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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
New piece from The Atlantic: The Age of AI Child Abuse is Here, which delves into a large-scale hack of Muah.AI and the large-scale problem of people using AI as a child porn generator.
And now, another personal sidenote, because I cannot stop writing these (this oneās thankfully unrelated to the articleās main point):
The idea that ā[Insert New Tech] Is Inevitabletmā (which Unserious Academic interrogated in depth BTW) took a major blow when NFTs crashed and burned in full view of the public eye and got rapidly turned into a pop-culture punchline.
That, I suspect, is helping to fuel the large scale rejection of AI and resistance to its implementation - Silicon Valleyās failure to make NFTs a thing has taught people that Silicon Valley can be beaten, that resistance is anything but futile.
lol fandom could have been even worse
data moat
imagine how they could have monetized it
Surely Wikia could have catapulted to the upper echelons of the Fortune 500 if they had just moved faster to gatekeep the facts about gender-swapped Lady Vegeta being a rare card in set 27 of the Dragonball gacha game
ok my first thought was to make a joke about castle warfare, despite my knowledge set being ephemera from a childhood appreciating tech trees in video games. So I did some research:
- The etymology of āmoatā is that it comes from the word āmotteā. I will not elaborate.
- Moats were effective against early forms of siege warfare, like battering rams, siege towers, and mining out the foundations of a castleās defences, or anything that required approaching the castle directly
- Moats were made somewhat obsolete by siege artillery, which did not need to be in the direct vicinity of the castle
Err so yeah. Make your own jokes, ig.
Anyway, this has been MoatFactsā¢ļø. Paging @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de for better commentary*
idk what to exactly put there, moat is still an obstacle even in modern context, but assault on a castle with a moat using modern weaponry would be hilariously one-sided. you can suppress defenders with something, use a bridge layer to get inside the moat, then let combat engineers do their shenanigans to āopenā castle one way or another. or you can use helis to do the same, or you can just level it all with artillery or airstrike or maybe even loads of ATGMs
that said itās not completely useless. moats but dry were used as a part of fixed fortifications in ww1 quite successfully. freshly invented electrified barbed wire fence and machine guns made them quite hard to pass, especially if you are, say, a peasant from tula oblast born in 1898 that has never seen powerline before. i think the last proper moat use in large-scale warfare happened during iran-iraq war, in battle of the marshes, when iraqis flooded previously dry area known as fish lake and put underwater coils of barbed wire and high-voltage cables. defensive tactic used there was to shoot at assaulting iranians to make them abandon or fall out of their boats or amphibious vehicles, then when they were in the water high voltage lines were energized. iranians eventually crossed the marshes entirely using speedboats. maybe itās not that outdated considering that last recored bayonet charge happened in 2004 (by brits in iraq). ymmv
Like Vitalik Buterin creating eth because he was mad his op WoW char got nerfed, we now have more gamers lore. J D Vance played a Yawgmothās Bargain deck.
the harris campaign must get his list. if he ran only three dark rituals the election is over
We cannot allow a dark ritual gap.
āO Cent O Pence (R)ā is an anagram for āNecropotenceā
Trump is clearly campaigning on the critically overlooked black draw engine platform, possibly to spite blue voters.
Edit: āOne Percent Co.ā was right there! Itās all coming together now!
In other news, a lengthy report about Richard Stallman liking kids just dropped.
Hacker News has a thread on it. Its a dumpster fire, as expected.
Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, itās even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didnāt help.
Very serious people at HN at it again:
The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someoneās personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.
Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like āsexual harassment is not a real crimeā or āwe shouldnāt give our employees raises because otherwise theyāll soon demand infinite payā or āthereās no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isnāt going to damage the reputation of the organization I leadā youāre a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.
Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.
The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someoneās personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.
What do these people think leadership is?
No, obviously opinions like
- āif my MIT AI Lab mentor had sex with an underage sex worker on Epsteinās teen rape island, that was only because he thought she consentedā,
- āstealing a kiss from a woman is fine and not a sexual assault, maybe perhaps at most itās supposedly sexual harassment which is not real and is actually fineā,
- āI donāt believe in bereavement leave. What if all your close friends and family die one after another? Itās conceivable you would be gone from the office for days, or weeks, if not months.1 What if you lie about who is dying?ā,
- āOvertly sexualizing āparodyā ceremonies for a semi-fictitious church of Emacs centering around unprepared girls and women in my audience are fine and when people participate in them, there is certainly no peer pressure involved, not that I care if there isā,
- āItās fine to throw a tantrum about Emacs supporting another compiler infrastructure Not Invented Here. LLVM/Clang is supported by Apple and has a permissive license instead of GPL so itās basically proprietary, right?ā,
- ā
You may have heard or read critical statements about me; <a href=https://website.made.by.my.sychophants.example.com>please make up your own mind.</a>ā,
are in the same category as āI think pineapple on pizza is delicious/disgustingā when it comes to evaluating someoneās aptitude as a leader.
I advocate for Free Software despite RMS. I recognize the value of his good contributions and that I might not even have the concept of Free Software and its value without him. I donāt want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the editors of the report make it clear that neither do they. I think Stallman is an embarrassment and a liability for the Free Software movement. I respect his moral integrity on software freedom and some other political causes (including his clumsy, yet justified condemnations of police brutality, and boycott of Coca-Cola company due to their use of fascist death squads to suppress Colombian trade unions), but his awful takes on issues of basic respect and empathy toward women, suspiciously fervent wilingness to defend sexual relations between teenage minors and adults, and a number of other gaffes (both ones listed in the report and some that are less morally detestable, but still embarrassing) are still bad enough that Iād be willing to elect an inanimate carbon rod as the leader of the movement before him.
1: Itās conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola. I do not wish to imply that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola, but I will simply point out itās conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has such a secret humiliation fetish involving the aforementioned details, and that I have conceived such a scenario simply to prove it is conceivable, that (etc.).
