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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.)

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[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 53 minutes ago)

we regret to inform you that mullenweg is still posting through it

no matter how unhinged you may expect this to be on starting to read it, you're probably guessing low

[-] mii@awful.systems 1 points 3 minutes ago

[The] SEO space, an industry known for making the web better.

end_me_now.jpg

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 10 hours ago

[Fiction] [Comic] Effective Altruism and Rationality meet at a Secular Solstice afterparty

When the very first thing you say about a character is that they "have money in crypto", you may already be doing it wrong

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 1 points 41 minutes ago

wow i hate this so much

it's neat how the cartooning gets lazier and lazier as it goes though

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 13 hours ago

"The Publisher of the Journal "Nature" Is Emailing Authors of Scientific Papers, Offering to Sell Them AI Summaries of Their Own Work", by Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism:

Springer Nature, the stalwart publisher of scientific journals including the prestigious Nature as well as the nearly 200-year-old magazine Scientific American, is approaching the authors of papers in its journals with AI-generated "Media Kits" to summarize and promote their research.

In an email to journal authors obtained by Futurism, Springer told the scientists that its AI tool will "maximize the impact" of their research, saying the $49 package will return "high-quality" outputs for marketing and communication purposes. The publisher's sell for the package hinges on the argument that boiling down complex, jargon-laden research into digestible soundbites for press releases and social media copy can be difficult and time-consuming — making it, Springer asserts, a task worth automating.

[-] saucerwizard@awful.systems 5 points 13 hours ago

OT: I remember linux on the desktop as a meme, but like, when did this actually happen? I don’t think ai noticed.

[-] mii@awful.systems 5 points 10 hours ago

At some point in the last years, playing games on Linux turned from fiddling three hours with a Wine config to maybe get an hour of 30fps before the next crash into a legit better experience than Windows that works out of the box in most cases. That did sell a lot of people on giving it a try.

I guess it happened when Valve went all-in on Proton. And Microsoft first adding ads into Windows and now forcing their autoplag on everyone helped a bit, too.

[-] saucerwizard@awful.systems 5 points 10 hours ago

That seems reasonable.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 15 hours ago

Thiel has fully lost it, and as I assume nobody around him has warned him about how crazy this ~~manifesto found after the shooting~~ oped in the ft makes him sound, so do the people around him.

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 2 points 33 minutes ago

jesus christ

[-] mii@awful.systems 4 points 11 hours ago

That reads like some bullshit you'd find on r/iamverysmart on Reddit.

Maybe side effects of all the substances he uses to become the Übermensch.

[-] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

Molly White on one of the more obvious problems with betting markets

Tried to add the screenshot in the post but it won't work for some reason.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 20 hours ago

With betting markets I often think, so they have all just forgotten the idea of assassination markets?

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

My favorite quote from flipping through LessWrong to find something passingly entertaining:

You only multiply the SAT z-score by 0.8 if you're selecting people on high SAT score and estimating the IQ of that subpopulation, making a correction for regressional Goodhart. Rationalists are more likely selected for high g which causes both SAT and IQ

(From the comments for "The average rationalist IQ is about 122".)

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

, and I say that as a person with a sat score of 1650!

E: ow god the first comments are 'actually you and scott underestimate the derived IQ'

E: in other related new turns out Cephalopods have a higher IQ that the people on themotte. Article unrelated, just thought it was neat.

[-] sinedpick@awful.systems 3 points 19 hours ago

I bet if they restricted the survey entrants to people who actually write on LW, the score would have been far lower. Has a single article on there contained even a twinge of a useful idea?

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 18 hours ago

Yes it has had good ideas. As rationalwiki said. The good ideas are not new, and the new ideas are not good.

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 23 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out it's much worse:

https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/

[Do not post} Insults, including those about [...] Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”

You can see the full diff from last version if you click "Jan 8, 2025" and yeah it's a doozy.

Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day. I couldn't really concentrate on work. It's hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isn't dunking on them for it.

On the bright side the policy technically lets you go around calling people insane for being straight or cisgender* if anyone is still on there and wants to get banned from that platform in a blaze of glory.

* or indeed simply having a gender and I'm not sure fascists know how to use words right.

[-] saucerwizard@awful.systems 4 points 14 hours ago

I’m pretty confident of a significant backlash against queer communities in North America in the near term.

[-] nightsky@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago

It is very disturbing and scary.

They're explicitly carving out an exception to target sexual/gender minorities. And I wonder, given how they are often among the first groups being targeted, and then other groups follow, how long until they add more exceptions? How long until Meta modifies the rules further to e.g. explicitly allow racism too?

Meta/Facebook has never been a good company. But the path they have actively chosen now is so much more evil than before.

[-] mii@awful.systems 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I've been around the internet a long time, and even back then when throwing slurs at each other and "making fun" of marginalized groups was, if not accepted, at least tolerated because it was considered some poor attempt at humor, I don't remember ever seeing a rule or passage in any netiquette stating it that explicitly.

It was always "we don't censor speech but don't be an asshole" with a giant asterisk about what both censoring and being an asshole meant, but I don't think I've ever seen even the worst places say, "we explicitly allow hate speech, go ahead".

Holy fucking shitballs.

[-] self@awful.systems 16 points 2 days ago

Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day.

same here. the thing is, I think a lot of us are on awful.systems because we’ve seen far too much of how fascism operates and spreads online. this is an antifascist place; it’s so core to the mission that we don’t publish it as a policy (because a policy can be argued against and twisted and the fash kids love doing that), we just demonstrate it in a way that can’t be ignored. so seeing the first or second (I don’t keep track of these things) most popular social media platform publish a policy whose only purpose is to be used as a weapon against marginalized people, for it to be written in a matter-of-fact “this is just how it is” way, and for essentially nobody outside of the fediverse to push back on it in any real way — that is shocking.

[-] self@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago
[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Now the new language merely bans “unsupported comparisons” between protected groups’ on the basis of their “inherent intellectual capacity”

Im sure we all noticed that this is also exactly one of those things which was allowed in the Rationalist places. And one of the reasons that it took them forever to get rid of slurinnameO on the ssc subreddit (E: He now moved to twitter where he has a terrifying 200k followers (cremieuxrecueil if you want to block the shithead)).

See this is why I try to do my reading here at night, because now when I feel sad and angry for the rest of the day it's gonna be like 5 hours tops.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yud is against seed oils, right? Or was that Siskind? I have a vague memory of the topic coming up but was unable to substantiate it in the 22 seconds of archive-searching that I was willing to do.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

yud, a technofascist, recently forming opinions against seed oils forms a poop ouroboros with the wellness to fascism pipeline.

[-] saucerwizard@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Its Yud I think. As someone from Canola-land this shit really grinds my gears.

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[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 15 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Just want to share this great term & definition "hyperkludge" coined by Jonathan Korman (@miniver on bsky and masto)

hyperkludge: a design which is not a good solution for much of anything, but is a tolerably bad solution for so many things that it proliferates until network effects help it beat out better designs

https://miniver.blogspot.com/2023/01/hyperkludge-n.html

[-] khalid_salad@awful.systems 2 points 18 hours ago

After reading some of the counterpoints here, I began thinking about how I considered Excel a hyperkludge if you qualify it enough. I realized the qualifications apply to every programming language (good ol' Turing Completeness). I think, in my case, the common scenario of

  1. this tool^[1]^ is just a proof of concept/prototype
  2. it costs less to maintain our tool than to write a more appropriate solution from scratch
  3. our infrastructure is now the tool

had me erroneously criticizing the tool instead of its application^[2]^. In the case of Excel, I worked a few jobs where the spreadsheets used when the company was small led to an absolute nightmare after the company grew.

I appreciate the thoughtful responses from everyone. <3


1: Usually a spreadsheet, in my experience.

2: Noting that, while "it's not the tool, it's the application" is a common refrain from people using tools in shitty ways, there is a distinction between "this is the wrong tool for the job" and "this tool will hurt people".

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

ehh. even in the original text it rapidly decays into anything that annoys him is a hyperkludge. Successful things have problems that are only problems of success.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

Saying that Excel is not and never was a good solution for any problem feels like a rather blinkered, programmer-brained technique.

[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 2 points 14 hours ago

I love the word, the definition, but I agree with so few of his examples.

I latched on to it because it fit so well with my regular criticisms of tech products, particularly saas shit

[-] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Counterpoint: to what extent are hyperkludges actually a unique thing versus an aspect of how technologies and tools are integrated into human context? Like, one of the original examples is the TCP/IP stack, but as anyone who has had to wrangle multiple vendors can attest a lot of the value in that standardization necessarily comes from the network effects - the fact that it's an accepted standard. The web couldn't function if you had a bespoke protocol stack hand-made to elegantly handle the specific problems of a given application not just because of the difficulty in building that much software (i.e. network effects on the design and construction side) but because of how unwieldy and impractical it would be to get any of those applications in front of people. The fit of those tools for a given application is secondary to how much more cleanly the entire ecosystem can operate because they are more limited in number.

The OP also talks about how embedded the history of a given problem is in the solution which feels like the central explanation for this trend. In that sense a hyperkludge isn't a unique pattern that some things fall into and more a way of indicating a particularly noteworthy whorl in the fractal infinikludge that is all human endeavors.

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Examples off the top of my head:

  • Almost everything about TCP/IP stack
  • NETCONF
  • YAML
  • Most things related to cars and car infrastructure
  • Alcohol
  • Chiclet keyboards
  • Unicode Han unification
  • Layer 2 SDN
  • Kubernetes
  • JavaScript
  • Disk partitioning
  • UEFI
  • Public transit fares

Edit: checked the link and was surprised our lists didn't have any ones in common (though I considered including MS Excel).

[-] self@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago
  • MS-DOS and Windows, of course…
  • but, and this will get some boos, Unix as a workstation OS compared with every other non-windows workstation OS
[-] istewart@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago

If you step back and think about it, it is rather absurd that a time-sharing multi-user OS essentially took over for personal devices

[-] mlen@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago

I'm surprised that alphabetical lists are included. Maybe my brain has completely rotten, but keeping the data sorted is pretty neat for efficient processing

[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago

yeah that is an interesting example. I immediately applied the term to commercial products. Like Notion for example - funny because I always say Notion takes wikis which are well established in their usefulness and just slaps them into saas product with other things like docs and spreadsheets (also well established in their usefulness) - but he calls wikis themselves a hyperkludge but what superior thing did wikis kill by network effects?

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this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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