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 you’ll 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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Looks like Ziz remains on the lam again.
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I don’t think I could ever recommend chromium-based browsers due to the MV3 switch. Does ungoogled-chromium do any patching to get around this? If not I think FF is the only sane option still.
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The best solution right now may be “buy a Macbook and learn MacOS”, which is so depressing.
Depends on whether you include “my personal data is sent to the manufacturer of the computer against my wishes” in your threat model… Apple does many good things for security, and I wish PC hardware makers would take security-related things even just nearly as seriously as them. But I can’t trust Apple anymore either.
(Explanation: the whole iCloud syncing stuff is such a buggy mess. I don’t want it, I don’t need it, so I want it off. But I guess Apple just doesn’t test enough how well it works when you turn it off, maybe they can’t imagine someone not wanting it. The problem is, iCloud sync settings don’t stay off. Settings randomly turn themselves back on, e.g. during OS updates, and upload data before you even notice it. I’m not claiming that’s intentional, I assume it’s just bugs. But I’ve observed such bugs again and again in the past 9 years, and I’ve had enough. Still have a Macbook around, but I use it very rarely these days, only when I need some piece of software on MacOS that has no suitable Linux equivalent.)
While a PC+Linux setup can avoid the specific issue of “don’t randomly upload my data somewhere”, the setup of it all can be a mess, as you say. And then security is still limited by buggy hardware and BIOS/firmware that is frequently full of security holes. The state of computers is depressing indeed (in so many ways, security just being one of them)…
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Last time I tried it, ungoogled chromium had some issues with yubikeys (see https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-wiki/faq#how-to-get-fido-u2f-security-keys-to-work-in-google-sign-in) which I don’t think have been fixed yet. That was enough to be a deal breaker for me.
do yubikeys suck as much as it looks like they suck?
Without knowing why you think they suck, it’s hard to say. I like having unphishable uncopyable credentials, and it irritates me that they aren’t more widely supported. On my desktop or laptop, they’re less irritating than TOTP, for example, which is neither unphishable nor uncopyable but much more widely used.
whereas passwords that will always be copy-pasted are 128 characters
Whilst there isn’t really such a thing as “too secure”, it is the case that things like passwords are not infinitely scaleable. Something like yescrypt produces 256-bit hashes (iirc) so there’s simply no space to squish all that extra entropy you’re providing into the output… it might not be any more secure than a password a quarter of its length (or less!).
128 bits of entropy is already impractical to brute force, even if you ignore the fact that modern password hashes like yescrypt and argon2 are particularly challenging to attack even if your password has low entropy.
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The biggest issue I have is that the firmware cannot be updated (which I realize is somewhat a matter of taste regarding your threat model). Other than that, it’s the added complexity of “use this physical device” and the concern I had about recovering accounts if I lost the Yubikey.
The solokey v2 and the nitrokey v3 (I think) have some firmware upgradability, but they’re not as capable as a yubikey (the last time I checked I couldn’t use either of them to unlock a keepassxc password vault, for example). Whilst it would be a right hassle to deal with a lost device, I generally lock my accounts with a main key and two spares that get stored safely and make a note in my password database of which accounts can use which keys so there’s little risk of locking myself out of anything, and I can get a list of sites to visit to revoke credentials from. In any case, the minor inconvenience is a good tradeoff for me, given the significant security guarantees the keys offer over other authentication mechanisms.
But also, “added complexity” is just a thing with two factor authentication, and most of my use of U2F keys involves less effort than unlocking my phone, then unlocking my TOTP application, then searching for the account and site I’m trying to unlock, then waiting for the timer to reset because I can’t authenticate before the current code expires, etc.
Assuming I didn’t fuck up basic math,
Beats me! I just use off-the-shelf entropy calculators and hope they’re right. They mostly seem to agree that ~128 bits of entropy from a 10-word (70-85-ish characters) passphrase from the EFF large wordlist, or ~24 characters from uppercase/lowercase/numeric. Both might be reasonably considered overkill, if you can be sure that the thing that’s hashing the password is using a modern algorithm (which often you can’t, sadly).
I also dislike unreasonably long passwords because more modestly-sized ones can be typed out manually when needs be, or even read over the phone in an emergency. I wouldn’t fancy doing that with 128 character passwords! You may of course never need to do those things, but I’ve needed to do both, at work and otherwise.
In the process of looking for ways to link up with homeschool parents that aren’t doing it for culty reasons, I accidentally discovered the existence of a small but active subreddit for “progressive monarchists”. It’s titled r/progressivemonarchists, because their imagination in naming conventions only slightly outatrips their imagination for forms of government. Given how our usual sneer fodder overlaps with nrx I figured there are others here who I can inflict this headache on.
Quality shitpost, I could imagine some thirteen year old actually believing this.
Yea, no fascism whatsoever took place in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, or Belgium during WW2, in which they were all very successfully avoiding being occupied by fascists.
Extra points to Spain who already avoided succumbing to their own homegrown brand of fascism before the Nazi German invasion of Poland, and where they avoided having fascists in power all the way until the 1970s. There’s a book I quite like about the war where that happened called Homage to Catalonia. I wonder if Orwell ever read it.
Missing from the list is Italy, which is no longer a constitutional monarchy, but used to be until 1946, which is why they were so good at avoiding fascism they even named it.
This might take the cake for the dumbest take I’ve seen from George Orwell and not for a lack of competition.
A really hot take for sure. Apparently Orwell did at least say this, at least according to Wikipedia (I was doubtful initially), which is weird, but I also feel that Orwell is often misrepresented and we are probably missing context. For one, Orwell was a socialist and yet is somehow presented as a hero by Raeganists and the such. I suspect there might be context missing.
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is it a real quote from Orwell or just something someone made up?
seems to be a real quote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchism#Liberty
Yeah then it is a shitty take.
let’s also not forget these very liberal and not at all nazi-collaborating kingdoms of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Thailand and Japan. honorable mentions to Cambodia that very successfully avoided Pol Pot and Iran that very successfully avoided islamic revolution
Oh yeah Britain didn’t become fascist, they just imposed brutal imperialist exploitation on colonies in Asia and Africa lol. It’s not fascism if you export it!
Fascism really is “we have imperialism at home”
i would love to read someone more familiar with historical fascism and imperialism who is able to articulate the link between the two. like, an analysis of imperialism as the construction and maintenance of borders across which exploitation is enforced and economic value is extracted – paired with the observation of fascism as the attempts to construct borders “across peoples” from within the imperial core
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I screenshot this the other day and forgot to post it. Well, enjoy.]
i wonder which endocrine systems are disrupted by not having your head sufficiently stuffed into a toilet before being old enough to type words into nazitter dot com
deepseek goes wild https://www.reddit.com/r/mathmemes/comments/1iehx5f/what_the_fuck/
@dgerard @blakestacey like that Looney Tunes bit of cutting down an entire tree to make a single toothpick
I have to keep reminding myself that this is the technology that they all claim will soon do all our work, our arts, our science, everything.
oh well done, you’ve gone and made logorrhea a feature
these chatbots are billed by token, so it only makes sense
you’d think that $200+ entertainment would be better
73 might be overrepresented because it’s used by radioamateurs as a signoff. you can see it in old forums in comment footers as 73 [callsign]
lol holy shit this just came into reddit sneerclub (and was zapped immediately)
user HardboiledHack
also tried r/lesswrong and r/slatestarcodex
i’m sure the guardian can be trusted to report on anything involving trans people
the journalist is J Oliver Conroy https://www.theguardian.com/profile/j-oliver-conroy who now writes for the Washington Examiner and used to write for Quillette (the article has been deleted from the site) https://archive.is/aSBjW
from http://joliverconroy.net/
I am a journalist who specializes in features and profiles. I write about the American right, ideologues, intellectuals, extremist movements, the culture wars, true crime, and strange events and strange places.
by “about”, he means “for”
I’m a journalist at the Guardian working on a piece about the Zizians. If you have encountered members of the group or had interactions with them, or know people who have, please contact me: [email protected].
I’m also interested in chatting with people who can talk about the Zizians’ beliefs and where they fit (or did not fit) in the rationalist/EA/risk community.
I prefer to talk to people on the record but if you prefer to be anonymous/speak on background/etc. that can possibly be arranged.
Thanks very much.
i’ve also warned over at the old place
Do the Zizians fit in the “rationalist/EA/risk community”? Gosh and golly gee.
Yuddites and Zizians are a better example of the “narcissism of small differences” than any of the ones that Siskind propped up.
From what I’ve been able to piece together from the various theological disputes people have had with the murder cult it seems like the only two differences are that Ziz and friends are much more committed to nonhuman animal welfare than the average rat and that they have decided that the correct approach to conflict is always to escalate. This makes them more aggressive about basically everything which looks like a much deeper ideological gap than there actually is. I’m not going to evaluate whether these are reasonable conclusions to take from the same bizarre set of premises that lead to Roko’s Basilisk being a concern.
However, I do think that the unfolding of this story presents an object lesson in why “always escalate to the max” is a wildly stupid idea. It turns out that even when you have guns (metaphorical or otherwise) and a complete disregard for the consequences of failure the average group of citizens is still at a decided disadvantage to the state at higher points on the escalation ladder.
You misunderstand, they escalate to the max to keep themselves (including selves in parallel dimensions or far future simulations) from being blackmailed by future super intelligent beings, not to survive shootouts with border patrol agents.
I am fairly certain Yud had said something very close to that effect in reference to preventing blackmail from the basilisk, even though he tries to no-true-scotchman zizians wrt his functional decision ‘theory’ these days.
No nibbles here.
Project Gutenberg has AI generated summaries?? How the mighty have fallen.
I was researching a bizarre old sci-fi book I once read (don’t judge; bad old sci-fi is a trip), and Gutenberg’s summary claims it was written in the 21st century. There’s actually no accurate information about this book online, as far as I can tell the earliest reference is Project Gutenberg typing it up into a text file in 2003.
Given that it’s in the public domain, no one has any idea where it came from, and it has old sci-fi vibes; I strongly suspect it was written in the 20th century*; making that misinformation. It’s also just a bad summary that, while not wrong, doesn’t really reflect the (amusingly weird) themes of the book.
Anyway someone needs to tell them that no information is leagues better than misinformation.
* maybe the '70s give or take but I’m not a professional date guesser
It definitely has that old sci-fi weirdness to it, but the earliest edition I’m seeing on goodreads was in '03.
The file metadata of the oldest copy on the gutenberg webserver says 2003 – and the document itself says Gutenberg created it in 2003 and published it in 2005 (whatever that means, maybe they were delaying ebook releases to ensure a steady stream)
Anyway this 2003 copy had their public domain boilerplate; it was described as a book in the public domain.
There are indeed a lot of websites about this, but none with any more information that Project Gutenberg so I’m guessing they all trace back to the Gutenberg release. Probably you’d have to find some physical information about it in an actual library to trace it further.
But I’m not like a professional book researcher or anything, that’s just my opinion!
That is indeed troubling, casts a shadow on Project Gutenberg’s judgement. Now I wonder how long until Wikipedia falls too :( Gosh, I miss being excited about new tech. Now new tech is just making things worse.
About that book, so it is more “good bad” instead of “bad bad”? Maybe I’ll take a look, some light/weird reading might be better than doomscrolling (and these days there’s so much doom to scroll).
I don’t remember (reading it was a bit like a fever dream) but there’s a non-zero chance it has racist vibes in parts you have been warned.
But oh so quotable:
We have been treating the trees on a ten mile radius with an anti-flammatory solution for several years as well, and it is quite impossible to set them on fire.
Okay thanks for the heads-up, I will give it a try. The “Note to the reader” it starts with is already pretty wild… (unless that’s just part of the fiction. Edit: I assume it’s part of the fiction)
Edit: okay… a few pages in, I don’t think I can do this… not my thing.
I myself have a collection of dutch science fiction from the 70s (doubt any of it was ever translated) and wow does it get wild at times. At least that is what I remembered from reading it when younger (the books came from my parents), the thing i remember the most was about a dude having some weird sexual relation with a spider alien. (Out of wtf factor, not out of “this awakened something” factor, not that there is something wrong with that, just eurgh spiders). Often thought about that story in relation to the puppies saying they wanted to go back to their imagined past science fiction. Bunch of reactionaries
Is there anything written up anywhere about these AI book summaries? I know they were doing “AI” audiobooks.
(After sleeping on it it’s possible the book I was thinking of was written in the earliest 21st century).
There was an announcement on their mailing list here: https://lists.pglaf.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/MTHHI3TD7YXD3EHLKVBBA57KRBBWRI72/
We then worked with the same programmers [as AI generated categories] to provide automated summaries of nearly every book in the collection. You can find those summaries on book landing pages. These summaries are intended to be helpful for people trying to decide what book to read, or to get an idea of what a book is about.
For example, here is the automated summary from book #1, the US Declaration of Independence (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1): […]
If you spot errors in summaries, let us know. Summaries of most books are based only on the first 12,000 characters, because the costs would have been too high for if we included all of every book.
We have also been corresponding with another programmer seeking to instruct AI technologies to “read” books from Project Gutenberg, summarize them, and answer questions about them. We hope this might be described further in a future newsletter.
Based off Wayback Machine poking around it looks like they were added sometime between September 20th to October 1st.
Ick.
Oh no it’s more US politics.
So as part of the ongoing administrative coup; federal employees have been receiving stupid emails from what everyone assumes is Elon Musk (since it’s the exact same playbook as the twitter firings). But they apparently royally flubbed up NOAA’s email security in the process so the employees are getting constant spam through an unsecured broadcast address.
Finally a thing Musk prob did all by himself, after the printout your code thing I assume his technical knowledge is firmly stuck in 1999.
(Reposting from the last thread)
Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero
My investigation tracked to you [Outlier.ai] as the source of problems - where your instructional videos are tricking people into creating those issues to - apparently train your AI.
I couldn’t locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various “tasks” to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.
Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera “device” to record ones every waking moment
P.S. sorry for the linkedin link behind the mastodon link, but shared suffering and all that. I had to read “Uber for AI code data” so now you do too.
I had to read “Uber for AI code data” so now you do too.
Wow, what a fractal of cursed meaning. I don’t even understand what it really means, but it feels like understanding it any further would cause considerable psychic damage.
Well I can’t translate it but if you search for it… holy smokes are search engines amusingly bad at indexing federated content.
That random other Lemmy instance is actually doing the right thing here since it includes the right link rel canonical, so I guess Google just hasn’t caught up yet or something. I have no idea why Google chopped off the last byte of the IP address.
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when your skulls are both packed solid with wet cat food
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I’d swear I’ve seen that exact same “realization” from Aella before, when she posted something like “I got really into tradcath practices for [the writer’s barely disguised fetish] reasons, and now I’m shocked that they really actually do hate sex work.”
Edit to add:
ok what the FUCK is goin on with the neo-trads? I was just over here enjoying this free life, individualism, subversive, unwoke cultural movement and I thought everybody was on board but suddenly BAM we’ve got a a bunch of them spawning into sex-negative tradcaths or whatever […] i’m just sad cause i thought this section of culture were my allies. we both were like ‘leave me alone, authoritarian government/culture’, and were appropriately skeptical of novel identity movements, willing to say the weirdo things.
aww, look at the little collaborators trying to pretend they both got duped instead of both having been active and enthusiastic enablers
b-but i thought they hated women rationally
Over on Bluesky, Mike Drucker sneers this as “German scientists in 1945 filling out their job application for Operation Paperclip”.
“Oh well, time to learn absolutely nothing from this and continue to be terrible people,” said Grimes and Aella mentally, and unbeknownst to them, because they each have one brain cell quantum-entangled* with the other’s, simultaneously
*I finished the three body problem trilogy recently! Where do I sign up for the ETO
i read this and my brain started leaking out my ears
Aella last seen shouting ‘but it is in the dictionary, I dont understand why yall keep telling me it isnt!?’
see why i never hang out in berkeley these days
i want to slap each and every one of the people of X replying with something about autism
bad faith is actually incredibly easy to detect with a little practice if you’re not a bad faith idiot yourself
Days since tech bro tried to reinvent religion so they could javascript faster: 0. We have sold the 1 sign and donated the money.
on a side note I found out what “agile” is a few months ago and I think I’d rather go back to working retail than do the little morning circlejerk thing. dehumanizing
Rituals can be good, but yeah, agile standup meetings are not the good kind. Luckily I don’t have them daily… several times a week is already draining enough. If they were daily, I would just burn out. And the standups are IMO not even the worst part of agile…
