self

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] self@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

nobody asked you to post in this thread. you came and posted this shit in here because the thread is very popular, because lots and lots of people correctly fucking hate generative AI

so I guess please enjoy being the only “non-disingenuous” bootlicker you know outside of work, where everyone’s required (under implicit threat to their livelihood) to love this shitty fucking technology

but most of all: don’t fucking come back, none of us Luddites need your mid ass

[–] self@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago (4 children)
[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

exactly. in Doom Emacs (and an appropriately configured vim), you can surround the word under the cursor with brackets with ysiw] where the last character is the bracket you want. it’s incredibly fast (especially combined with motion commands, you can do these faster than you can think) and very easy to learn, if you know vim.

and I think that last bit is where the educational branch of our industry massively fucked up. a good editor that works exactly how you like (and I like the vim command language for realtime control and lisp for configuration) is like an electrician’s screwdriver or another semi-specialized tool. there’s a million things you can do with it, but we don’t teach any of them to programmers. there’s no vim or emacs class, and I’ve seen the quality of your average bootcamp’s vscode material. your average programmer bounces between fad editors depending on what’s being marketed at the time, and right now LLMs are it. learning to use your tools is considered a snobby elitist thing, but it really shouldn’t be — I’d gladly trade all of my freshman CS classes for a couple semesters learning how to make vim and emacs sing and dance.

and now we’re trapped in this industry where our professionals never learned to use a screwdriver properly, so instead they bring their nephew to test for live voltage by licking the wires. and when you tell them to stop electrocuting their nephew and get the fuck out of your house, they get this faraway look in their eyes and start mumbling about how you’re just jealous that their nephew is going to become god first, because of course it’s also a weirdo cult underneath it all, that’s what happens when you vilify the concept of knowing fuck all about anything.

[–] self@awful.systems 13 points 1 day ago (6 children)

it could turn on the RGB! though that would imply that the RGB could be turned off in the first place, which is optimistic on my part

[–] self@awful.systems 29 points 1 day ago (3 children)

it’s really embarrassing when the promptfans come here to brag about how they’re using the technology that’s burning the earth and it’s just basic editor shit they never learned. and then you watch these fuckers “work” and it’s miserably slow cause they’re prompting the piece of shit model in English, waiting for the cloud service to burn enough methane to generate a response, correcting the output and re-prompting, all to do the same task that’s just a fucking key combo.

Same with text formatting, for example. I regularly need to format long strings in specific ways, adding brackets and changing upper/lower capitalization. It does it in a second, and really well.

how in fuck do you work with strings and have this shit not be muscle memory or an editor macro? oh yeah, by giving the fuck up.

[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago

me: writing software for a calculator I don’t even own yet so I can maybe hopefully have a pocket version of one of the only good products of the first AI boom

them: Math Yes, it is fairly good at math. You can’t trust it,

[–] self@awful.systems 14 points 2 days ago

I will not go into ethics.

then stop wasting our fucking time

I didn’t read the rest of your post but it’s vaguely LLM-shaped so off you fuck

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

you may or may not classify it as ‘Generative AI’ on it’s own.

while the ship has sailed on calling the opencv shit you’re doing AI (thx, grifters of the first AI bubble), which part of object detection and facial recognition is generative?

[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago

also you’re right, I was unfair towards cubism_pitta. I wasn’t enough of an asshole.

hey fuckers. next time you get the sudden, overwhelming urge to jack off in public about how much money you’re feeding into the machine that does plagiarism and nothing else, keep it the fuck off my instance.

[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago

okwhateverdude

[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 2 days ago (10 children)

ah yes the only way to make LLMs, a technology built on plagiarism with no known use case, “not silly” is to throw a shitload of money at Apple or framework or whichever vendor decided to sell pickaxes this time for more RAM. yes, very interesting, thank you, fuck off

[–] self@awful.systems 22 points 2 days ago

ah yes the only way to make LLMs, a technology built on plagiarism with no known use case, “useful for any actual ai application” is to throw a shitload of money at nvidia. weird how that works!

 

this thread fucking sucks for me to have to post, but the linked open letter is an important read. none of the systemic issues pertaining to marginalized folks and commercial/military-industrial interests in the Nix community I’ve previously written about on TechTakes have been solved; in fact, they’ve gotten worse to the point where the Nix community moderation team is essentially in the process of quitting. that’s the beginning to an awful end for a project I like a whole lot.

even if you don’t give a fuck about Nix, the open letter is an important read because the toxicity, conflicts of interest, and underhanded tactics detailed in it are incredibly common in the open source space. this letter could have been written about a multitude of infamously toxic open source projects; Nix is lucky that it has marginalized folks involved who care about the direction of the project and want to make things better, but those people are actively leaving, after being burnt out by the toxic people and structures entrenched in Nix’s community. that’s a fucking tragedy.

 

who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do

 

reply with features and bug fixes you'd like to see in Philthy, the lemmy fork that runs on this instance. no guarantees I'll get to any of them soon, but particularly low-hanging fruit and well-liked features can be prioritized.

 

the awful.systems server cluster runs on an open infrastructure based on NixOS and Nix flakes, and though it desperately needs cleanup in some places, it's still a pretty good example of how to use a Nix flake to deploy NixOS in production. feel free to browse the repo and ask any questions about how it works, or about Nix in general!

also, if I get hit by a bus, this can be used to redeploy awful.systems elsewhere. an existing admin who isn't in the hospital or the grave can import a database backup and get back up and running!

and as always, contributions are welcome.

 

the r/SneerClub archive at awful.systems is welcoming contributors. it's a statically-generated site (from this set of archived posts in JSON format) that uses a unique, high-performance Nix-based static site generation system. the current site desperately needs a new stylesheet (especially on mobile), but one area where I really need advice or contributions is the dataset.

currently, the SneerClub archives only pull in data from the bdfr set, which I generated using Bulk Downloader for Reddit right before Reddit killed its API, but I'd love to merge the SneerClub_comments.jsonl and SneerClub_submissions.jsonl files into the data we're using to generate the site, since those have older data from ArchiveTeam. unfortunately, that data set is in a complete different format from the BDFR data. any advice for tools or techniques to merge those two data sets into one (or offers to contribute a merge script) is greatly appreciated.

 

the software we use to run awful.systems, which @dgerard@awful.systems suggested I call Philthy (and I agreed!), is seeking contributors.

like upstream Lemmy, this consists of a Rust backend and a Typescript+React frontend. contributions to both are welcome; use this thread to discuss ideas and collaborate.

here's some contribution ideas off the top of my head (but all reasonable contributions are welcome):

  • (frontend & backend) actually rebrand to Philthy, to prevent confusion between us and upstream Lemmy
  • (frontend & backend) rewrite README.md to emphasize that this is a fork
  • (frontend) make the page header and footer more configurable; remove various links that aren't relevant to awful.systems
  • (backend) delete posts from Mastodon when they're deleted on our end
  • (frontend & backend) implement The Firehose, a big admin-only list of the posts and content leaving our instance
  • (frontend & backend, ongoing) merge in changes from upstream Lemmy if there are features you wish our instance had

or make suggestions in this thread!

one major blocker preventing folks from contributing to Lemmy-related development I've seen is that a lot of people don't know Rust. if that's the case, I can offer the following:

  • the Lemmy codebase is the worst possible place to learn Rust, but I'd love to start a thread for Rust tutorials and shared learning. it's honestly an excellent language in its own right, so I'd love to teach folks about it even if they don't end up contributing to Philthy.
  • if you're good with React and/or Typescript and the feature you want to implement has a backend component, I don't mind handling the backend portion if I'm able.
 

this is a non-toxic place to collaborate on projects (programming, design, art, or otherwise) and share information; effectively, it's the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. this community has been in the planning phase for a long time, but the xz backdoor recently emphasized how severe the toxicity problem in existing open source communities is, and how important it is that we have a place to collaborate that isn't controlled by toxic personalities or corporate interests.

FreeAssembly is starting its existence as a Lemmy community that enables collaboration on externally-hosted projects, but that doesn't necessarily need to be its final form. as we figure out the needs of this community, we can grow to service needs like code hosting and design collaboration. for now, we recommend hosting code on software forges like Codeberg (and we recommend avoiding github if possible, though it's well-understood that this isn't easy for established projects). we also want to explore the best options for designers and artists to collaborate without making them dependent on large corporate infrastructure.

there are some expectations around posting to FreeAssembly. see the sidebar for details.

 

(via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)

surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive

even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down

 

we’re seeing a bit of spam come in from lemmy.world. if you happen to see any (and a lot of it seems to be in DMs), make sure to flag it. that’ll let both us and the originating instance’s mods know. if we get a bunch of reports and it seems like lemmy.world isn’t cleaning things up properly, we’ll take further steps to limit the amount of spam we get

 

Amaranth is a simple-but-expressive hardware description language (the type of language you use to define integrated circuits for FPGAs, ASICs, and similar hardware) implemented as a Python DSL. I'm not the biggest Python fan, but Amaranth is worth it -- even though it's in heavy development and its documentation is incomplete, it's by far the most comprehensible HDL I've ever used, and I've tried many of them.

its documentation is incomplete since the language is under heavy development, but its language guide is still the best gentle introduction to HDL concepts I've read, and its tutorials are written for an older version of the language (sometimes called nMigen) but are still excellent -- in particular, Robert Baruch's tutorials combine design fundamentals with formal verification (which itself is usually considered an advanced technique, but Amaranth streamlines it), and the Vivonomicon RISC-V tutorials are worth a read too

 

You could get a robot limb for your blown-off limb

Later on the same technology could automate your gig, as awesome as it is

Wait, it gets awful: you could split a atom willy-nilly

If it's energy that can be used for killing, then it will be

It's not about a better knife, it's chemistry and genocide

And medicine for tempering the heck in a projector light

Landmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes

Cameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness

We can not be trusted with the stuff that we come up with

The machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons, um

Technology, focus on the other shit

3D-printed body parts, dehydrated onion dip

You can buy a Jet Ski from a cell phone on a jumbo jet

T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y, it's the ultimate

the subject matter of Aesop Rock's latest album felt relevant to our instance's interests

 

(here’s a Verge article about the Waymo car getting burned during a Chinese New Year celebration)

a self-driving car got destroyed (to a round of applause from the crowd) in San Francisco! will the robot car fans on the orange site take this opportunity to explore why the tech seems to be extremely unpopular among the populations of the cities where it’s deployed?

of course the fuck not, time to spin the wheel of racist dog whistles and see which one we land on! a note to the roving orange site fans (hi, fuck off), these replies are either heavily upvoted or have broad agreement in the thread (or I’m posting them here cause I want to laugh at some stupid shit, you don’t dictate the terms of my enjoyment)

This isn't a revolt against AI. SF attracts anarchist mobs and they'll vandalize buses, trains, police cars, bikes, whatever is around.

we’re off to a strong start with some bullshit straight from musk’s twitter (which he stole from the fever dreams of the conservatives on his platform)

Alternatively: this is San Francisco where on a good day the locals don’t need much excuse to set fire to a car (although I usually associate it with the Giants winning a World Series) and this poor dumb stupid driverless Waymo drove into a celebratory and by the looks of it somewhat drunken crowd on the Streets of Chinatown during the Chinese New Year where in following its prime directive to do no harm, it got itself stuck up the creek without a paddle so to speak. Waymo probably should have accounted for that ahead of time and told their cars not to go near Chinatown this evening.

remember that no matter what, the robot car is the victim here. there’s no chance Waymo was doing anything dangerous or assholeish in the area; much like robocop, the car is an innocent victim of its fucking prime directives??? and you wouldn’t set fire to robocop, would you?

This is a hilarious take. A few youths went bonkers and defaced private property. Has nothing to do with philosophical beliefs or a Big Tech agenda. You should debate the finer points of the Big Tech agenda with them while they run up to you in a maddened rage.

yeah! I can’t wait until these angry mobs set fire to your robot car body! then you’ll see!

Arguments about driverless cars aside, the youth in this country are seriously lost. It only takes one generation of poor parenting and poor civic policies to ruin a culture.

this one is downvoted, but this reply isn’t:

Sounds like they were right. The youth at that point was lost, and are now raising people who will literally burn down a waymo for fun, or because of some horrifically ignorant idea about fairness.

oh you poor woke kids don’t like when shitty dangerous robot cars are on the streets? are you gonna start crying about how it’s “unfair” they’re covering up pedestrian injuries and traffic accidents now? your grandpa would never stand for this

view more: ‹ prev next ›