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rook

@ rook @awful.systems

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Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025

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  • Some fediverse links from non-mastodon sites can’t be loaded directly, it seems… if I stick the url into my mastodon client’s search field it’ll take me to the actual post, because it’ll do the request via the fedipub api. Anyway, I appreciate that’s a pretty poor UX for most people, so I’ll try and check my links more carefully in future!

    I saw the post linked yesterday, fwiw. I’m annoyed I didn’t spot that it was missing a timestamp, as that’s usually a sign of suspicious tweets.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025

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  • Oh yeah, it’s not the particular kind of good news we’d all like, but it is still entertaining.

    Also, it is worth noting that this isn’t the normal way people get served. It’s a right hassle compared to just visiting someone at home or at the office or whatever. This sort of action is taken when the person being subpoenaed was actively evading it, but is also an egotistical idiot who is incapable of keeping a low profile.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025

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  • It sounds a little like “natural language is an awful way to unambiguously specify systems… but what if there was a special computer language that you could use to create computer programs in? 🤯” combined with a something that sounds a lot like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choreographic_programming which already exists, but I guess represents a new frontier for vibe coding distributed systems, which are famously amenable to yolo development.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025

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  • It’s everyone’s favourite alternate browser developer back again, lamenting how mean some tech folk are and how cruelly they threaten and oppress certain groups of people.

    Which groups? Oh, you know the ones 😉

    A screenshot of a twitter post by Andreas Kling, reading:

    In recent years l've attended multiple software conference talks that had unrelated extreme political rhetoric in slides, such as "fuck [name]" and "punch [group]".

    Whenever this happened, some of the audience would clap and cheer, l'd roll my eyes, and the talk would get back on topic.

    Fast-forward to today, and look at how many people in our industry are openly celebrating the murder of someone they decided was a "nazi" and "fascist". Turns out these people were more serious than I thought.

    As someone who's repeatedly been called a "nazi" and "fascist" myself for disagreements with far-left ideology, I know how easily those labels get thrown around. And honestly, this is making me seriously reconsider which conferences I attend.

    There's a hateful rot within our industry. It shouldn't be socially acceptable to cheer for murder. We need to do more than roll our eyes.

    Source: https://goblin.band/notes/aeui8zv7rw80c08v

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025

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  • KeepassXC (my password manager of choice) are “experimenting” with ai code assistants 🫩

    https://www.reddit.com/r/KeePass/comments/1lnvw6q/comment/n0jg8ae/

    I'm a KeePassXC maintainer. The Copilot PRs are a test drive to speed up the development process. For now, it's just a playground and most of the PRs are simple fixes for existing issues with very limited reach. None of the PRs are merged without being reviewed, tested, and, if necessary, amended by a human developer. This is how it is now and how it will continue to be should we choose to go on with this. We prefer to be transparent about the use of AI, so we chose to go the PR route. We could have also done it locally and nobody would ever know. That's probably how most projects work these days. We might publish a blog article soon with some more details.

    The trace of petulance in the response… “we could have done it secretly, that’s how most projects do it” is not the kind of attitude I’m happy to see attached to a security critical piece of software.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025

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  • Not so much “enjoy” as “remember at all, unlike most of the other games I’ve played in the last 10 years or so”, but I take your point.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025

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  • KDE showing how it should be done:

    https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-www/2025-October/009275.html

    Question:

    I am curious why you do not have a link to your X social media on your website. I know you are just forwarding posts to X from your Mastodon server. However, I’m afraid that if you pushed for more marketing on X—like DHH and Ladybird do—the hype would be much greater. I think you need a separate social media manager for the X platform.

    Response:

    We stopped posting on X for several reasons:

    1. The owner is a nazi
    2. The owner censors non- nazis and promotes nazis and their messages
    3. (Hence) most people who remain on X or are clueless and have difficulty

    parsing written text (one would assume), or are nazis 4. Most of the new followers we were getting were nazi-propaganda spewing bots (7 out of 10 on average) or just straight up nazis.

    Our community is not made up of nazis and many of our friendly contributors would be the target of nazi harassment, so we were not sure what we were doing there and stopped posting and left.

    We are happy with that decision and have no intention of reversing it.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025

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  • I got more “the thing” vibes, tbh.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025

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  • That’s depressing… I really liked the music direction of halo. It really stood out to me in a way that other games never manage. I can still hum the halo theme and a bunch of its score, but I’d be hard pressed to do that with any other game… I know the elder scrolls theme, I guess, but can’t remember much else about their sound design.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025

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  • Yeah, skintight palmtop hologram cortana certainly ticked some boxes there, but in-universe it was all a bit “everyone is beautiful, no-one is horny”, with a side order of “all assistants should be female and sexy”, to my mind at least.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025

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  • And on the subject of microsoft, this is a splendid way to describe the both that specific company, the us tech sector as a whole and entire us government for that matter:

    “We will build the tools of genocide, but never a sex bot” is such a condemnation of American society lolsob

    https://xoxo.zone/@Ashedryden/115452105359019979

    It was posted in reference to this article on the MIT technology review site, which gets an archive link because it has two overlapping cookie opt-out popups: https://archive.is/KhMqT

    It is an interview with microsoft’s mustafa suleyman, their head of ai. For all he claims to think that chatbots pretending to be people is bad, I don’t see him actually doing a whole lot about it.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025

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  • I might be behind the curve on this one, but ice are now using halo (the computer game) images in recruitment ads, and referring to immigrants (and people who look like immigrants, i guess) as “the flood”, the all-consuming alien horde who are one of the antagonists of the series.

    Given how microsoft are happy to contribute to the development of the epstein ballroom, I can only assume that they’re cool with all this.

    https://aftermath.site/microsoft-halo-dhs-ice-trump-flood

    A screenshot of a twitter post by the department of homeland security, showing an image from the halo video game series and the text “finishing this fight”, “destroy the flood” and a link to “join ice gov”.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th October 2025

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  • I can imagine a world where AI becomes extremely good at flipping burgers or driving cars well before it learns how to write software or […] protein folding or playing board games

    That’s because despite Moravec’s paradox being noted down in the 80s (y’know, the last ai winter) there’s still a certain kind of asshole who thinks that flipping burgers is an easy task performed by stupid people but playing go is somehow the height of human intellect, despite 40+ years of evidence to the contrary.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th October 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th October 2025

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  • But of course they named it “atlas”. Openai is clearly the work randian supermen.

    Also, anil sounds like he might be a little out of touch with regards to how people search these days. Careful keyword searching isn’t even as useful as it used to be, given the damage google et al have done to their own products.

    (also also, interactive fiction has marched on a little since zork and infocom were the latest and greatest things, but I accept that most people won’t have noticed)

  • New Omarchy damage control just dropped

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  • There are various other posts here on the general subject.

    https://awful.systems/post/5897965

    Omarchy is a deeply uninteresting and partially-assed project that has been thrust into the limelight because if the creator’s political leanings, not because of any merits it might have.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th October 2025

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  • I see there’s at least one big fan of Moldbug still trying to implement his perfect neofeudal state.

    https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-wants-strong-influence-over-the-robot-army-hes-building/

    My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have at Tesla is, if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?

    If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army? Not control, but a strong influence … I don't feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.

    I’m sure this is fine, largely because he is an idiot. Probably bad news for other shareholders and customers though.

    Anyone else getting “when I die, you’re all joining me in my mausoleum” vibes from musk?

  • New Omarchy damage control just dropped

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  • Mmm. There’s certainly nothing else about any of the people or projects involved that’s likely to be a source of fuss, either.

    No sir, nothing but apolitical dramaless software development as far as the eye can see.