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.
@Soyweiser @dgerard i have disliked and distrusted this guy since at least 2016–hate to see how he’s still inflicting injury on us
Since I went looking for links, I thought I’d include them for others wondering.
Thiel invests in Polymarket: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/polymarket-raises-70m-thiel-founders-140000178.html
Nate Silver joins Polymarket as advisor: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nate-silver-joins-polymarket-ahead-of-2024-election-as-trading-volume-tops-400m-302198424.html
@Soyweiser @dgerard WOW!!! and Silver wants #Biden to drop out. No collusion there??? Thanks for providing context.
@Soyweiser @dgerard This is all about taking over the US monetary system. And the dumbass Democrats in Congress are falling right in line. How much cryptocurrency did it cost Thiel to buy them, I wonder?
@Soyweiser @dgerard Everything is clear now!
@Soyweiser @dgerard From day one he’s been there to nudge, not report.
@Soyweiser @dgerard it does track with silver going off the deep end in 2016
He started getting high off his own supply and thinking he could do climate science better than climate scientists back in 2012.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nate-silver-climate-change_b_1909482
@blakestacey I remember him talking about Stacy Abrams election for governor and saying yah maybe all the illegal shit led to her loosing but there isn’t good research and so it doesn’t matter. When that happened my thoughts about him changed a great deal
Days since last dangerous humanity ending infohazard discovered by some guy on twitter: 0
did it have sex with him
It told him he was very smart and correct so he had an hypnogasm yes.
(For the people not in the know and who want some more psychic damage, look up Scott and his ‘I can hypnotise you into having orgasms’ blog posts, the man is utterly nuts, and it is really scary how many people seriously follow him).
Looks like he confused “tantrum” with “tantric”
No shame, happens to guys all the time
If this wasn’t Scott Adams I’d have assumed this was fetish content. Now I don’t know what to think.
Fetish content for the world’s most divorced man.
Is he more divorced than Elon these days? I didn’t think that would be possible
how the fuck would you explain that to humans who don’t have years of psychic damage
explaining these things to normal humans is how you turn them into humans with years of psychic damage, and I support that mission wholeheartedly
an attempt at a summary:
the dilbert guy, who believes he can hypnotize women into having sex with him, now also believes he knows a magic incantation to teach hypnosis to a chatbot, and heavily implies the chatbot was able to hypnotize him in turn (presumably into having sex with it)
who believes he can hypnotize women into having sex with him
Wait I missed this, he believes what?
Now this is doubly funny.
Content warning for this post, you will get psychic damage.
It is worse, he believes he can hypnotize people over the internet into having orgasms. Here is a link to a screenshot, not sure if I’m able to find a archive link. I think he deleted his blog.
E: a tumblr has archive links but it seems he managed to delete the first post.
Hey, haven’t seen a proof of god’s non-existence today yet, thanks!
extreme psychic damage trap
Submissives, I want you to start planning your New Year’s Eve now. Make sure you have some time alone, or some time with a partner who fully accepts your wonderful nature. But most of all, I want you wet, or hard, and especially obedient, starting now. And I want you to know how much I enjoy putting you in this state of mind. It starts now, but will get more intense by Thursday night. Expect to be a quivering, throbbing, wet mess by then.
How did that make you feel?
Queasy.
This is quite literally “creep discovers dirty-talking, thinks it’s a superpower even though he’s terrible at it”.
EDIT: From Part 3:
So today I am only talking to the perhaps 20% of you who were turned off by this series.
Bwahahahaha! That’s some funny shit mate, I’ve seen many bollocks number straight from between them buttocks, but this is fuckin’ choice.
If you see a train entering a tunnel, think of it as nothing but transportation.
Hey mate, I think… I think that’s what most normal people do? I sometimes imagine an action hero standing on top and fighting a villain before the tunnel slams them in the heads but that’s just me. What do you think about, Scott? Don’t answer that. please
On the plus side, this single image does catch one up pretty quickly
I saw people making fun of this on (the normally absurdly overly credulous) /r/singularity of all places. I guess even hopeful techno-rapture believers have limits to their suspension of disbelief.
At risk of being NSFW, this is an amazing self-own, pardon the pun. Hypnosis via text only works on folks who are fairly suggestible and also very enthusiastic about being hypnotized, because the brain doesn’t “power down” as much machinery as with the more traditional lie-back-on-the-couch setup. The eyes have to stay open, the text-processing center is constantly engaged, and re-reading doesn’t deepen properly because the subject has to have the initiative to scroll or turn the page.
Adams had to have wanted to be hypnotized by a chatbot. And that’s okay! I won’t kinkshame. But this level of engagement has to be voluntary and desired by the subject, which is counter to Adams’ whole approach of hypnosis as mind control.
Yep, was thinking something similar. Dude just posted a public sscce about the effect addressed in the llmentalist article
(The second c there is loadbearing under original interpretation, I guess)
imagine one day buying some shitpost novelty stickers from that one site you heard a friend mention sometime, and then getting them and laughing about it and forgetting it
all too rapidly the years pass: young trees shoot up, older trees start boughing their way past electrical lines, the oldest all already in their position of maximum comfort. whole generations of memes have been born and died. you no longer even get to make fun of your weird aunt for still sending the dancing baby gif (these days it’s all about the autotune clips of a decade ago…)
and then one day you get reminded that the shitpost novelty sticker web store exists by receiving an email from them
what the fuck.
In his twitter thread he’s attempting to troll people in the replies. And not even doing a particularly good job at it. A bold business strategy.
Apparently they also once chained a design into ‘liberal moron’ from what was some political message once in the past, so it isn’t coming from nowhere. Guess it wasn’t an innocent mistake.
yeah stickermule is where I got the bitcoin “it can’t be that stupid” stickers
how annoying
Proton, who I use for mail and various other services, has gone against the wishes of the majority of their userbase as measured by their own survey and implemented an LLM writing assistant in protonmail, which is a real laugh given Proton’s main hook is its services are end-to-end encrypted
(supposedly this piece of shit will run locally if you meet these incredibly high system requirements including a high end GPU or recent, high end Apple M chipset and a privacy-violating Chromium-based browser. otherwise it breaks e2e by sending your emails unencrypted to Proton’s servers, and they do a lot to try to talk over that fact)
Who is the target audience for this?
People who use Proton are privacy-conscious and mostly (I would argue) tech literate, and yet they shove spicy autocomplete that no one ever needed until two years ago and most people don’t want now because it produces complete horseshit, and spellchecking that every browser under then sun has built in by now.
And then they quietly say you need to use Chromium, so the people who use anything but (like, I don’t know, the majority of privacy-conscious folks who should be their main user base, lol) have their e2e broken?
I really hope they catch a raging firestorm for this.
(Also I’m really pissed right now because used to recommend them to people and now feel like a total jackass for doing that.)
(Also I’m really pissed right now because used to recommend them to people and now feel like a total jackass for doing that.)
don’t feel bad for making the best choice you could with the information of the past. until we get a workable, interoperable, federated, encrypted communication/online services platform, the choice was to recommend one of the centralized e2e providers. we both chose to recommend Proton and they did this shit, but it could have just as easily been tutanota.
now my brain’s going “e2e encrypted federated email but it preferably uses activitypub as a transport and classic email as a fallback, is that anything”
yep! that’s the game they’re playing. I really don’t give a fuck about Proton’s relatively tiny number of enterprise whales, but they make Proton a shitload of money in the short term.
the depressing part is, historically, online services that remain uncompromisingly user-focused tend to stick around roughly forever, while the ones that chase short-term gains and compromise everything else almost always enshittify and fizzle out pretty quick.
Saw this in passing earlier and I just laughed
Until indicated otherwise I’m going to presume it was some bizbro PM/PO/whatever pushing it because they really think it should be there “to be able to compete” (because of some laughably idiotic misunderstanding of their own value proposition and pitch)
Tangent: while I mostly run my own servers and services I did a recent assay on who’s reasonable for service shit. Proton kept popping up massively recommended while some occasional critical mentions from folks in anarchist circles, etc - made me a bit 🤨 and want to dig in more, but also just their product offerings aren’t great. Others I poked into are fastmail and tuta - both seem a fair bit better. Might be worth a look
Proton kept popping up massively recommended while some occasional critical mentions from folks in anarchist circles, etc - made me a bit 🤨 and want to dig in more,
No surprise that folks in anarchist circles are skeptical of Proton ha. That said, I do know quite a few people in the email “industry” who are broadly skeptical of Proton’s general philosophy/approach to email security, and the way they market their service/offerings.
Others I poked into are fastmail and tuta - both seem a fair bit better. Might be worth a look
Fastmail has a great interface and user experience imo, significantly better than any other web client I’ve tried. That said, they’re not end-to-end encrypted, so they’re not really trying to fill the same niche as Proton/Tuta.
From their website:
Fastmail customers looking for end-to-end encryption can use PGP or s/mime in many popular 3rd party apps. We don’t offer end-to-end encryption in our own apps, as we don’t believe it provides a meaningful increase in security for most users…
If you don’t trust the server, you can’t trust it to load uncompromised code, so you should be using a third party app to do end-to-end encryption, which we fully support. And if you really need end-to-end encryption, we highly recommend you don’t use email at all and use Signal, which was designed for this kind of use case.
I honestly don’t know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff here (I can barely write functional python scripts lol - so please chime in if I’m completely off base), but this comes across to me as an understandable (and fairly honest) compromise, that is probably adequate for some threat models?
Last time I used Tuta the user experience was pretty clunky, but afaik it is E2EE, so it’s probably a better direct alternative to Proton.
re fastmail, david mentioned a thing I wasn’t aware of so they’re off the list now, more or less just going to forget they exist except as a counter-recommendation
this comes across to me as an understandable (and fairly honest) compromise, that is probably adequate for some threat models?
they’re sorta saying “yeah just use external GPG like before”
albeit I will say their reasoning is a bit fucked in the head imo: that “if you can’t trust the server” shit applies equally for whether it’s serving you up the page elements to do message cryptography, or whether it’s serving you up a normal webmail client. I think I know/understand where they meant to go with it, but the wording they picked is quite shit
I set up a tuta domain for a thing about a month ago. it could’ve been a bit smoother (esp. domain/dns state checks) but I didn’t find anything immediately jarringly bad - and I was even drunk at the time (which means my diy-able supergrump comes out about this sort of shit). will see how it goes over some longer use :)
I’ve posted at Proton on Mastodon about this with some details on why it’s real bad; no reply yet
I linked to your masto post on twitter https://x.com/fasterandworse/status/1813994815991980204
I was reported for posting Eamon’s twitter handle on masto
there really are some weird-ass reports from people on fedi sometimes. I imagine it also hits on other platforms, but there we don’t get to see them
I imagine it was reported by proton because they were directly @ in the post :)
fucking wow. so that kinda confirms that:
- that’s Eamon’s alt account he’s using because he’s a fucking coward
- proton fucking sucks and is doing their best to squash this in exactly the way a privacy/security company shouldn’t
in exactly the way privacy/security companies keep doing over and over
Jesus fucking christ…
So where do I switch now? Is this the moment I build my own email server and handle this shit myself? I really don’t wanna…
I use tuta and they seem mostly ok.
they have apparently promised they don’t plan on implementing anything AI-related which is good, though I’m honestly hoping for a system where our privacy isn’t entirely reliant on the promises of a single authority
and I’m not saying we should do our own federated e2e email service, but somebody should
…more realistically, I’ll probably switch to tuta when my proton account nears renewal, as I’m not a fan of how much pure unfiltered horseshit I’m seeing them output with the money I paid them
Setting up an email server is really straightforward with simple-nixos-mailserver, highly recommend. No idea how likely you are to be classified as spam though from a new domain
I host my own email and for my day job I run an institutional email system that handles ~50 million messages per week. I can’t recommend hosting email at either end of that scale (or anywhere in between), and I find it difficult to believe that anyone with experience running a mail server would claim it’s reasonable or straightforward.
i host my mail services for the last twenty seven years, and yeah, you’re talking shit. starting the smtp daemon is not the same as managing mail server.
i host my mail services for the last twenty seven years
this is one of the circles of hell Dante didn’t comprehend when he wrote Inferno
coming up on 18y on mine. my postfix config is almost of legal drinking age in a lot of countries.
modern email ecosystem is a fucking mess.
chance is near 100% though
it’s also really, really fucking unpredictable, in the the-other-parties-do-not-reliably-behave-the-same way
used to hate having to debug mail failing to deliver to yahoo, and now lately google has started filling that niche…
eh, nix is experiencing a chudpocalypse at the moment, which might be why you’re catching strays
Not to downplay what proton mail is doing, but they’re saying that you can run this locally with a 2 core, 4 thread CPU from 2017 (the i3 7100, which is a 7000 series processor), and a RTX 2060, a GPU that was never considered high end. Perhaps they changed the requirements while you weren’t looking. Or Am I reading this wrong?
only one of the 8 computers I own (and I’m not being cheeky here and counting embedded or retro systems, just laptops and desktops) is physically capable of meeting the model’s minimum requirements, and that’s only if I install chromium on the Windows gaming VM my bigger GPU’s dedicated to and access protonmail from there. nothing else I do needs a GPU that big, professional or otherwise — that hardware exists for games and nothing else. compared with the integrated GPUs most people have, a 2060’s fucking massive.
do you see how these incredibly high system requirements (for a webmail client of all things), alongside them already treating the local model as strictly optional, can act as a funnel redirecting people towards the insecure cloud version of the feature? “this feature only works securely on one of the computers where you write mail, at best” feels like a dark pattern to me.
Unfortunately, “extremely expensive” and “high-end” aren’t really synonyms, thanks to, y’know, bitcoin. Of course, I don’t disagree with your argument that having to buy a GPU just to ensure your webmail does what it’s advertised to do is, well, dumb.
What I don’t know is what the LLM even is. Did they just tack on Llama to their webmail app and call it a day? Did they train a model? Was it trained on emails? If so, whose emails? What an advertisement that would be: “Use Protonmail to encrypt your emails so that companies like Protonmail can’t use them to train an LLM.”
David’s article has some details on what the LLM is. I don’t think it’s trained on emails, but that doesn’t make me feel much better.
Ah yes, Alexander’s unnumbered hordes, that endless torrent of humanity that is all but certain to have made a lasting impact on the sparsely populated subcontinent’s collective DNA.
edit: Also, the absolute brain on someone who would think that before entertaining a random recent western ancestor like a grandfather or whateverthefuckjesus.
No, it wasn’t a massive impact by numbers but that superior euro genetics has been floating around waiting to be born like the Kwasitz Haderach.
probably a mix of early Macedonian invasions.
Like his mom?
invasions.
inviasions. Sounds better in Makadonian.
comment from friend:
Slightly related: now I know when the AI crash is going to happen. Every bottomfeeder recruiter company on LinkedIn is suddenly pushing 2-month contract technical writer positions with AI companies with no product, no strategy, and no idea of how to proceed other than “CEO cashes out.” I suspect the idea is to get all of their documentation together so they can sell their bags of magic beans before the beginning of the holiday season.
sickos.jpg
I have asked if he can send me links to a few of these, I’ll see what I can do with 'em
That seems suspiciously soon, but my impression is based on nothing but vibes — a sense that companies are still buying in.
I think there was a report saying that the most recent quarter still showed a massive infusion of VC cash into the space, but I’m not sure how much of that comes from the fact that a new money sink hasn’t yet started trending in the valley. It wouldn’t surprise me if the griftier founders were looking to cash out before the bubble properly bursts in order to avoid burning bridges with the investors they’ll need to get the next thing rolling.
yeah, i think this is a last gasp or a second-last gasp.
Ed Zitron says it’ll burn by end of the year, but he doesn’t list sources either so idk
