- 3 Posts
- 10 Comments
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th May 2025English8·7 days agoHuh, I had missed the part in 2020 when Peter Thiel just flat out stated outright that it only makes sense to be in favour of capitalism if you’re a capital owner.
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•OpenAI offers to buy the Chrome web browser from Google. Uh huh.English4·9 days agoWe live in hellworld, please don’t get my hopes up…
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025English12·1 month agojesus fucking christ I think that IDF tweet is the worst thing that has ever existed
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025English9·1 month agooh no :(
poor strange she didn’t deserve that :(
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025English12·1 month agoWhile you all laugh at ChatGPT slop leaving “as a language model…” cruft everywhere, from Twitter political bots to published Springer textbooks, over there in lala land “AIs” are rewriting their reward functions and hacking the matrix and spontaneously emerging mind models of Diplomacy players and generally a week or so from becoming the irresistible superintelligent hypno goddess:
https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/1jixljo/comment/mjlexau/
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd March 2025English11·2 months agoThe problem with FOSS for me is the other side of the FOSS surplus: namely corporate encircling of the commons. The free software movement never had a political analysis of the power imbalance between capital owners and workers. This results in the “Freedom 0” dogma, which makes everything workers produce with a genuine communitarian, laudably pro-social sentiment, to be easily coopted and appropriated into the interests of capital owners (for example with embrace-and-extend, network effects, product bundling, or creative backstabbing of the kind Google did to Linux with the Android app store). LLM scrapers are just the latest iteration of this.
A few years back various groups tried to tackle this problem with a shift to “ethical licensing”, such as the non-violent license, the anti-capitalist software license, or the do no harm license. While license-based approaches won’t stop capitalists from using the commons to target immigrants (NixOS), enable genocide (Meta) or bomb children (Google), this was in my view worthwhile as a rallying cry of sorts; drawing a line in the sand between capital owners and the public. So if you put your free time on a software project meant for everyone and some billionaire starts coopting it, you can at least make it clear it’s non-consensual, even if you can’t out-lawyer capital owners. But these ethical licenses initiatives didn’t seem to make any strides, due to the FOSS culture issue you describe; traditional software repositories didn’t acknowledge or make any infrastructure for them, and ethical licenses would still be generically “non-free” in FOSS spaces.
(Personally, I use FOSS operating systems for 26 years now; I’ve given up on contributing or participating in the “community” a long time ago, burned out by all the bigotry, hostility, and First World-centrism of its forums.)
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsOPto TechTakes@awful.systems•The broken search bar is symbiotic with the bullshitting chatbotEnglish11·2 months agoI hate programming but if I wanted to waste any time programming stuff my idea would be something akin to Yahoo! Directory from before Google, or del.icio.us from the 2000s, but distributed, and tied to a PGP-like web of trust system.
You search for a topic, you get links saved with that tag by people you personally validated and trust first, and then by people they trust, and people you don’t know but added as probably fine, and so on. Dunno how doable it would be to do something like this.
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th March 2025English4·2 months agoYes to all that, plus the browser thing: How annoying the browsers are with expired certificates. I mean it has to be super hard to allow me to guess that the admin just forgot to renew the certificate, or it wouldn’t protect me from the very common threat model of… ähm… uh…
(it’s to protect the CA business model, of course.)
mirrorwitch@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2 March 2025English8·2 months agosmall domino: Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters” (2003)
…
big domino: “AI” “art” “realism”
If you’re in Germany I like the Mühle Grande a lot. I use it with any random foam from DM and with Astra blades which cost 10€ for a pack of 100. The blades last me over a year.