TechTakes self • 2 weeks ago • 100%

fromjason.xyz

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.

TechTakes self • 1 month ago • 100%

www.theverge.com

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.

TechTakes self • 2 months ago • 100%

www.404media.co

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.

TechTakes self • 2 months ago • 100%

a16z.com

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.

FreeAssembly self • 5 months ago • 100%

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](https://lix.systems/about/#why-lix) 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](https://lix.systems/install/) and [pulling auxpkgs-unstable](https://forum.aux.computer/t/our-first-unstable-release/397/5), 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](https://forum.aux.computer/t/the-future-of-nixcpp-lix/483); so far, there’s a lot of high-level support and excitement for using it as Aux’s evaluator.

FreeAssembly self • 5 months ago • 100%

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.

TechTakes self • 5 months ago • 100%

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

FreeAssembly self • 5 months ago • 100%

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.

FreeAssembly self • 6 months ago • 100%

codeberg.org

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.

FreeAssembly self • 6 months ago • 100%

codeberg.org

the [r/SneerClub archive](https://awful.systems/archives/) at awful.systems is welcoming contributors. it's a statically-generated site (from [this set](https://codeberg.org/awful-systems/sneer-archive-data) 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.

FreeAssembly self • 6 months ago • 100%

codeberg.org

the software we use to run awful.systems, which [@dgerard@awful.systems](https://awful.systems/u/dgerard) suggested I call Philthy (and I agreed!), is seeking contributors. like upstream Lemmy, this consists of [a Rust backend](https://codeberg.org/awful-systems/lemmy) and [a Typescript+React frontend](https://codeberg.org/awful-systems/lemmy-ui). 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.

FreeAssembly self • 6 months ago • 100%

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.

TechTakes self • 6 months ago • 100%

gizmodo.com

(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

NotAwfulTech self • 7 months ago • 100%

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](https://amaranth-lang.org/docs/amaranth/latest/) is incomplete since the language is under heavy development, but its [language guide](https://amaranth-lang.org/docs/amaranth/latest/guide.html) is still the best gentle introduction to HDL concepts I've read, and [its tutorials](https://amaranth-lang.org/docs/amaranth/latest/tutorial.html) 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

NotAwfulTech self • 7 months ago • 97%

aesoprock.bandcamp.com

>You could get a robot limb for your blown-off limb > >Later on the same technology could automate your gig, as awesome as it is > >Wait, it gets awful: you could split a atom willy-nilly > >If it's energy that can be used for killing, then it will be > >It's not about a better knife, it's chemistry and genocide > >And medicine for tempering the heck in a projector light > >Landmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes > >Cameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness > >We can not be trusted with the stuff that we come up with > >The machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons, um > >Technology, focus on the other shit > >3D-printed body parts, dehydrated onion dip > >You can buy a Jet Ski from a cell phone on a jumbo jet > >T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y, it's the ultimate the subject matter of Aesop Rock's latest album felt relevant to our instance's interests

TechTakes self • 7 months ago • 100%

([here’s a Verge article about the Waymo car getting burned during a Chinese New Year celebration](https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/11/24069251/waymo-driverless-taxi-fire-vandalized-video-san-francisco-china-town)) a self-driving car got destroyed (to a round of applause from the crowd) in San Francisco! will the robot car fans on the orange site take this opportunity to explore why the tech seems to be extremely unpopular among the populations of the cities where it’s deployed? of course the fuck not, time to spin the wheel of racist dog whistles and see which one we land on! a note to the roving orange site fans (hi, fuck off), these replies are either heavily upvoted or have broad agreement in the thread (or I’m posting them here cause I want to laugh at some stupid shit, you don’t dictate the terms of my enjoyment) >This isn't a revolt against AI. SF attracts anarchist mobs and they'll vandalize buses, trains, police cars, bikes, whatever is around. we’re off to a strong start with some bullshit straight from musk’s twitter (which he stole from the fever dreams of the conservatives on his platform) >Alternatively: this is San Francisco where on a good day the locals don’t need much excuse to set fire to a car (although I usually associate it with the Giants winning a World Series) and this poor dumb stupid driverless Waymo drove into a celebratory and by the looks of it somewhat drunken crowd on the Streets of Chinatown during the Chinese New Year where in following its prime directive to do no harm, it got itself stuck up the creek without a paddle so to speak. Waymo probably should have accounted for that ahead of time and told their cars not to go near Chinatown this evening. remember that no matter what, the robot car is the victim here. there’s no chance Waymo was doing anything dangerous or assholeish in the area; much like robocop, the car is an innocent victim of its fucking prime directives??? and you wouldn’t set fire to robocop, would you? >This is a hilarious take. A few youths went bonkers and defaced private property. Has nothing to do with philosophical beliefs or a Big Tech agenda. You should debate the finer points of the Big Tech agenda with them while they run up to you in a maddened rage. yeah! I can’t wait until these angry mobs set fire to your robot car body! then you’ll see! >Arguments about driverless cars aside, the youth in this country are seriously lost. It only takes one generation of poor parenting and poor civic policies to ruin a culture. this one is downvoted, but this reply isn’t: >Sounds like they were right. The youth at that point was lost, and are now raising people who will literally burn down a waymo for fun, or because of some horrifically ignorant idea about fairness. oh you poor woke kids don’t like when shitty dangerous robot cars are on the streets? are you gonna start crying about how it’s “unfair” they’re covering up pedestrian injuries and traffic accidents now? your grandpa would never stand for this

TechTakes self • 7 months ago • 100%

www.donotpanic.news

(via [mastodon](https://wandering.shop/@soonleenz/111909667654377938))

TechTakes self • 8 months ago • 100%

www.usatoday.com

remember, regardless of how outspoken you are in life, nothing will stop the capitalists from reanimating your defiled corpse into a shitheaded centrist zombie if there’s a buck in it: >“I'd just like to say that as much as I think billionaires are destroying the fabric of society with unchecked greed and blatant self-interest at the expense of basic human rights for everyone else, it is a little strange to me that people get mad at them. People are the ones who gave them the money in the first place," the AI Carlin said. (editor’s note: the above is supposed to be a joke from the comedy special these fucking assholes hijacked Carlin’s corpse to promote. I can’t find the punchline, but it’s supposed to be a joke)

Buttcoin self • 9 months ago • 100%

we had a [previous thread](https://awful.systems/post/123) on this thing way back when TechTakes moved here, but it deserves a Buttcoin thread too. observe, for your enjoyment(???), an even worse derivative of the reputedly most worthless W3C standard. when you’ve got nothing of value to write about but you need a spec to be taken seriously so you write stuff like this: >The purpose of DIDComm Messaging is to provide a secure, private communication methodology built atop the decentralized design of DIDs. > >It is the second half of this sentence, not the first, that makes DIDComm interesting. “Methodology” implies more than just a mechanism for individual messages, or even for a sequence of them. DIDComm Messaging defines how messages compose into the larger primitive of application-level protocols and workflows, while seamlessly retaining trust. “Built atop … DIDs” emphasizes DIDComm’s connection to the larger decentralized identity movement, with its many attendent virtues. (that typo in the second paragraph of the spec has been there for at least 6 months, cause if anyone went back to proofread this crap they’d probably delete all of it out of embarrassment) DIDcomm is what happens when crypto folks get invited to join your standards org, and it does to the spec writing process what crypto and AI did to whitepapers: it’s all extreme filler to mask the lack of an idea, built on top of a spec that famously specifies nothing

NotAwfulTech self • 9 months ago • 100%

this is pretty cool. it’s a tutorial with interactive exercises that explores the Nix language as a general-purpose functional programming language, outside of its role as the configuration and package definition language for NixOS. understanding Nix better as a language makes more complicated packages easier to write (and is necessary to understand the guts of nixpkgs and the parts of Nix written in itself), but it also has a number of unique advantages as a programming language within a very specific domain.

Buttcoin self • 9 months ago • 100%

web3isgoinggreat.com

this has all my favorite grifts in one! crypto, AI, and the one where you re-scam the victims of your other scam by pretending to be the cops!

Buttcoin self • 9 months ago • 100%

decrypt.co

to help kick off the new federated home of sneering at crypto and meme stocks, enjoy a mask off look at what these fucking fools intend to do to the nocoiners if they’re ever given an ounce of actual geopolitical power

TechTakes self • 9 months ago • 100%

from the [linked github thread](https://github.com/jawslouis/MakePlacePlugin/pull/26): >Your project is in violation of the AGPL, and you have stated this is intentional and you have no plans to open source it. This is breaking the law, and as such I've began to help you with the first steps of re-open sourcing the plugin. the project author (who gets paid for violating the AGPL via patreon) responds like a mediocre crypto grifter and insists their violation of the law be debated on the discord they control (where their shitty community can shout down the reporter): >While keeping code private doesn't guarantee security, it does make it harder for bad actors to keep up with changes. You are welcome to debate this matter in the MakePlace discord: https://discord.com/invite/YuvcPzCuhq If you are able to convince the MakePlace community that keeping the code open-source is better, I will respect the wishes of the community. aaaand the smackdown: >Respectfully, I won't attempt to "debate" or "convince" anyone; I'm leaving this pull request and my fork here for others to see and use. It is not a matter of "better"; you are violating a software license and the law. It does not "make it harder" for anyone; Harmony hooking exists, IL modification exists, you can modify plugins from other plugins.

SneerClub self • 9 months ago • 100%

(via [Timnit Gebru](https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/111563817711169482)) >Although the board members didn’t use the language of abuse to describe Altman’s behavior, these complaints echoed some of their interactions with Altman over the years, and they had already been debating the board’s ability to hold the CEO accountable. Several board members thought Altman had lied to them, for example, as part of a campaign to remove board member Helen Toner after she published a paper criticizing OpenAI, the people said. >The complaints about Altman’s alleged behavior, which have not previously been reported, were a major factor in the board’s abrupt decision to fire Altman on Nov. 17, according to the people. Initially cast as a clash over the safe development of artificial intelligence, Altman’s firing was at least partially motivated by the sense that his behavior would make it impossible for the board to oversee the CEO. >For longtime employees, there was added incentive to sign: Altman’s departure jeopardized an investment deal that would allow them to sell their stock back to OpenAI, cashing out equity without waiting for the company to go public. The deal — led by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital — values the company at almost $90 billion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, more than triple its $28 billion valuation in April, and it could have been threatened by tanking value triggered by the CEO’s departure. huh, I think this shady AI startup whose product is based on theft that cloaks all its actions in fake concern for humanity might have a systemic ethics problem

TechTakes self • 10 months ago • 100%

techcrunch.com

in spite of popular belief, maybe [lying your ass off on the orange site](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145997) is actually a fucking stupid career move for those who don’t know about Kyle, see [our last thread about Cruise](https://awful.systems/post/482352). the company also popped up a bit recently when we discussed general orange site nonsense — Paully G was doing his best to make Cruise look like an absolute success after the safety failings of their awful self-driving tech became too obvious to ignore last month

TechTakes self • 10 months ago • 100%

this article is incredibly long and rambly, but please enjoy as this asshole struggles to select random items from an array in presumably Javascript for what sounds like a basic crossword app: >At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly. > >Fine: commands like those are notoriously fussy, and everybody looks them up anyway. ah, the NP-complete problem of just fucking pulling the file into memory (there’s no way this clown was burning a rainforest asking ChatGPT for a memory-optimized way to do this), selecting a random item between 0 and the areay’s length minus 1, and maybe storing that index in a second array if you want to guarantee uniqueness. there’s definitely not literally thousands of libraries for this if you seriously can’t figure it out yourself, hackerman >I returned to the crossword project. Our puzzle generator printed its output in an ugly text format, with lines like `"s""c""a""r""*""k""u""n""i""s""*" "a""r""e""a"`. I wanted to turn output like that into a pretty Web page that allowed me to explore the words in the grid, showing scoring information at a glance. But I knew the task would be tricky: each letter had to be tagged with the words it belonged to, both the across and the down. This was a detailed problem, one that could easily consume the better part of an evening. fuck it’s convenient that every example this chucklefuck gives of ChatGPT helping is for incredibly well-treaded toy and example code. wonder why that is? (check out the author’s other articles for a hint) >I thought that my brother was a hacker. Like many programmers, I dreamed of breaking into and controlling remote systems. The point wasn’t to cause mayhem—it was to find hidden places and learn hidden things. “My crime is that of curiosity,” goes “The Hacker’s Manifesto,” written in 1986 by Loyd Blankenship. My favorite scene from the 1995 movie “Hackers” is most of this article is this type of fluffy cringe, almost like it’s written by a shitty advertiser trying and failing to pass themselves off as a relatable techy

NotAwfulTech self • 11 months ago • 100%

having recently played and refunded a terrible “modern” text adventure, I’ve had the urge to revisit my favorite interactive fiction author, [Andrew Plotkin aka Zarf](https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@zarfeblong). here’s a selection of recommendations from his long list of works: - if you’re new to playing interactive fiction (essentially the modernized form of the old Infocom text adventures), check out his [tutorial game](https://eblong.com/zarf/if.html#dreamhold) and [guide to IF parser commands](http://pr-if.org/doc/play-if-card/play-if-card.html) - [Spider and Web](https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/) is an old favorite; it uses the nature of the interactive fiction medium to involve the player in a game of deception - [Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home](https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/heliopause/) is a good interactive sci-fi short story - [Shade](https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/shade/) is an exploration into dreamlike writing and horror - [Lists and Lists](https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/lists/) is a gamified Lisp tutorial — it’s where I learned the language!

TechTakes self • 1 year ago • 100%

www.agile451.com

I found this searching for information on how to program for the old Commodore Amiga’s [HAM (Hold And Modify) video mode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify) and you gotta touch and feel this one to sneer at it, cause I haven’t seen a website this aggressively shitty since Flash died. the content isn’t even worth quoting as it’s just LLM-generated bullshit meant to SEO this shit site into the top result for an existing term (which worked), but just clicking around and scrolling on this site will expose you to an incredible density of laggy, broken full screen animations that take way too long to complete and block reading content until they’re done, alongside a long list of other good design sense violations (find your favorites!) **bonus sneer** arguably I’m finally taking up Amiga programming as an escape from all this AI bullshit. well fuck me I guess cause here’s one of the vultures in the retrocomputing space selling an enshittified (and very ugly) version of AmigaOS with a ChatGPT app and an AI art generator, cause not even operating on a 30 year old computer will spare me this bullshit:  like fuck man, all I want to do is trick a video chipset from 1985 into making pretty colors. am I seriously gonna have to barge screaming into another German demoscene IRC channel?

TechTakes self • 1 year ago • 100%

the writer [Nina Illingworth](https://www.ninaillingworth.com/), whose work has been a constant source of inspiration, posted this excellent analysis of the reality of the AI bubble on Mastodon (featuring a shout-out to the recent articles on the subject from Amy Castor and [@dgerard@awful.systems](https://awful.systems/u/dgerard)): >Naw, I figured it out; they absolutely don't care if AI doesn't work. > >They really don't. They're pot-committed; these dudes aren't tech pioneers, they're money muppets playing the bubble game. They are invested in increasing the valuation of their investments and cashing out, it's literally a massive scam. Reading a bunch of stuff by Amy Castor and David Gerard finally got me there in terms of understanding it's not real and they don't care. From there it was pretty easy to apply a historical analysis of the last 10 bubbles, who profited, at which point in the cycle, and where the real money was made. > >The plan is more or less to foist AI on establishment actors who don't know their ass from their elbow, causing investment valuations to soar, and then cash the fuck out before anyone really realizes it's total gibberish and unlikely to get better at the rate and speed they were promised. > >Particularly in the media, it's all about adoption and cashing out, not actually replacing media. Nobody making decisions and investments here, particularly wants an informed populace, after all. the linked mastodon thread also has a very interesting post from an AI skeptic who used to work at Microsoft and seems to have gotten laid off for their skepticism

NotAwfulTech self • 1 year ago • 100%

a surprisingly good Atari 2600 demo by XAYAX, originally presented at Revision 2014

NotAwfulTech self • 1 year ago • 100%

nullsignal.games

Netrunner is a collectible card game with a very long history. in short: - its first edition was designed by the Magic: The Gathering guy (with about as many greed and scarcity mechanics as Magic) and took place in the same universe as Cyberpunk 2077 - the second edition was published by Fantasy Flight Games, replaced the scarcity mechanics with Living Card Game expansion packs (you get all the cards in the set with one purchase) and a sliding window for tournament play card validity, and switched universes and names to Android: Netrunner - the game went entirely out of print once Fantasy Flight dropped it - the current “edition” of the game and its rules are maintained by a non-profit cooperative named Nullsignal (formerly NISEI), who also continued the story started in Android: Netrunner. because the game is maintained by a non-profit (and actually appropriately fairly anti-corporate) cooperative, playing Netrunner ranges from free to relatively cheap: - any recognizable proxy is valid even in tournament play with the right (opaque-backed) sleeves. this means that you can print out Nullsignal’s cards at home and sleeve them with a little bit of card stock for rigidity and be ready for tournament play. this also means you can sleeve a post-it note for the same effect, so long as both players can recognize which card you’re supposed to be playing - you can buy a boxed set from Nullsignal if you’d like high quality cards, and they’ve also got on-demand manufacturing set up through DriveThruCards and MakePlayingCards - or you can forget physical cards entirely and play on [jinteki.net](https://www.jinteki.net/), a free service that lets you play an online game of Netrunner using every card ever published by Fantasy Flight and Nullsignal. the designers at Nullsignal also use Jinteki to beta test and pre-release sets, so you may also get access to cards that don’t physically exist yet the gameplay of Netrunner is fucking great: it’s an asymmetric card game where one player is a corporation (or their sysadmin at least) and the other is a runner trying to hack and bring down that corporation. the gameplay feels a lot like a mix between a shell game, the bluffing parts of poker, the better bits of Magic (most of the rules you need are on the cards), and an aggressive cat and mouse struggle, all at once. it’s actually one of my favorite ways that decking and ICE have been translated into gameplay mechanics. Nullsignal also does a great job on the story, art, and aesthetic of their new cards. modern Netrunner has a distinctive feel to it, but it’s clear that the folks behind it understand how to make good cyberpunk.

NotAwfulTech self • 1 year ago • 100%

Hypnospace Outlaw is that [funny meme game with the pizza dance](https://youtu.be/L5oFYQPUnmE). it’s also a leftist parody of the California Ideology and some of the factors that led to the bursting of the dot com bubble. crucially, it’s also a whole lot of fun to play — it’s a very good point and click mystery adventure that takes place on a faithfully rendered and authentic-feeling version of a networked computer in the 90s, crafted by someone who absolutely knew what they were doing with the time period and aesthetic. above all, it’s one of the better cyberpunk games I’ve played, though I can’t really explain why without spoiling the ending. Hypnospace Outlaw can be finished fairly quickly, so I encourage anyone who hasn’t to give it a play or at least watch a playthrough from a non-annoying YouTuber. ending spoilers follow: ::: spoiler Hypnospace Outlaw ending spoilers it goes without saying that sleeptime computing in Hypnospace is a limited and janky but still revolutionary brain-computer interface, and in effect what you’re doing during the whole game is a precursor to netrunning. in fact, Hypnospace in general is a perfect prelude to a Gibsonian cyberpunk dystopia. as demonstrated in the last chapter of the game, sleeptime computing tech is fatal when pushed beyond its limits, as Merchantsoft demonstrated like only a short-sighted and greedy startup in 1999 could. Dylan even spends 20 solid years blaming a hacker for the lives he took fucking with tech he barely understood. the tech behind sleeptime computing is most likely outlawed after 1999, or its use is at least heavily stigmatized. at the same time, the promise behind Hypnospace remains alluring as fuck. in the last chapter of the game, you join up with a nostalgic effort to archive all of Hypnospace from the cache memory in your repaired moderator headband. the allure goes beyond nostalgia though: with the 90s ideas stripped away, even a janky BCI is incredibly useful. you can imagine high-frequency traders, drone pilots, and similar assholes being particularly interested in the illegal tech that replaces sleep with the ability to very efficiently do their jobs 24/7. cyberdeck tech being strictly regulated and only available to high-level corpos and obsessed hackers is a key component of classic cyberpunk. and hey, while we’re on the topic of the worst people in the world adopting illegal tech, did you finish the (excellent) M1NX and Leaky Piping side plots? cause if you did, you’ll know that sleeptime computing doesn’t actually let you sleep — it severely limits the amount of time you spend in REM sleep, but users don’t realize that because they’re still physically resting. so those high-frequency traders, drone pilots, and other assholes who’ve adopted habitual sleeptime computing use are also slowly going insane from a lack of REM sleep, and chances are they don’t know it because all the evidence was released right before the Mindcrash in short, these are all the precursor chemicals you need for a cyberpunk future. ::: the game’s author, Jay Tholen, is currently in progress on its sequel, Dreamsettler. I can’t wait for more good cyberpunk.

TechTakes self • 1 year ago • 100%

www.techdirt.com

there’s an alternate universe version of this where musk’s attendant sycophants and bodyguard have to fish his electrocuted/suffocated/crushed body out from the crawlspace he wedged himself into with a pocket knife

TechTakes self • 1 year ago • 100%

www.404media.co

404media continues to do devastatingly good tech journalism >What Kaedim’s artificial intelligence produced was of such low quality that at one point in time “it would just be an unrecognizable blob or something instead of a tree for example,” one source familiar with its process said. 404 Media granted multiple sources in this article anonymity to avoid retaliation. this is fucking amazing. the company tries to hide it as a QA check, but they’re really just paying 3d modelers $1-$4 a pop to churn out models in 15 minutes while they pretend the work’s being done by an AI, and now I’m wondering what other AI startups have also discovered this shitty dishonest growth hack

NotAwfulTech self • 1 year ago • 100%

this is a computer that’s almost entirely without graphical capabilities, so here’s a demo featuring animations and sound someone did last year

TechTakes self • 1 year ago • 100%

kinda glad I bounced off of the suckless ecosystem when I realized how much their config mechanism (C header files and a recompile cycle) fucking sucked

TechTakes self • 1 year ago • 99%

meow.social


MoreWrite self • 1 year ago • 100%

# A Brief Primer on Technofascism ## Introduction It has become increasingly obvious that some of the most prominent and monied people and projects in the tech industry intend to implement many of the same features and pursue the same goals that are described in Umberto Eco’s *Ur-Fascism*(4); that is, these people are fascists and their projects enable fascist goals. However, it has become equally obvious that those fascist goals are being pursued using a set of methods and pathways that are unique to the tech industry, and which appear to be uniquely crafted to force both Silicon Valley corporations and the venture capital sphere to embrace fascist values. The name that fits this particular strain of fascism the best is *technofascism* (with thanks to `@future_synthetic`), frequently shortened for convenience to techfash. Some prime examples of technofascist methods in action exist in cryptocurrency projects, generative AI, large language models, and a particular early example of technofascism named Urbit. There are many more examples of technofascist methods, but these were picked because they clearly demonstrate what outwardly separates technofascism from ordinary hype and marketing. ## The Unique Mechanisms of Technofascism ### Disassociation with technological progress or success Technofascist projects are almost always entirely unsuccessful at achieving their stated goals, and rarely involve any actual technological innovation. This is because the marketed goals of these projects are not their real, fascist aims. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are frequently presented as innovative, but all blockchain-based technologies are, in fact, inefficient distributed database based on Merkle trees, a very old technology which blockchains add little practical value to. In fact, blockchains are so impractical that they have provably failed to achieve any of the marketed goals undertaken by cryptocurrency corporations since the public release of Bitcoin(6). ### Statement of world-changing goals, to be achieved without consent Technofascist goals are never small-scale. Successful tech projects are usually narrowly focused in order to limit their scope(9), but technofascist projects invariably have global ambitions (with no real attempt to establish a roadmap of humbler goals), and equally invariably attempt to achieve those goals without the consent of anyone outside of the project, usually via coercion. This type of coercion and consent violation is best demonstrated by example. In cryptocurrency, a line of thought that has been called the Bitcoin Citadel(8) has become common in several communities centered around Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. Generally speaking, this is the idea that in a near-future post-collapse society, the early adopters of the cryptocurrency at hand will rule, while late and non-adopters will be enslaved. In keeping with technofascism’s disdain for the success of its marketed goals, this monstrous idea ignores the fact that cryptocurrencies would be useless in a post-collapse environment with a fractured or non-existent global computer network. AI and TESCREAL groups demonstrate this same pattern by simultaneously positioning large language models as an existential threat on the verge of becoming a hostile godlike sentience, as well as the key to unlocking a brighter (see: more profitable) future for the faithful of the TESCREAL in-group. In this case, the consent violation is exacerbated by large language models and generative AI necessarily being trained on mass volumes of textual and artistic work taken without permission(1). Urbit positions itself as the inevitable future of networked computing, but its admitted goal is to technologically implement a neofeudal structure where early adopters get significant control over the network and how it executes code(3, 12). ### Creation and furtherance of a death cult In the fascist ideology described by Eco, fascism is described as “a life lived for struggle” where everyone is indoctrinated to believe in a cult of heroism that is closely linked with a cult of death(4). This same indoctrination is common in what I will refer to as a *death cult*, where a technofascist project is simultaneously positioned as both a world-ending problem, and the solution to that same problem (which would not exist without the efforts of technofascists) for a select, enlightened few. The death cult of technofascism is demonstrated with perfect clarity by the closely-related ideologies surrounding Large Language Models (LLMs), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and the bundle of ideas known as TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singulartarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism)(5). We can derive examples of this death cult from the examples given in the previous section. In the concept of the Bitcoin Citadel, cryptocurrencies are idealized as both the cause of the collapse and as the in-group’s source of power after that collapse(6). The TESCREAL belief that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will end the world unless it is “aligned with humanity” by members of the death cult, who handle the AGI with the proper religious fervor(11). While Urbit does not technologically structure itself as a death cult, its community and network is structured to be a highly effective incubator for other death cults(2, 7, 10). ### Severance of our relationship with truth and scientific research ### Destruction and redefinition of historical records This can be viewed as a furtherance of technofascism’s goal of destroying our ability to perceive the truth, but it must be called out that technofascist projects have a particular interest in distorting our remembrance of history; to make history effectively mutable in order to cover for technofascism’s failings. ### Parasitization of existing terminology As part of the process of generating false consensus and covering for the many failings of technofascist projects, existing terminology is often taken and repurposed to suit the goals of the fascists. One obvious example is the popular term *crypto*, which until relatively recently referred to cryptography, an extremely important branch of mathematics. Cryptocurrency communities have now adopted the term, and have deliberately used the resulting confusion to falsely imply that cryptocurrencies, like cryptography, are an important tool in software architecture. ### Weaponization of open source and the commons One of the distinctive traits that separates ordinary capitalist exploitation from technofascism is the subversion and weaponization of the efforts of the open source community and the development commons. One notable weapon used by many technofascist projects to achieve absolute control while maintaining the illusion that the work being undertaken is an open source community effort is what I will call *forking hostility*. This is a concerted effort to make forking the project infeasible, and it takes two forms. Its technological form is accomplished via network effects; good examples are large cryptocurrency projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which cannot practically be forked because any blockchain without majority consensus is highly vulnerable to attacks, and in any case is much less valuable than the larger chain. Urbit maintains technological forking hostility via its aforementioned implementation of neofeudal network resource allocation. The second form of forking hostility is social; technofascist open source communities are notably for extremely aggressively telling dissenters to “just for it, it’s open source” while just as aggressively punishing anyone attempting a fork with threats, hacking attempts (such as the aforementioned blockchain attacks), ostracization, and other severe social repercussions. These responses are very distinctive in the uniformity of their response, which is rarely seen even among the most toxic of regular open source communities. ### Implementation of racist, biased, and prejudiced systems ## References [1] Bender, Emily M. and Hanna, Alex, *Ai Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype*, Scientific American, 2023. [2] Broderick, Ryan, *Inside Remilia Corporation, the Anti-Woke Dao behind the Doomed Milady Maker Nft*, Fast Company, 2022. [3] Duesterberg, James, *Among the Reality Entrepreneurs*, The Point Magazine, 2022. [4] Eco, Umberto, *Ur-Fascism*, The Anarchist Library, 1995. [5] Gebru, Timnit and Torres, Emile, *Satml 2023 - Timnit Gebru - Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Agi*, 2023. [6] Gerard, David, *Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Etherium and Smart Contracts*, {David Gerard}, 2017. [7] Gottsegen, Will, *Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Miladys but Were Afraid to Ask*, 2022. [8] Munster, Decrypt / Ben, *The Bizarre Rise of the ’Bitcoin Citadel’*, Decrypt, 2021. [9] , *Scope Creep*, Wikipedia, 2023. [10] , *How to Start a Secret Society*, 2022. [11] Torres, Emile P., *The Acronym behind Our Wildest Ai Dreams and Nightmares*, Truthdig, 2023. [12] Yarvin, Curtis, *3-Intro.Txt*, GitHub, 2010.

TechTakes self • 1 year ago • 100%

no excerpts yet cause work destroyed me, but this just got posted on the orange site. apparently a couple of urbit devs realized urbit sucks actually. interestingly they correctly call out some of urbit’s worst points (like its incredibly high degree of centralization), but I get the strong feeling that this whole thing is an attempt to launder urbit’s reputation while swapping out the fascists in charge e: I also have to point out that this is written from the insane perspective that anyone uses urbit for anything at all other than an incredibly inefficient message board and a set of interlocking crypto scams e2: I didn’t link it initially, but [the orange site thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37057471) where I found this has heated up significantly since then