Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th January 2025
https://awful.systems/post/3226912
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Starting off with a weapons-grade sneer: How to Dehumanize Accessibility with AI
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Thanks, that was infuriating to read.
Whenever techbros use the word “storytelling”, some disaster follows…
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I just want to harp on this one:
“Existing methods for testing are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for developers nor for users.”
Wtf, can you imagine saying something like this about literally any other profession than software engineering? “Existing methods for checking brake pressure are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for mechanics nor for users”. “Existing methods for sterilising surgical equipment are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for surgeons nor for patients”. “Existing methods for checking voltage are often very technical and not very attractive, neither for electricians nor for users”.
The lack of any fucking standards that devs are held to is insane, so the excuse for accessibility in the web being shit is that it’s TOO TECHNICAL and kinda annoying for web devs??? Again, can you fucking imagine saying this about anything else, “ye, cars kinda suck because making sure they don’t is all technical and kinda boring for mechanics to do”.
It’s YOUR JOB. Literally YOUR PROFESSION. PROFESSIONALS ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE STANDARDS you fucking piece of shit, have you no honour, not a single care in the world for your craft, you fucking babies. “Oh but it’s very technical” YOU’RE A TECH SPECIALIST. THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU GET YOUR SALARY FOR???
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A great example of ‘we are bad at our jobs and if you rely on us everybody will die’
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The worst bit is, the devs who aren’t like this are basically forced to comply anyway. Whenever I justify a delay in some release with that testing/bugfixing takes time, I get slapped with release it anyway, you can patch it later, and although I am lucky to be in a privileged position where I can fight this for some amount of time, every young programmer who comes into a job with a good mindset is not and has to bend over or face shit like negative performance reviews because they’re too slow.
This is so fucking infuriating. I don’t want to release shit software, I want to make sure the stuff I ship works. Back when patching meant you had to ship a physical medium to a non-trivial amount of users, that was how things worked, but apparently only because IT HAD TO and not because it’s good fucking wort ethics to have. Now that you can just zero-day patch everything it’s apparently okay to ship unfinished shit and use your customers as beta testers.
I hate this so much and I try to avoid doing this as much as I can professionally. And whenever I can’t I actually feel bad and want to apologize to everyone who has to use that shit release.
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The New Antitrust is so goddamn meta, deep writing from the 2025 authors
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Reading through announcements of new hardware from CES and the endless series of products containing “AI” is so tiring. Not suprising, but still… ugh. Claims of AI in everything.
My favourite so far: USB controller with “AI enhancements” because… uuh… if I understand it right, you could theoretically use it to connect an external GPU and use that for AI, so that’s why “AI” is in the marketing for the USB controller…?
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Maybe EAs should ditch malaria nets and start subsidizing bum ticklers
disclaimer(not a claim made by linked OP)
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Re: disclaimerNot OP indeed, butt …
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The comments are something else alright:
The part about kids is wrong. Per Aella’s survey, many people report having masturbated well before puberty. Breeding and pregnancy were actually one of my earliest kinks when I was 7.
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aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
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yeah I wasn’t sure about what to post either but this about gets it
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feels bad when “Per Aella’s survey” is the high point of a post
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I’m sure her surveys are immune to sampling bias and therefore perfectly represent the general population. /s
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There even is a SSC post talking about how even professionally ran surveys have a 5% rate of bullshit (the lizardman constant, mentioned by Scott in 2013, and now in a lot more places (I think the idea is fine, just that Scott seems to draw a few to generalizing conclusions (in the article, not the conclusion) about classifying people as trolls/malicious vs 'sometimes people give a trollish/malicious answer. I also don’t think the percentage is constant)). (Yes, SSC style Rationalists not internalizing the SSC lore is one of my pet peeves). And as Amoeba_girl said, this is the highlight of the post.
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Im going ro pretend i never saw that.
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just when you think you’re at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, the rationalists take you lower
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Oof ouch
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su;dr
(saw URL; didn’t read)
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the worst Nix project has finally been announced: behold crypto NixOS
I’m starting a paradigm shifting, open and new human / computer interface system that is global, multi device and privacy focused.
[…]
DISCLAIMER: You are not my exit liquidity, I have the best performing long term spot crypto portfolio in the world - I’m a early adopter with 100% hit rate on geniuses. So, I don’t have to work, I’m not building this to become rich. I want to build something paradigm changing - truly mind-blowing, because now we have the tech and I’m annoyed how computer work. It is a lot of work, but it will reward us all.
my “this isn’t a grift and I’m not a grifter” disclaimer is prompting a lot of questions already answered by the disclaimer. but speaking of prompting, what goes with crypto?
ChatGPT-1o thinks, after some reinforced asking, that the MC of such a coin can reach 300-1000M; I think it could easily go higher - it solves so fundamental problems in a much more elegant way. In my opinion, it will be the same step as the command line to the windowed systems was. Or dump phone to smart phone. It will just span devices and span users while keeping the data under control and of companies.
of course. after some reinforced asking, gpt told me you’re all haters if you don’t think I’m as important as Xerox PARC!
there’s lots more in the OP to sneer at, but here’s the worst part of the thread:
Mod note: I’m glad to see doubt and scepticism about crypto-based claims. However, that point has now been made; please avoid any further posts in that vein to avoid a pile-on dunkfest, and leave the thread for any potential on-topic discussion.
thanks for nothing as usual NixOS discourse!
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Must be rich indeed, the disclaimer is pure gold.
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The ’ dont ignore this it is not spam’ spam disclaimer
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after some reinforced asking
Shit chatgpt is self aware, it did the ‘if i agree with you will you shut the fuck up’ thing.
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i forced chatgpt to say that my idea will make you a billion dollars but i think it can go higher
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it solves so fundamental problems in a much more elegant way. In my opinion, it will be the same step as the command line to the windowed systems was.
wait wait wait does this bozo think we invented CLI after graphical windows?
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Zuck wants to get back to his roots
It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do: […] 5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
Narrator: this announcement did not, in fact, ease concerns about bias.
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Ah i recall somebody got mad when I mentioned traditionally capitalists will team up with fascists.
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Maybe I was naive, but I didn’t expect all this to go that fast and that blatant…
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No, I’m with you. Bad feeling about where this is going.
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a few people have been posting along the lines of “we all knew Facebook was evil, why are you surprised” which seems to miss the point — this is happening so fast and blatant that we’re almost definitely seeing the early stages of a playbook being executed. and even if not: Facebook was already the fash pipeline targeting mom, dad, and grandma. should I feel good that the pipeline is getting much more efficient and pervasive? none of them are ever gonna be on something like the fediverse.
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the new FB standards guy is a Heritage Foundation guy, he would be the precise vector
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Today’s news…
internally at Meta:
-trans and nonbinary themes stripped from Messenger
-enforcement policy now allows for the denial of trans people’s existence
-tampons removed from men’s restrooms
-DEI programs shuttered
-Kaplan briefed top conservative influencers the night before policy changes were announced
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holy fuck :|
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Meta’s memo to employees rolling back DEI programs (axios.com)
916 points by bsilvereagle 17 hours ago | hide | 1315 comments
orange site is having a moment
haven’t tried to look at the comments yet though, those numbers are ominous
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zuck is really pulling that gaddafi look recently, wonder if he will be found someday in a drainage pipe
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🤞🏼
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this is going in hard enough that I suspect zuck is not expecting there to be another meaningful election
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Is that a comedy account? The announcement surely reads as if it was…
Related: meta renames pride themed skins in chat labyrinth.zone/…/e129982d-997e-489b-985a-3ef547b6…
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It’s not. Surprise! All of Silicon Valley has gone mask off in preparation for the new administration in Washington!
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Id say this means they are prob betting that democracy is over, segregation/sexism will come back, and the republicans will stay in power for quite some time. Else this move, esp as the usa seems to flipflop between dems/repubs seems very shortsighted. Very worrying.
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Fascist virtue signalling aside, candy floss should not exist. That’s like the exact opposite of dental care.
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Isn’t this just an economic move dressed up as an ideological one?
If only all those sneaker companies had thought to say they had to move their factories from America to Chinese sweatshops because American workers were too woke.
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Trick question; it’s both an economic move and an ideological move.
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For a fun 20 minutes or so, I recommend going theough the recent enron “revival”. (It’s all satire)
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Just want to share this great term & definition “hyperkludge” coined by Jonathan Korman (@miniver on bsky and masto)
miniver.blogspot.com/2023/01/hyperkludge-n.html
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oh that’s pretty great
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this rules <3
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Examples off the top of my head:
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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
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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
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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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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 likethe central explanation for this trend. In that sense a hyperkludges 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.
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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.
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Saying that Excel is not and never was a good solution for any problem feels like a rather blinkered, programmer-brained technique.
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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
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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
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”.
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25475 O Jan 08 Duke University ( 42K) Help Us Evaluate New Personalized AI Learning Tool
groan
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put an article in mdpi and you’ll get 70 of these per month
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text/gemini