Skip Navigation
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th June 2025
  • I feel like this article might deserve its own post, because I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen an attempted counter-sneer. it’s written like someone’s idea of what a sneer is (tpacek swears sometimes and says he doesn’t give a shit! so many paragraphs into giving a shit!) but all the content is awful bootlicking and points that don’t stand up to even mild scrutiny? and now I’m wondering if tpacek’s been reading us and that’s why he’s upset, or if this is what an LLM shits out if you ask it to write critihype in the tone of a sneer

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st June 2025
  • it’s not pseudoscience unless it’s from the “literally studying ghosts” region of crankery, otherwise it’s just sparkling… actually I don’t know what your point is with all this

  • Latest AI-hallucinated legal filing, from AI vendor Anthropic
  • I agree, you are fucking done. good job showing up 12 days late to the thread expecting strangers to humor your weird fucking obsession with using LLMs for something existing software does better

  • Game studios love AI! The gamers … hate it
  • imagine if you read the article at all instead of posting 6 paragraphs about an impossible game you’re fantasizing about, that LLMs do nothing to enable because they’re stochastic chatbots and don’t understand game systems (just like you!)

  • Game studios love AI! The gamers … hate it
  • pretty much same! I’ve heard good things about some of the games published under Sony, and their umbrella as a publisher still includes excellent studios whose previous games I have very good memories of. but… I just can’t swing the price for a PS5, it really doesn’t feel worth it just for a few games, and I’m not a huge fan of the hardware design. they also seem to have fumbled PSVR2, and I was a big fan of the indie VR scene and how accessible it was on the PSVR1. on top of everything else, I feel like I’ve gotten by far more mileage out of open platforms than I have from any modern console — so for me, just like you, most Sony releases are invisible unless they’re the ones that bomb

  • Game studios love AI! The gamers … hate it
  • Sony (I guess defensible, idk),

    their two highest profile failures as of now are Concord, a live service Overwatch clone that was shut down two weeks after launch, and Marathon, an upcoming (or possibly cancelled) Bungie live service Escape from Tarkov clone that doesn’t play well, isn’t anything like the original Marathon games, and infamously has already had several credible accusations of art plagiarism leveled against it. for the latter, I suspect we’ll see a second controversy surface over generative assets; the art that wasn’t plagiarized was starkly ugly and weirdly generic, and I don’t buy that it was that way stylistically.

    that shit like this is a normal part of doing business points at a gaming industry that’s rotting at the head, because as unpopular as live service games are, corporations like EA proved they can be very profitable if you tweak the right dopamine receptors to hook enough whales. it’d be nice if EA and Ubisoft were irrelevant now, but unfortunately the industry is still exactly the same exploitative piece of shit they helped make it into. myself and anyone who gives a fuck about quality can keep playing indie games all we want, but these corporations don’t care — they know that a mediocre live service with gambling mechanics will make many times more profit than any indie hit, so they target mediocrity. sometimes they miss and hit rock bottom instead, but who cares? the executives responsible will decimate the studio that developed the game with layoffs or eliminate it entirely, and because capitalism is a death cult that’ll be seen as a win.

  • Game studios love AI! The gamers … hate it
  • if only the industry could be rid of Ubisoft and EA, we could finally play our AAA live service gacha games in peace, without being exploited for money

    if only we could go back to the good old days, when the most prominent people in gaming were:

    • the out and proud fascist who runs Epic
    • the out and proud fascists who ran id
    • Todd Howard
    • fucking Peter Molyneux
    • it’s ok, a developer who’s existed since the Amiga days has made a good game!
    • I regret to inform you that the above-mentioned developer has willingly sold their entire studio to EA in exchange for a sack of money and now the sequel is a live service game with gambling mechanics
    • at least we’ll always have the Wing Commander guy. I wonder what he’s up to?
  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025
  • I’m heckin’ moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.

    that’s seriously amazing! I’m glad you were able to get things going relatively quickly.

  • You can’t feed generative AI on ‘bad’ data then filter it for only ‘good’ data
  • “but why don’t we simply have another LLM check the LLM’s answer” statements dreamt up by the utterly Deranged

    But I guess sounding clever is more important on lemmy than being correct.

    that explains so much of your post history

  • GitHub wants to spam open source projects with AI slop
  • “beware, for I am a leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™” is exactly the kind of thing I’d expect an evil wizard to scream moments before I hit him in the head with a mace

  • GitHub wants to spam open source projects with AI slop
  • oh GitLab is terrible on several levels and is definitely best avoided — for some reason, they think that competing with github involves making all of github’s mistakes, but with a much worse UI

    so far I’ve had good luck with codeberg. of your requirements, the only missing feature seems to be vulnerability scanning. CI is available and pretty good, but you have to ask for it to be enabled for your account. I think you’re able to hook self-hosted runners into codeberg’s CI frontend, but the process to do so confused the hell out of me, so you may have to dig a bit to figure out how it works.

  • If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?
  • it can’t be that stupid, you must be training it wrong

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th May 2025
  • brother remains the only brand of printer I don’t regret buying — some people keep buying new printers and trashing the old ones (which is a bit monstrous) because the starter toner cartridge lasts forever, but I’ve found that the move is to get one of the XL boxes that includes a normal-sized toner cartridge (which should last years) and an extra-large one (I don’t know how long that lasts, I don’t think I’ve had to use mine) along with a printer for much cheaper than the price of the individual parts bought separately.

    the other move with brother is to ignore or reset the low toner warning and get almost twice the life out of the cartridge. supposedly the DRM in newer printers might prevent this? which is a damn shame. but the printer won’t stop you from printing with supposedly low toner either way. older printers also take to third party toner cartridges instantly, though I’ve bought toner so rarely I always went first-party when I did cause the savings didn’t feel too notable.

    drivers for brother printers are excellent because they just work and are probably included, without bloatware, in your distro.

    I don’t have any experience with modern color printing; I switched entirely to ordering color prints from local photo shops and online bulk printers a long time ago and ended up saving money for how rarely I printed. I haven’t heard too much about LED printers so they might be worth looking into; I’ve heard mixed (but not entirely negative, which is an improvement over plain inkjet!) things about the epson printers that take big tanks of ink — they’re somewhat cheaper to run than a plain inkjet (which isn’t hard), but the print heads might become a maintenance nightmare depending on your printing habits.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th May 2025
  • I will be watching with great interest. it’s going to be difficult to pull out of this one, but I figure he deserves as fair a swing at redemption as any recovered crypto gambler. but like with a problem gambler in recovery, it’s very important that the intent to do better is backed up by understanding, transparency, and action.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th May 2025
  • if you saw that post making its rounds in the more susceptible parts of tech mastodon about how AI’s energy use isn’t that bad actually, here’s an excellent post tearing into it. predictably, the original post used a bunch of LWer tricks to replace numbers with vibes in an effort to minimize the damage being done by the slop machines currently being powered by such things as 35 illegal gas turbines, coal, and bespoke nuclear plants, with plans on the table to quickly renovate old nuclear plants to meet the energy demand. but sure, I’m certain that can be ignored because hey look over your shoulder is that AGI in a funny hat?

  • Musk ("xAI") now claims grok was hacked
  • none of us consume LLM-generated content and none of us have any interest in doing so

  • Ai scraping is an effective DDoS on the entire interent
  • yep, it seems so! I haven’t put the permanent fix for the nodeinfo bug into place yet but it’ll be live as soon as I’m able to give it an appropriate level of testing.

  • Ai scraping is an effective DDoS on the entire interent
  • at least OpenAI and probably others do currently use commercial residential proxying services, though reputedly only if you make it obvious you’re blocking their scrapers, presumably as an attempt on their end to limit operating costs

  • an introduction to gibberish.awful.systems
    gibberish.awful.systems a guide to this gibberish

    welcome to gibberish.awful.systems, a platform for long-form writing and blogging hosted on awful.systems and running on WriteFreely. thi...

    we have a WriteFreely instance now! I wrote up a guide to why it exists, why it's so fucking janky, and what we can do to fix it.

    6
    update: email, backups, and writefreely

    this is somewhat of a bigger update, and it's the product of a few things that have been in progress for a while:

    email

    email should be working again as of a couple months ago. good news: our old provider was, ahem, mildly inflating our usage to get us off their free plan, so this part of our infrastructure is going to cost a lot less than anticipated.

    backups

    we now have a restic-based system for distributed backups, thanks to a solid recommendation from @froztbyte@awful.systems. this will make us a lot more resilient to the possibility of having our host evaporate out from under us, and make other disaster scenarios much less lethal.

    writefreely

    I used some of the spare capacity on our staging instance to spin up a new WriteFreely instance where we can post long-form articles and other stuff that's more suitable for a blog. post your gibberish at gibberish.awful.systems! contact me if you'd like an invite link; WriteFreely instances are particularly vulnerable to being turned into platforms for spam and nothing else, so we're keeping this small-scale for instance regulars for now.

    alongside all the ordinary WriteFreely stuff (partial federation, a ton of jank), our instance has a special feature: if you have an account, you can make a PR on this repository and once it's merged, gibberish will automatically pull its frontend files from that repo and redeploy WriteFreely. currently this is only for the frontend, but there's a lot you can do with that -- check out the templates, pages, less, and static directories on the repo to see what gets pulled. check it out if you see some jank you want to fix! (also it's the only way to get WriteFreely to host images as part of a post, no I'm not kidding)

    what's next?

    next up, I plan to turn off Hetzner's backups for awful.systems and use that budget to expand the node's storage by 100GB, which should increase the monthly bill by around 2.50 euros. I want to go this route to expand our instance's storage instead of using an object store like S3 or B2 because using block storage makes us more resilient to Hetzner or Backblaze evaporating or ending our service, and because it's relatively easy to undo this decision if it proves not to scale, but very hard to go from using object storage back to generic block storage.

    after that, it'll be about time to carefully upgrade to the current version of Lemmy, and to get our fork (Philthy) in a better state for contributions.

    as always, see our infrastructure deployment flake for more documentation and details on how all of the above works.

    0
    On “Safe” C++: An Odyssey of Sneers

    this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:

    > This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.

    fucking masterful

    an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol

    29
    fromjason.xyz Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something

    Odes & Satires, and other matters of stuff & things.

    Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something

    this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:

    >Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.

    >I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.

    >The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.

    32
    infra: email notifications might be a bit spotty

    we’ve exceeded the usage tier for our email sending API today (and they kindly didn’t email me to tell me that was the case until we were 300% over), so email notifications might be a bit spotty/non-working for a little bit. I’m working on figuring out what we should migrate to — I’m leaning towards AWS SES as by far the cheapest option, though I’m no Amazon fan and I’m open to other options as long as they’ve got an option to send with SMTP

    0
    the Humane AI Pin is fucked
    www.theverge.com Humane’s daily returns are outpacing sales

    After raising $200 million from investors, Humane has only sold $9 million worth of products and has received $1 million in returned products.

    Humane’s daily returns are outpacing sales

    after the predictable failure of the Rabbit R1, it feels like we’ve heard relatively nothing about the Humane AI Pin, which released first but was rapidly overshadowed by the R1’s shittiness. as it turns out, the reason why we haven’t heard much about the Humane AI pin is because it’s fucked:

    > Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.

    it’s fucked in ways you might not have seen coming, but Humane should have:

    >Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone.

    13
    pivot-to-ai.com Nvidia caught ingesting as much of YouTube as possible

    AI shovelmaker Nvidia has been looking into making its own AI models. To that end, it’s been vacuuming up YouTube videos like nobody’s business. According to leaked internal communications obtained…

    19
    404media: Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI
    www.404media.co Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI

    Internal emails, Slack conversations and documents obtained by 404 Media show how Nvidia created a yet-to-be-released video foundational model.

    Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI

    as I was reading through this one, the quotes I wanted to pull kept growing in size until it was just the whole article, so fuck it, this one’s pretty damning

    here’s a thin sample of what you can expect, but it gets much worse from here:

    >Internal conversations at Nvidia viewed by 404 Media show when employees working on the project raised questions about potential legal issues surrounding the use of datasets compiled by academics for research purposes and YouTube videos, managers told them they had clearance to use that content from the highest levels of the company. > >A former Nvidia employee, whom 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about internal Nvidia processes, said that employees were asked to scrape videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other sources to train an AI model for Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human” products. The project, internally named Cosmos (but different from the company’s existing Cosmos deep learning product), has not yet been released to the public.

    4
    Andreessen Horowitz and the uwuness of little technofascism
    a16z.com The Little Tech Agenda | Andreessen Horowitz

    The time has come to stand up for Little Tech. Bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech. We believe American technology supremacy, and the critical role that Little Tech startups play in ensuring that supremacy, is a first class political issue on par with any other.

    so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:

    >Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain. > >Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.

    does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.

    here’s some more banal shit:

    >We find there are three kinds of politicians: > >Those who support Little Tech. We support them. > >Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them. > >Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.

    I find there are three kinds of politicians:

    • those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
    • those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
    • those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
    25
    Lix: a Nix evaluator fork focused on correctness and doing right by its community

    it can’t be overstated how important the Nix evaluator is to the Nix ecosystem; it implements the Nix language and package manager, maintains the store, has a hand in the low-level workings of every Nix tool, and is the focus of the push by Eelco and friends to commercialize Nix and keep it appealing to military-industrial interests.

    all of the above is why I joined the Aux CLI SIG, which focuses on maintaining a fork of the Nix evaluator for the Aux ecosystem. but just now I saw the announcement for Lix, a Nix evaluator fork that focuses on modernizing the codebase (including gradually replacing C++ with Rust), maintaining correctness (something the upstream evaluator has been notoriously struggling with lately), and doing right by its community. I found myself nodding along to their description of the project and feeling something I haven’t felt since I read the open letter — I’m finally feeling excited for the future of the technology behind Nix.

    I have no idea if Lix will become Aux’s chosen evaluator fork, though the Aux CLI SIG can help determine that collectively (and I’ll have many more details on Aux in a post later tonight). here’s what’s truly exciting though: by following Lix’s install steps and pulling auxpkgs-unstable, we can have a package ecosystem and NixOS fork that’s completely independent of the Nix community, and we can have it right now. I’m so excited by that news that I’m going to spin up a host just to give Lix+auxpkgs a try later tonight.

    here’s the Aux thread about Lix; so far, there’s a lot of high-level support and excitement for using it as Aux’s evaluator.

    0
    an open letter to the NixOS foundation

    this thread fucking sucks for me to have to post, but the linked open letter is an important read. none of the systemic issues pertaining to marginalized folks and commercial/military-industrial interests in the Nix community I’ve previously written about on TechTakes have been solved; in fact, they’ve gotten worse to the point where the Nix community moderation team is essentially in the process of quitting. that’s the beginning to an awful end for a project I like a whole lot.

    even if you don’t give a fuck about Nix, the open letter is an important read because the toxicity, conflicts of interest, and underhanded tactics detailed in it are incredibly common in the open source space. this letter could have been written about a multitude of infamously toxic open source projects; Nix is lucky that it has marginalized folks involved who care about the direction of the project and want to make things better, but those people are actively leaving, after being burnt out by the toxic people and structures entrenched in Nix’s community. that’s a fucking tragedy.

    0
    the tea protocol is still predictably a gigantic source of PR spam
    www.web3isgoinggreat.com tea.xyz causes open source software spam problems, again

    The tea.xyz protocol first earned an entry on Web3 is Going Just Great in late February, when their plan to reward open source software contributors resulted in crypto enthusiasts with no intention of participating in OSS opening endless pull requests to claim ownership of prominent OSS projects. Th...

    tea.xyz causes open source software spam problems, again

    who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do

    15
    thread your Philthy feature requests

    reply with features and bug fixes you'd like to see in Philthy, the lemmy fork that runs on this instance. no guarantees I'll get to any of them soon, but particularly low-hanging fruit and well-liked features can be prioritized.

    3
    ask me questions about awful.systems or NixOS!
    codeberg.org awful-systems

    the Nix flake that deploys the awful.systems server infrastructure

    awful-systems

    the awful.systems server cluster runs on an open infrastructure based on NixOS and Nix flakes, and though it desperately needs cleanup in some places, it's still a pretty good example of how to use a Nix flake to deploy NixOS in production. feel free to browse the repo and ask any questions about how it works, or about Nix in general!

    also, if I get hit by a bus, this can be used to redeploy awful.systems elsewhere. an existing admin who isn't in the hospital or the grave can import a database backup and get back up and running!

    and as always, contributions are welcome.

    0
    the r/SneerClub archive welcomes contributions
    codeberg.org sneer-archive-site

    An archival site for the posts from r/SneerClub, generated from a static data snapshot

    sneer-archive-site

    the r/SneerClub archive at awful.systems is welcoming contributors. it's a statically-generated site (from this set of archived posts in JSON format) that uses a unique, high-performance Nix-based static site generation system. the current site desperately needs a new stylesheet (especially on mobile), but one area where I really need advice or contributions is the dataset.

    currently, the SneerClub archives only pull in data from the bdfr set, which I generated using Bulk Downloader for Reddit right before Reddit killed its API, but I'd love to merge the SneerClub_comments.jsonl and SneerClub_submissions.jsonl files into the data we're using to generate the site, since those have older data from ArchiveTeam. unfortunately, that data set is in a complete different format from the BDFR data. any advice for tools or techniques to merge those two data sets into one (or offers to contribute a merge script) is greatly appreciated.

    0
    Philthy, the awful.systems fork of Lemmy, is seeking contributors
    codeberg.org awful.systems

    Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led organization that aims to help free and open source projects prosper by giving them a safe and friendly home.

    awful.systems

    the software we use to run awful.systems, which @dgerard@awful.systems suggested I call Philthy (and I agreed!), is seeking contributors.

    like upstream Lemmy, this consists of a Rust backend and a Typescript+React frontend. contributions to both are welcome; use this thread to discuss ideas and collaborate.

    here's some contribution ideas off the top of my head (but all reasonable contributions are welcome):

    • (frontend & backend) actually rebrand to Philthy, to prevent confusion between us and upstream Lemmy
    • (frontend & backend) rewrite README.md to emphasize that this is a fork
    • (frontend) make the page header and footer more configurable; remove various links that aren't relevant to awful.systems
    • (backend) delete posts from Mastodon when they're deleted on our end
    • (frontend & backend) implement The Firehose, a big admin-only list of the posts and content leaving our instance
    • (frontend & backend, ongoing) merge in changes from upstream Lemmy if there are features you wish our instance had

    or make suggestions in this thread!

    one major blocker preventing folks from contributing to Lemmy-related development I've seen is that a lot of people don't know Rust. if that's the case, I can offer the following:

    • the Lemmy codebase is the worst possible place to learn Rust, but I'd love to start a thread for Rust tutorials and shared learning. it's honestly an excellent language in its own right, so I'd love to teach folks about it even if they don't end up contributing to Philthy.
    • if you're good with React and/or Typescript and the feature you want to implement has a backend component, I don't mind handling the backend portion if I'm able.
    0
    welcome to FreeAssembly: a non-toxic collaborative community

    this is a non-toxic place to collaborate on projects (programming, design, art, or otherwise) and share information; effectively, it's the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. this community has been in the planning phase for a long time, but the xz backdoor recently emphasized how severe the toxicity problem in existing open source communities is, and how important it is that we have a place to collaborate that isn't controlled by toxic personalities or corporate interests.

    FreeAssembly is starting its existence as a Lemmy community that enables collaboration on externally-hosted projects, but that doesn't necessarily need to be its final form. as we figure out the needs of this community, we can grow to service needs like code hosting and design collaboration. for now, we recommend hosting code on software forges like Codeberg (and we recommend avoiding github if possible, though it's well-understood that this isn't easy for established projects). we also want to explore the best options for designers and artists to collaborate without making them dependent on large corporate infrastructure.

    there are some expectations around posting to FreeAssembly. see the sidebar for details.

    0
    Amazon’s 'Just Walk Out' grocery stores are dead
    gizmodo.com Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores

    Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.

    Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores

    (via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)

    surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive

    even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down

    20
    flag any spam you see from lemmy.world (or elsewhere)

    we’re seeing a bit of spam come in from lemmy.world. if you happen to see any (and a lot of it seems to be in DMs), make sure to flag it. that’ll let both us and the originating instance’s mods know. if we get a bunch of reports and it seems like lemmy.world isn’t cleaning things up properly, we’ll take further steps to limit the amount of spam we get

    0
    the Amaranth hardware description language

    Amaranth is a simple-but-expressive hardware description language (the type of language you use to define integrated circuits for FPGAs, ASICs, and similar hardware) implemented as a Python DSL. I'm not the biggest Python fan, but Amaranth is worth it -- even though it's in heavy development and its documentation is incomplete, it's by far the most comprehensible HDL I've ever used, and I've tried many of them.

    its documentation is incomplete since the language is under heavy development, but its language guide is still the best gentle introduction to HDL concepts I've read, and its tutorials are written for an older version of the language (sometimes called nMigen) but are still excellent -- in particular, Robert Baruch's tutorials combine design fundamentals with formal verification (which itself is usually considered an advanced technique, but Amaranth streamlines it), and the Vivonomicon RISC-V tutorials are worth a read too

    3