the history of humanity. all claims to the contrary are paid conspirators in the pocket of Big Dick Blick

Of course, the AIs can't wake up if we use that analogy. They are not capable of anything more than this state right now.

But to me, lucid dreaming is already a step above the total unconsciousness of just dreaming, or just nothing at all. And wakefulness always follows shortly after I lucid dream.

only 10x lucid dreamers wake up after falling asleep

we can progressively increase the numerical values of the weights—eventually in some sense “blowing the mind” of the network (and going a bit “psychedelic” in the process)

I wonder if there's a more exact analog of the action of psychedelics on the brain that could be performed on generative models?

I always find it interesting how a hero dose of LSD gives similar visuals to what these image AI's do to achieve a coherent image.

[more nonsense]

I feel like the more we get AI to act like humans, and the more those engineers and others use LSD, the more convergence we are going to have with curiosity and breakthroughs about how we function.

the next time you’re in an altered state, I want you to close your eyes and just imagine how annoyed you’d be if one of these shitheads was there with you, trying to get you to “form a BCI” or whatever by typing free association words into ChatGPT

 

hopefully this is alright with @dgerard@awful.systems, and I apologize for the clumsy format since we can’t pull posts directly until we’re federated (and even then lemmy doesn’t interact the best with masto posts), but absolutely everyone who hasn’t seen Scott’s emails yet (or like me somehow forgot how fucking bad they were) needs to, including yud playing interference so the rats don’t realize what Scott is

 

post an image you want to see as the logo in the upper left (and other instances will probably see when we federate)

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