Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
“In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer,” [Peter Thiel] said, referring to Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky
I am going outside to smoke something. I don't care what, just… something
Damn, when you get kicked off the Thiel grifter pipeline, you get straight punted. Not even the callous disregard and abandonment practiced by a certain outer-borough real estate hustler, instead it's reverse apotheosis
Found a nice and lengthy sneer of Bluesky's dogshit moderation in the wild, focusing on how its repeatedly fucked over marginalised users.
as one of the two non-computer scientists here, every time I check in there seems to be some load bearing open source project I've never heard of that's gone fash. "GreenBlox is refusing to kick out a contributor who said the jewish question should be on the table??" "PipeLinux official account is posting that pronouns don't exist?" open source people, are you ok?
Hello other non-cs person!
open source people, are you ok?
No.
Think this about narrows it down. I was thinking about a longer post on all the bad dynamics and other weird things cs people and esp open source people have to deal with but you did it better.
CS has a huge number of people who think you can derive the solutions to social problems from first principles. It's impossible to reason with them.
it seems to me that bigger problem is that they also think that software can solve these problems
For the most part, the sudden rash of people deciding that their bigotry is now publicly acceptable is mostly around non-loadbearing things, because aggrieved entitled nerds aren’t great at working in a team (hyprland has definitely suffered from alienating people and missing out on fixes and compatibility work).
The rubygems stuff was a special case, because it was a hostile takeover of some important infrastructure by a shitty company, but most of the rest are unexciting projects that have found that giving it the old H-H is good publicity and more importantly: there are some rich folk throwing money around. Not a lot of cash in open source under normal circumstances.
Not that I want to minimise the problems that open source and tech in general very definitely have, but in this specific case it is a small number of people who are very loud and/or very rich, and sometimes both.
Well at least I can now stop being angry at them for fucking up the Laptop 12 keyboard, because now they are on my "do not buy, ever" list anyway.
this bums me out so much
I'd wanted to mention this when I read about Cloudflare doing it, but, seriously, what the hell is up with Omarchy?
It's not even a full distribution, just a fucking Arch config. Some shell scripts and dotfiles you can run to set up a system ... like tons of nerds have on their git and have been using for decades. Why is this shit getting sponsorships?
Is it time yet to begin accepting that Arch is kind of ass anyway? I had a bad experience with updates crapping out on Manjaro, the original Arch-plus distro, and then somebody told me that Arch developers build all the packages on their local machines, not a secured build server??? Maybe that was just the AUR stuff, but still. And you need to update all packages in lock-step. I'll take the flexibility of Gentoo every time, where I can easily keep a stable base system and experiment with less-stable upstream packages around the edge, and still have it all make sense.
Having a bunch of out-and-proud fascists and bigots maintaining one of your most popular frontends is the kind of shit that kills projects. It's not just Framework, Arch needs to get out ahead of this if they don't want to get passed up. Not too long before having Valve downstream is the only thing they've got going for them, and that's not guaranteed to be a happy relationship forever.
Manjaro's package update delay thing does tend to fuck stuff up, EndeavourOS been behaving quite fine for me.
bongrip Manjaro is a psyop to make Arch look less competently maintained than it really is
Foxboron (arch maintainer dude) seems pretty good about rejecting fascism, he's in the framework thread linked from the post above expressing discontent.
I am being a bit unfair, it's good to see project principals getting out ahead of this. A lot of people glom onto Arch because of some perceived elitism, and it's a hop skip and a jump from that to convincing yourself you're part of the "master race"
Genuinely, arch linux is just like any other distro once you have it installed, aside from having the AUR.
YAY!
The answer probably looks a lot like “here’s how to install omarchy on your laptop in 14 easy steps! And 88 great apps you can install afterwards!”
Because Omarchy is an open endorsement of fascism disguised as a Linux distro - like the takeovers of NixOS and RubyGems, its success would help to further entrench fascists in the FOSS ecosystem.
Between this and the relatively disappointing GPU refresh for their Framework 16 (Nvidia 5070 8GB? That's it?! 🤮 ), doesn't look like they'll be getting my money anytime soon either. Seems like the used Thinkpad + LibreBoot crowd stays winning
Mercifully image-free article from rolling stone on how easy it is becoming to get grok to generate porn, including deepfakes of real people and bestiality.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-grok-hardcore-porn-1235442715
Includes a relevant quote from musk back in august:
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1954791048934244394
I still remember 6th/7th grade debates with classmates about VHS vs Betamax!
VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉
I guess that’s a product “moat” of sorts.
VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉
Stop gooning for 5 minutes challenge, difficulty level: impossible
Come on, Elon, I still post on Something Awful constantly and even I can do it
VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉
That factoid isn't even true - Sony had zero control over what people put on the tapes, meaning both formats allowed porn.
VHS didn't win because of porn, VHS won because a standard VHS cassette contains a shitload more tape than Beta (meaning a much longer recording time), and because the format was much more open (letting anyone build a VCR player and driving down the price).
Actually, according to grokipedia,
https://www.theverge.com/news/797540/dc-comics-jim-lee-no-generative-ai-pledge - for context, Jim Lee was the 90s XMen artist and Image Comics cofounder.
