self @ self @awful.systems

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so Firefox now has terms of use with this text in them:

When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

this is bad. it feels like the driving force behind this are the legal requirements behind Mozilla’s AI features that nobody asked for, but functionally these terms give Mozilla the rights to everything you do in Firefox effectively without limitation (because legally, the justification they give could apply to anything you do in your browser)

I haven’t taken the rebranded forks of Firefox very seriously before, but they might be worth taking a close look at now, since apparently these terms of use only apply to the use of mainline Firefox itself and not any of the rebrands

after Proton’s latest PR push to paint their CEO as absolutely not a fascist failed to convince much of anyone (feat. a medium article I’m not gonna read cause it’s a waste of my time getting spread around by brand new accounts who mostly only seem to post about how much they like Proton), they decided to quietly bow out of mastodon and switch to the much more private and secure platform of… fucking Reddit of all things, where Proton can moderate critical comments out of existence (unfun fact: in spite of what most redditors believe, there’s no rule against companies moderating their own subs — it’s an etiquete violation, meaning nobody gives a fuck) and accounts that only post in defense of Proton won’t stick out like a sore thumb

you’re fucking right! my brain recombined that into a still wrong but slightly more sane claim when I first read it: “what if the packages you installed lose all their maintainers?” and, like, I think the only package manager that sometimes solves for that is Nix, and it solves it in the most annoying way possible (removal from nixpkgs and your config breaks, instead of any attempt at using an incredibly powerful software archival tool for intentionally archiving software (and it pisses me off that nixpkgs could trivially be the archive.org of packaging and it just isn’t, cause that’s not a murder drone))

but no, something about arch being relatively manually configured broke that poster’s brain into thinking that arch of all things didn’t have basic package management functionality, somehow. arch, the linux for former BSD kids too exhausted to deal with compatibility. nah, only red hat knows about, uh, basic software maintenance

it’s beautiful how you can pick out any sentence in that quote and chase down an entire fractal of wrongness

• “Users are expected to handle system upgrades” nope, pacman does that automatically (though sometimes it’ll fuck your initramfs because arch is a joy)
• “manage the underlying software stack” ??? that’s all pacman does
• “configure MAC (Mandatory Access Control), write profiles for it” AppArmor clearly isn’t good enough cause red hat (sploosh) uses selinux
• “set up kernel module blacklists, and more. Failing to do this results in a less secure operating system.” maybe I’m showing my ass on this one but I don’t think I’ve ever blacklisted a kernel module for security. usually it’s a hacky way to select which driver you want for your device (hello nvidia), stop a buggy device from taking down the system (hello again nvidia! and also like a hundred vendors making shit hardware that barely works on windows, much less linux), and passthru devices that are precious about their init order to qemu (nvidia again? what the fuck)

and bonus wrongness:

For example, DNF in Fedora handles transitions like moving from PulseAudio to PipeWire, which can enhance security and usability.

i fucking love when a distro upgrade breaks audio in all my applications cause red hat suddenly, after over a decade of being utterly nasty about it, got anxious about how much pulseaudio fucking sucks

that’s the one I ended up grabbing, and from the setup-only usage I’ve been giving it, it’s surprisingly good

there’s a post where they claim that secure boot is worthless on linux (other than fedora of course) and it’s not because secure boot itself is worthless but because someone can just put malware in your .bashrc and, like, chef’s kiss

I stumbled upon this poster while trying to figure out what linux distro normal people are using these days, and there’s something about their particular brand of confident incorrectness. please enjoy the posts of someone who’s either a relatively finely tuned impolite disagreement bot or a human very carefully emulating one:

• weirdly extremely into everything red hat
• outrageously bad takes, repeated frequently in all the Linux beginner subs, never called out because “hey fucker I know you’re bullshitting and no I don’t have to explain myself” gets punished by the mods of those subs
• very quickly carries conversation into nested subthreads where the downvotes can’t get them
• accuses other posters of using AI to generate the posts they disagree with
• when called out for sounding like AI, explains that they use it “only to translate”
• just the perfect embodiment of a fucking terrible linux guy, I swear this is where the microsoft research money goes

yeah, this is nothing but red flags

so the nix devenv CLI tool that was gaining popularity around the time I left nix is now doing extremely invasive telemetry and quietly implemented a feature that exfiltrates your entire repo and all related files to their servers to feed into an LLM. if you’d like a reminder of the extreme bad faith the corporate assholes who own nixpkgs operate under, someone tried to add DO_NOT_TRACK to Nix’s wrapped version of devenv, and the devenv lead maintainer used their elevated privileges on the nixpkgs repo to revert that change instantly without following any existing processes or asking for the community’s consensus.

I ranted some time ago about how all these shit commercial tools are just ways to capture and monetize large parts of the nix ecosystem, and the bill has finally come due. lixpkgs can’t happen soon enough (and the nix infra people seem to agree — they’ve been using lix for a while now, cause the regular evaluator is too unstable for large-scale use)

a very old concept with useful applications dating back in the 80s.

wait a fucking minute

you came here to lecture us and you think algorithms from the field of AI only started seeing serious use in the 80s? the Mark I Perceptron was built in 1958

(I admittedly didn’t know about the machine before today, but I know more than enough about AI to know perceptrons as software are old as hell)

why do all these papers have their own microsites, dedicated domain names (in Anguilla no less!), and shitty graphics? I can’t think of another branch of research that consistently does this shit. it’s almost like it’s all marketing fluff or something!

I feel the same way. I program in rust cause I like it, and the feeling of actually liking writing systems code was refreshing coming from C and especially C++. rust is a language I find beautiful — but I won’t for long if its excellent diagnostics and tooling all get deprecated in favor of an LLM. I can’t imagine what pivoting to AI would do to the language’s roadmap.

wow what utter horseshit

AI, as I’m sure you are all aware, is a very old concept with useful applications dating back in the 80s.

the first AI winter happened because those fuckers couldn’t stop grifting academic funds by promising shit that didn’t work. we know the history of the field better than you do. not that you had a point other than wanting to reply guy about a name we didn’t adopt (cause we’re not OpenAI) for a technology all of us strongly dislike.

fucking pointless shit

holy shit that’s perfect

Niko Matsakis wrote a post about how the fucking rust compiler toolchain should include an LLM to explain error messages because teaching the semantics of a language is too hard and that pissed me off so much that instead of linking that piece of shit directly I’m posting this excellent sneer from Anatol Ulrich that’s also much shorter than Niko’s extended attempt to beg for a promotion at Amazon

e: mastodon thread

my related guess is primarily marketing surveillance and secondarily all other types of surveillance. notably Venmo no longer lets you put “hookers and blow” as a transaction note, because it was the default response from most people who didn’t really want to do a social transaction but had to use Venmo cause it’s all their recipient had. Venmo’s social features are all designed to make you leak as much data to Venmo as possible so it can be monetized or otherwise capitalized upon, and that’s about par for the course for how a thielverse paypal mafia offshoot operates. this is surveillance capitalism with a smiley face.

it’s even worse on mastodon: it goes from plain text to markdown back to plain text, so both posts are just “1.”

it’s turning out the most successful thing about deepseek was whatever they did to trick the worst fossbro reply guys you’ve ever met into going to bat for them

somehow it got even worse

Google appears to have faked AI output in a commercial set to run during the Super Bowl. The ad shows a business owner using Gemini to write a website description, but the text portrayed as generated by AI has been available on the business’s website since at least August 2020

also they doubled down on the bad stat

The ad originally had Gemini present copy stating that Gouda accounts for “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption” — which is not true. Google later edited the commercial to take out the stat, while the business owner also removed it from their website.

[…]

But Google maintained that the website description was written by Gemini all along. In addition to showing Gemini “generate” the description in the commercial, Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler said on X that the Gouda stat was “not a hallucination,” adding that “Gemini is grounded in the Web.”

also also they later doubled down on lying that Gemini wrote the whole page? it’s… really embarrassing that Google’s marketing team doesn’t know about web archives

standard “fuck off programming.dev” ban with a side of who the fuck cares. deepseek isn’t the good guys, you weird fucks don’t have to go to a nitpick war defending them, there’s no good guys in LLMs and generative AI. all these people are grifters, all of them are gaming the benchmarks they designed to be gamed, nobody’s getting good results out of this fucking mediocre technology.