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rook

@ rook @awful.systems

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119
Joined
3 yr. ago

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

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  • What, are you telling me you’re not prepared to share your most intimate details with elon musk’s edgelord/waifu simulator in order to let it pretend to be you well enough to fool a bunch of professionals who should know better, and let it decide whether you should live or die? With a marketing pitch like that, who could possibly refuse?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Somehow I missed the fact that yesterday paypal’s blockchain operator fucked up and accidentally minted 300 trillion itchy and scratchy coins.

    https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=paxos-accidental-mint

    And now apparently it turns out that it was just a sequence of stupid whereby they accidentally deleted 300 million, which would have been impressive all by itself, then tried to recreate it (🎶 but at least it isn’t fiat currency🎶) and got the order of magnitude catastrophically wrong and had to delete that before finally undoing their original mistake. Future of finance right here, folks.

    Anyone else know the grisly details? The place I heard it from is a mostly-private account on mastodon which isn’t really shareable here, and they didn’t say where they’d heard it.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Interesting developments reported by ars technica: Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews

    I don’t think any of this is actually good news for the people who’re actually suffering the effects of ai scraping and bullshit generation, but I do think it is a good idea that someone with sufficient clout is standing up to google et al and suggesting that they can’t just scrape al the things, all the time, and then screw the source of all their training data.

    I’m somewhat unhappy that it is cloudflare doing this, a company who have deeply shitty politics and an unpleasantly strong grasp on the internet already. I very much do not want the internet to be divided into cloudflare customers, and the slop bucket.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Aside from the name being stupid and annoying (and their justifications and comparisons being additionally stupid and annoying) I’m… not entirely against this license? As a less shitty (AFAICT) version of the BUSL, I’d rather companies used this than the BUSL or just going closed-source (which is an option a bunch of firms have chosen, after all).

    I’m attempting to get my employer to open-source some of our stuff, and there are several people at the top who are proprietary software folk at heart and this seems like a reasonable way to trick them into relaxing a their grip a little.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th October 2025

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  • Fosstodon does not have a good history in this regard. It took some effort to get them to drop a far-right mod earlier this year, and even with a shuffle of leadership they’re clearly all about the centrist acceptance of the right wing and the repeated assertion that tech isn’t political and that all this is just so much drama.

  • Feeling increasingly nihilistic about the state of tech, privacy, and the strangling of the miracle that is online anonymity. And some thoughts on arousing suspicion by using too many privacy tools.

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  • “If you cannot quit everything you may as well not quit anything” is not a great rallying cry, because there’s a strong risk that people will take you up on your suggestion.

    Doing something imperfect is better than doing nothing. Let’s not purity test.

  • Feeling increasingly nihilistic about the state of tech, privacy, and the strangling of the miracle that is online anonymity. And some thoughts on arousing suspicion by using too many privacy tools.

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  • I appreciate that licenses are not magic shields, and that you’re exposed to significant risks that I am not, so apologies if I came across a bit “have you tried googling”, which I was trying to avoid.

    Still, even without getting involved yourself it might be worth finding some local radio folk (if there are any) if only to see what they do, and what equipment they use, and whether they’ve got into any trouble over it.

  • Feeling increasingly nihilistic about the state of tech, privacy, and the strangling of the miracle that is online anonymity. And some thoughts on arousing suspicion by using too many privacy tools.

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  • But setting one of these up would definitely get me on a list here

    Is that the standard state attitude to amateur radio there, too? I mean, obviously getting an amateur radio license involves actively putting your name on a government list and paying money for the privilege, and I can understand you not wanting to do that, but it looks like the 430 band is available to amateur radio licensees there, and you can get lora devices in that range. Amateur radio folk seem to be mostly viewed as peculiar last century fossils (and to be fair, many of them are) because everyone else (legal and otherwise) has vastly better equipment, which might give you some leeway to experiment with mesh networking?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025

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  • I suspect we all knew it already, but Bruno Dias offers some receipts: the bluesky crackdown on people suggesting that charlie kirk should rest in piss came several days before the government leaned on social media firms.

    September 12th: bluesky mourns kirk: https://aftermath.site/bluesky-charlie-kirk-dead-rest-in-piss

    September 15th: whitehouse nastygram : https://bsky.app/profile/chipnick.com/post/3m2k6va63222m

    (also, bitter lol at “gentlemen”, because running a tech company is a mans job, don’t you know)

    They complied well in advance, because it’s what they wanted to do anyway.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025

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  • Polyphasic sleep was a thing for a while. Was that it?

  • OpenAI does deals to make a deal — and the money is getting worried

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  • Techbros learn anything from history, even recent history… difficulty level: impossible.

  • OpenAI does deals to make a deal — and the money is getting worried

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  • That’s impressively awful.

    Was it economically rational to discover America?

    I ain’t gonna buy this crap, and I don’t think I can be bothered to steal it, but… I hear that the triangle trade was quite lucrative back in the day. I wonder how they characterise the slave trade in their book, and whether they consider its ending a good thing or not.

    I mean, maybe even pause briefly to think about why the west indies were called that. Or think about what empires value. Or to think at all, really.

    from the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program to Moore’s law and Bitcoin

    No vaccines or antibiotics, but bitcoin is a world-changing invention? Someone’s been insulated from consequences all their life. Here’s hoping they lose everything in the Great Depression 2: Greater and More Depressing, whilst loudly proclaiming that a the invention of ai waifus was worth the destruction of civilisation.

  • Framework goes full fash, supports Hyprland and Omarchy

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  • Shoutout to gleam.run whose web page has always (AFAIK) said

    Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025

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  • For the most part, the sudden rash of people deciding that their bigotry is now publicly acceptable is mostly around non-loadbearing things, because aggrieved entitled nerds aren’t great at working in a team (hyprland has definitely suffered from alienating people and missing out on fixes and compatibility work).

    The rubygems stuff was a special case, because it was a hostile takeover of some important infrastructure by a shitty company, but most of the rest are unexciting projects that have found that giving it the old H-H is good publicity and more importantly: there are some rich folk throwing money around. Not a lot of cash in open source under normal circumstances.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025

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  • Mercifully image-free article from rolling stone on how easy it is becoming to get grok to generate porn, including deepfakes of real people and bestiality.

    https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-grok-hardcore-porn-1235442715

    Includes a relevant quote from musk back in august:

    https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1954791048934244394

    I still remember 6th/7th grade debates with classmates about VHS vs Betamax!

    VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉

    I guess that’s a product “moat” of sorts.

  • now that's what I call fashtech, vol. 1

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  • Framework getting into the fashtech game.

    They’re a gold tier sponsor of hyprland:

    https://xcancel.com/hyprwm/status/1975917930576785581

    Apparently they’ve been shilling omarchy on twitter too, though I’ve only found a guide on their website for now:

    https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Omarchy+Linux+Installation+on+the+Framework+Laptop+13/564

    After the revelation that their desktop machine was going to be aimed at ai bros and had soldered-on ram I was concerned that they might be abandoning the principles behind their laptops. Now I don’t think it matters how great or terrible their next offerings are going to be. What a disappointment.

    (h/t to cari, https://sunny.garden/@cari/115336460488524197)

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025

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  • Bluesky going to bad for that poor, downtrodden, victimised and underrepresented demographic, uh, ai slop posters?

    https://bsky.app/profile/carrion.bsky.social/post/3m2kf3rottc2h

    A screenshot of an email sent to a bluesky user, reading

    Hi there, Your Bluesky account (@carrion.bsky.social) has created a list called "Al Slop Posters" that may violate our Community Guidelines. We've temporarily hidden this list from other users because it contains one or more of these issues.

    • Harmful language such as insults or slurs
      • Unverified claims
      • Appears intended to shame or abuse users

  • now that's what I call fashtech, vol. 1

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  • I was always faintly baffled by ladybird… why, in this day and age, would you start a complex new project using a complex and deeply un-memory-safe language when you could just… not? I’m guessing kling is one of those rockstar devs who is certain that they never make mistakes.

    Swift is a surprisingly OK language. It’s just a shame it is hitched to apple who seem to have real problems with making dev tooling that isn’t awful. Maybe in a few years the cross-platform experience won’t suck.