rook @ rook @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

Mildly interesting thread about the progress of blacksky: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3m2n62lzbeu2p

They’re aiming for full independence from bluesky, which is a laudable goal though not one they’ve achieved yet. They’re currently getting a reasonable amount of user funding rather than being a typical vc furnace (https://opencollective.com/blacksky) but I’m not sure what their plan is for moderation which is what will carry the project in the long term. I’d like to say it can’t be worse than bluesky, but moderation at scale is a nightmare.

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

takes massive bong hit.

JSON is fundamentally untyped

If you think about it, programs are all just bytes. Types aren’t real, dude. It’s just The Man trying to control how you think.

segues into incoherent 3 hour monologue on craniometry of (((haskell developers)))

(an exception can be made for people repurposing real-world slurs and putting a techy spin on them. fuck directly off with “wireback” and similar shit)

This isn’t a particularly novel stupid take, but it was made by a bluesky engineer, and it is currently dunking-on-bluesky season so here we are.

“If you imagine that an ai is a person, then saying bad things about it is bigotry”

Welp, they’ve got me there. Guess I’ll never say anything bad about anything again, because it is racism, if you think about it.

https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3m2f66lgh2c2v

It’s a combination of reflexive authoritarianism and a complete and total inability to deliver a big public-sector tech project without it drowning in corruption and incompetence.

States which already have ID cards implemented them before the advent of modern consultancies. Even the UK managed driving licenses and passports OK, back in the day. But until someone buries deloitte and capita et al at crossroads at midnight with their heads chopped off, I suspect we’ll never manage such a thing again.

Somehow I missed this when it came out, but apparently starmer’s digital ID scheme is so half-baked that even palantir are backing away and saying they won’t tender for it. “Worst person you know”, etc.

Content warning for flattering pictures of moseley jr 🤮

Paywalled:

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/software-giant-palantir-snubs-digital-id-scheme-t0gdsknr2

Archived:

https://archive.is/N8ogR

Nobody ever seems to learn the “never get high from your own supply” lesson. Gotta get that hit of thousands of people instantly supporting and agreeing with whatever dumbfuck thought just fell out.

You absolutely don’t have to hand it to zuckerberg, but he at least is well aware that he runs an unethical ad company that’s bad for the world, has always expressed his total contempt for his users, and has not posted through it.

TL;DR: It’s all a meme-poisoned bluesky circle-jerk involving transphobes and people who desperately want transphobes to think they’re cool.

The link from self to mcc’s bluesky thread sums up this stuff with references, but to attempt to summarise the summary, there’s a tweet from the depths of time (2017) that says

Twitter the only place where well articulated sentences still get misinterpreted. You can say "I like pancakes" and somebody will say "So you hate waffles?"

Bluesky ceo jay graber uses “waffles” as shorthand referencing this post, and whipped it out when asked about bluesky’s ongoing unwillingness to do anything about noted transphobe jesse singal, who has since posted about how much he loves waffles.

Huh, didn’t know about the guy behind tangled.org (Anirudh Oppiliappan) being a waffle enthusiast too 🫤 Just visited his bsky profile, and he’s enthusing about a “decentralised accelerationism” post by jay.

I hadn’t really seen the point of the tangled project (I’m not sure what atproto brings to version control) but I was interested in an ecosystem around the jujutsu vcs stuff. I guess I won’t find that here.

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.

I know it’s terrible being a drama gossip, but there are some Fun Times on bluesky at the moment. I’m sure most of you know the origins of the project, and the political leanings of the founders, but they’re currently getting publicly riled up about trans folk and palestinians and tying themselves up in knots defending their decision to change the rules to keep jesse singal on site, and penniless victims of the idf off it.

They really cannot cope with the fact that their user base aren’t politically aligned with them, and are desperate to appease the fash (witness the crackdowns on people’s reaction to charlie kirk’s overdue departure from this vale of tears) and have currently reached the Posting Through It stage. I’m assuming at some point their self-image as Reasonable Centrists will crack and one or more of them will start throwing around transphobic slurs and/or sieg-heiling and bewailing how the awful leftists made them do it. Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?

There were some issues with an internet-connected chastity device not that long ago, but they were conventional “we can’t be bothered to secure our web service, even when everyone is telling us it is terrible” issues, rather than “knob gets crushed and catches fire”. Still, there’s plenty of scope for someone to make one of those in future… OTA BMS firmware updates are very much a thing, and the market for alarming sex toys is practically unlimited.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/your-cock-is-mine-now-hacker-locks-internet-connected-chastity-cage-demands-ransom/

(now I think about it, I suspect there’s a market for very poorly secured internet-connected sex toys. someone got off to that headline, I’m pretty certain)

In today’s torment nexus development news… you know how various cyberpunky type games let you hack into an enemy’s augmentations and blow them up? Perhaps you thought this was stupid and unrealistic, and you’d be right.

Maybe that’s the wrong example. How about a cursed evil ring that when you put it on, you couldn’t take it off and it wracks you with pain? Who hasn’t wanted one of those?

Happily, hard working torment nexus engineers have brought that dream one step closer, by having “smart rings”, powered by lithium polymer batteries. Y’know, the things that can go bad, and swell up and catch fire? And that you shouldn’t puncture, because that’s a fire risk too, meaning cutting the ring off is somewhat dangerous? Fun times abound!

https://bsky.app/profile/emily.gorcen.ski/post/3m25263bs3c2g

In a move that is not in any way ominous, and everyone involved has carefully thought through all the consequences, there’s a sora-generated video of sam altman shoplifting gpus that’s apparently quite popular right now.

https://bsky.app/profile/drewharwell.com/post/3m23ob342h22a

(no embed because safari on ipad is weird about downloading or linking video)

I suspect it is also hiding some rendering artefacts.

Oh hey, bay area techfash enthusing about AI and genocidal authoritarians? Must be a day ending in a Y. Today it is Vercel CEO and next.js dev Guillermo Rauch

https://nitter.net/rauchg/status/1972669025525158031

I also have strong opinions about not using next.js or vercel (and server-side javascript in general is a bit of a car crash) but even if you thought it was great you should probably have a look around for alternatives. Just not ruby on rails, perhaps.

I will say that the flipping between characters in order to disguise the fact that longer clips are impractical to render is a neat trick and fits well into the advert-like design, but rewatching it just really reinforces how much those kids look like something pretending real hard to be a human.

Also, fake old-celluloid-film filter for something that was supposed to be from 20 years ago? Really?

AI video generation use case: hallucinatory RETVRN clips about the good old days, such as, uh, walmart 20 years ago?

It his the uncanny valley triggers quite hard. It’s faintly unsettling t watch at all, but every individual detail is just wrong and dreamlike in a bad way.

Also, weird scenery clipping, just like real kids did back in the day!

https://bsky.app/profile/mugrimm.bsky.social/post/3lzy77zydrc2q

Today’s related news: the tailwind css guy is a big fan of dhh and the rubygems takeover.

https://bsky.app/profile/jaredwhite.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy/post/3lzofv4wi4yz2

I miss the days when being publicly fashy was considered poor pr, but on the other hand it does make it a lot easier to avoid their companies and products.

Tailwind is pointless, incidentally.