self @ self @awful.systems

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I am a firm realist. There are two sides: the anti-corpo leftists of Blade II, and the hyper “where do we sign” neo liberals of Battlefield Earth.

Blade II Leftists are sure nighttime is literally just yellow color grading except when it’s blue or they forget to do it at all, and the neo liberals are sure that you tilt the camera and the more you tilt the camera the better the movie is.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. John Travolta literally cannot evaporate, and he is also probably struggling to improve his filmmaking. He will probably find ways to do both fucked up color grading and what he thinks are Dutch angles, but in a more subtle way.

And then Del Toro will probably send him a box of shit or live bees for Christmas.

a shifter on the ceiling

I still can’t get over the design, engineering, and basic reasoning failures that must have gone into the decision to put supposedly the main way to change gears on the same type of mount that secures your rear-view mirror; a notably inconvenient and fragile place to put anything (and just like a rear-view mirror that got fucked with too intensely, a bunch of these shifters have already detached)

human oversigh :(

and daiquiri nominations :)

it’s so practiced too — “so I guess you could read Wikipedia but also! this tracingwoodgrains guy might have some points worth considering!” and from there you’re meant to ping-pong off the Wikipedia article into trace’s long-winded literal horseshit and the rest of the inane crap that’s linked after that, til you can no longer remember the non-rationalist sources you’ve read because your mind’s overwhelmed with the worst shit ever written, but you feel like you thoroughly researched both sides (and that’s only part of why centrism is a fucking trap)

how do I know? because this:

finally, i'm going to link to some posts from slatestarcodex and astral codex ten, its sucessor blog, some classic ones just to give you a feel for what people appreciate about it at its best

is exactly how Joe Rogan fans get you listening to his stupid shit daily, til you’re no longer listening to his podcast (supposedly) “at its best” and instead you’re just listening to an overwhelming volume of right-wing horseshit with an occasional nod to both sides centrism so you don’t feel your world get smaller and darker as you embrace fascism

The Home Office scrapped a previous machine-learning visa review tool in 2020 after it was caught being insanely racist. That tool had been in place since 2015.

oh my god. just accidentally running the racism machine for 5 years during a rise in global fascism

no we won’t let you examine how the racism machine 2.0 now with LLMs works

no thanks fucko

for them, certainly. I can guarantee that everything we do qualifies as harm.

still counting the days til red hat uses their position to insinuate an “open source” (but in no ways that actually matter) LLM model into every Linux distro

admin note: this is a very early access version of our WriteFreely instance — I’m finishing out a couple of features as we roll it out to our instance regulars. thank you to @fasterandworse@awful.systems for publishing our first non-test post!

I’m always surprised that’s not a factor, given how fervent the posts are

“we’ve tried nothing, and nothing is working!” this is going to be such a common refrain

not gonna give any money to a startup whose weird fucking founder thinks their primary product is AI rather than search, thanks

Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.

imagine writing something like this and considering yourself to be the adult in the room. just a big ol politics understander, writing and writing and none of it means a fucking thing. you get up every morning and somehow the dread doesn’t make you collapse back into bed.

what in the absolute fuck

“you shouldn’t do anything that works to resist fascism” is going to be the neoliberal siren call for 4+ years, isn’t it

that’s absolutely the ploy — in almost every instance, civility rules are used to punish marginalized people while giving polite fascists a pass (and the ability to normalize the behavior of impolite fascists)

having a lawn is so easy first just hire a gardener to come every week, second live in a place where tap water’s inexpensive

motherfuckers

I was going to call them friendless losers who never had company over to play cornhole, have a bonfire, or lounge around on a hot summer day getting doused by a sprinkler while drinking beers because they are repugnant socially awkward cave trolls who are bitter and jealous of people who use their picturesque lawns.

But I would never do that because that is neither civil nor polite.

dang hates this one weird trick you can use to be an asshole in spite of the orange site’s civility rules

also what is that list of activities? did ChatGPT generate this? grass is required to play beep boop normal human games like cornhole now? you’re “having a bonfire” on grass and not in something normal like a firepit that’s safer on rocks or concrete? you’re just laying down on the grass, where the dog shits, slowly getting drunk and incredibly itchy from the grass as a sprinkler douses you?

picturesque lawns

oh maybe that’s it, the only people I’ve ever met with picturesque lawns are wealthy and wealthy people ain’t fucking normal

Or you could just not water it, not fertilize it, not pesticide it and simply run the mower over it whenever the assorted vegetation (which will be mostly grass) exceeds a certain height.

It won't look "nice neighborhood" nice but it'll still be fine.

i love when my yard is a giant mud patch rimmed by yellow with an occasional glimmer of green when the crabgrass blooms

the orange site is absolutely populated by the type of shithead who’s proud to be on their HOA’s board

that’s absolutely valid, and I’ve come to effectively the same conclusion: good encrypted email is effectively a different protocol (one which, as of now, is proton-to-proton and tuta-to-tuta only) and should be treated as one. daily unencrypted email is a legacy protocol that can effectively be handled client-side as a different account.

encrypted mail should be federated, possibly with something like activitypub (though I don’t have a good solution for attachments), but every time I float this I get a lot of very angry feedback about how I shouldn’t propose a new email standard without solving spam first, whatever solving spam means. some of the people giving feedback then float solutions that are basically warmed-over hashcash and then I stop listening.

the difference between modern webmail and what activitypub already does is very thin — a lot of it is intent, UI (email’s focused on long messages and potentially long threads), and features like attachments going from best-effort priority to crucial. there’s absolutely room in the world for better email — I just believe that internally, it’ll look closer to e2e ActivityPub with something like Soatok’s federated keyserver concept on top, rather than the shitty half baked shit we do now to make PGP work with email

you’ve fucking done it

my next movie marathon is gonna be Revolution OS, Battlefield Earth, Antitrust, and then I’m going to go into a coma

you are, without any sense of shame, evangelizing libreoffice to someone who compiled it straight from git like 12 hours ago because they use it constantly, in a community made entirely out of techies deeply involved with open source projects

and now you’re complaining that your weak shit got a tiny number of downvotes? cause we didn’t clap like seals at the mere idea of the existence of open source software? fuck right off, thanks