Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      24 days ago

      On this topic I’ve been seeing more 503 lately, are the servers running into issue, or am i getting caught in anti-scraper cross-fire?

      • self@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        12·
        24 days ago

        nope, you’ve been getting caught in the fallout from us not having this yet. the scrapers have been so intense they’ve been crashing the instance repeatedly.

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
          7·
          24 days ago

          when you get this working i am totally copying this for rationalwiki

          i nearly installed caddy just to get iocaine

          • self@awful.systemsOPEnglish
            6·
            24 days ago

            I saw that! fortunately once iocaine is configured it seems to just work, but it’s also very much software that kicks and screams the entire way there. in my case the problem wasn’t even nginx-related, I just typoed the config section for the request handler and it silently defaulted to the mode where it returns garbage for every incoming request.

            • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
              4·
              22 days ago

              Just a heads-up, I tried reading up on Iocaine and the project website is giving me the madlibs nonsense version on my phone’s browser, so I hope the version you’re planning to enable here isn’t quite as aggressive (the making.awful link is currently working for me).

              Between this and Cloudflare’s geolocation provider no longer saying my IPv6 address block is in Russia, I’m hopeful that my browsing experience might ever so slightly improve for a bit.

              • self@awful.systemsOPEnglish
                2·
                22 days ago

                making is running the version of the configuration I intend to deploy, so if it works for you there it should (hopefully) work in prod too

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    23 days ago

    Not a scream just a nice thing people might enjoy. Somebody made a funny comic about what we all are thinking about

    Random screenshot which I found particularly funny (Zijn rant klopt):

    Image description

    Two people talking to each other, one a bald heavily bespectacled man in the distance, and the other a well dressed skullfaced man with a big mustache. Conversation goes as follows:

    “It could be the work of the French!”

    “Or the Dutch”

    “Could even be the British!”

    “Filthy pseudo German apes, The Dutch!”

    “The Russ…”

    “Scum of the earth marsh dwelling Dutch”

        • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
          3·
          23 days ago

          I was told repeatedly growing up that they like Canadians over there because of the whole liberation thing. Is this true?

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            2·
            22 days ago

            Yes we do. Lot of Canadians gave their lives for our liberation. (not just Canadians, which is why the Trump admin removing the sign about the Black Americans at the American WW2 burial ground here has not gone over well, but also the French gave a heroic defense of Zeeland at the start of the war, and the Brits, and the Polish (they got the blame for the failure of market garden for some stupid reasons, but they jumped late even when the operation wasn’t going well, after being stalled due to the weather)).

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      23 days ago

      you know, if those ASML folks in dutchland weren’t quite so busy what with their EUV lasers and all that, we might not be in quite this same pickle right now,

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    23 days ago

    Eurogamer has opinions about genai voices in games.

    Arc Raiders is set in a world where humanity has been driven underground by a race of hostile robots. The contradiction here between Arc Raiders’ themes and the manner of its creation is so glaring that it makes me want to scream. You made a game about the tragedy of humans being replaced by robots while replacing humans with robots, Embark!

    https://www.eurogamer.net/arc-raiders-review

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      23 days ago

      Definitely been seeing the pattern of: “if you don’t like AI, you are being x-phobic” where “x” is a marginalised group that the person is using the name of as a cudgel. They probably never cared about this group before, but what’s important to this person is that they glaze AI over any sort of principle or ethics. Usually it’s ableist, as is basically any form of marginalisation/discrimination.

      E: read the link. Lmao that’s… not xenophobia. What a piece of shit

    • self@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      5·
      23 days ago

      thanks! I tried to link it in the usual way, but I think a bug might have blanked the url box before I hit post.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      21 days ago

      further things: one, that’s the first website I’ve made where I wasn’t just plugging into a template, and I’m a little proud of it even though it’s almost nothing. I would appreciate feedback and suggestions

      two, a future episode idea I have is to examine what I’m thinking of as “the trustless society.” it’s about the replacing of social relations with legal or financial intermediaries. Those of you who are long time buttcoiners will be familiar with this process. if any of you have specific readings to recommend I would love to hear it. I’ll probably mostly focus on balaji but anyone or anything will help

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        21 days ago

        New site looks good! I think Let’sEncrypt is still the easiest and cheapest way to set up a decent cert but I’ve been away from IT for over a year now and someone else here can probably help point you in the right direction. At least for now the site probably doesn’t actually have security concerns it would address, but it pops up a browser alert on first hit so it’s probably a good idea?

        Also I just started listening to the latest episode while writing this up and had forgotten how great that opening medley is.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          21 days ago

          +1 to letsencrypt for https. certbot can even auto-configure your webserver for you, taking it from http base to https-with-redirect, no terrible advice from shitty exist-for-volume blogs required

          superquick tldr:

          1. install certbot and the applicable plugin package for your webserver; if you don’t know the name use p.d.o (or your distro’s own) to find the package name
          2. run certbot; there’s extra flags you can pass if you want to automate, but ootb it’ll ask you questions and start the process for cert + config (iirc - I mostly run it automated and non-interactive)
          • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
            1·
            20 days ago

            it’s probably better for my development as a human being to learn this properly, but it turns out github pages hosting does the letsencrypt process if you check a box in the page settings

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      23 days ago

      TIHI

      I reiterate the hope that AI slop, will eventually push us towards better sourcing of resources/articles as a society going forwards, but yikes in the meantime.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        21 days ago

        this is a more perfect description than any I could’ve come up! my thesis was largely on what a boon it would prove to thieves (although I recognize that flavour of thief probably varies by country and not all have them)

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      21 days ago

      In the last couple of years I have noticed that people have been using single purpose phone holders/straps (as opposed to a multipurpose thing holder like a handbag etc.), so I understand this as apple coming in a little late trying to cash in on a trend. That being said: Apple don’t try to make their soft material products to last, so I expect this to be hot garbage.

    • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      21 days ago

      I think they need to hire an English teacher for their marketing department.

      Introducing iPhone Pocket: a beautiful way to wear and carry ____ iPhone

      Please complete the sentence, a smartphone isn’t a person.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      21 days ago

      Oh joy, I can perform a threat display by twirling it around my head like a bolo. I think I will get the pink or bright yellow one

    • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      21 days ago

      More evidence for my conspiracy theory that all companies have switched their PR strategies to full-time ragebaiting. wake up sheeple

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    19 days ago

    I’m being shuffled sideways into a software architecture role at work, presumably because my whiteboard output is valued more than my code 😭 and I thought I’d try and find out what the rest of the world thought that meant.

    Turns out there’s almost no way of telling anymore, because the internet is filled with genai listicles on random subjects, some of which even have the same goddamn title. Finding anything from the beforetimes basically involves searching reddit and hoping for the best.

    Anyway, I eventually found some non-obviously-ai-generated work and books, and it turns out that even before llms flooded the zone with shit no-one knew what software architecture was, and the people who opined on it were basically in the business of creating bespoke hammers and declaring everything else to be the specific kind of nails that they were best at smashing.

    Guess I’ll be expensing a nice set of rainbow whiteboard markers for my personal use, and making it up as I go along.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      18 days ago

      Guess I’ll be expensing a nice set of rainbow whiteboard markers for my personal use, and making it up as I go along.

      Congratulations, you figured it out! Read Clean Architecture and then ignore the parts you don’t like and you’ll make it

    • x0rcist@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      18 days ago

      The zone has indeed always been flooded, especially since its a title that collides with “integration architect” and other similar titles whose jobs are completely different. That being said, it’s a title I’ve held before, and I really enjoyed the work I got to do. My perspective will be a little skewed here because I specifically do security architecture work, which is mostly consulting-style “hey come look at this design we made is it bad?” rather than developing systems from scratch, but here’s my take:

      Architecture is mostly about systems thinking-- you’re not as responsible for whether each individual feature, service, component etc is implemented exactly to spec or perfectly correctly, but you are responsible for understanding how they’ll fit together, what parts are dangerous and DO need extra attention, and catching features/design elements early on that need to be cut because they’re impossible or create tons of unneeded tech debt. Speaking of tech debt, making the call about where its okay to have a component be awful and hacky, versus where v1 absolutely still needs to be bulletproof probably falls into the purvey of architecture work too. You’re also probably the person who will end up creating the system diagrams and at least the skeleton of the internal docs for your system, because you’re responsible for making sure people who interact with it understand its limitations as well.

      I think the reason so much of the advice on this sort of work is bad or nonexistent is that when you try to boil the above down to a set of concrete practices or checklists, they get utterly massive, because so much of the work (in my experience) is knowing what NOT to focus on, where you can get away with really general abstractions, etc, while still being technically capable enough to dive into the parts that really do deserve the attention.

      In addition to the nice markers and whiteboard, I’d plug getting comfortable with some sort of diagramming software, if you aren’t already. There’s tons of options, they’re all pretty much Fine IMO.

      For reading, I’d suggest at least checking out the first few chapters of Engineering A Safer World , as it definitely had a big influence on how I practice architecture.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      18 days ago

      Ugh OK I have to vent:

      I’m getting pushed into more of a design role because oops my company accidentally fired or drove away all of a team of a dozen people except for me after forgetting for a few years that the code I work on is actually mission critical.

      I do my best at designing stuff and delegating the implementation to my coworkers. It’s not one of my strengths but there’s enough technical debt from when I was solo-maintaining everything for a few years that I know what needs improving and how to improve it.

      But none of my coworkers are domain experts, they haven’t been given enough free time for me to train them into domain experts, there’s only one of me, and the higher ups are continuously surprised that stuff is going so slow. It’s frustrating for everyone involved.

      I actually wouldn’t mind architecture or design work in better circumstances since I love to chat with people; but it feels like my employer has put me in an impossible position. At the moment I’m just trying to hang in there for some health insurance reasons; but in a few years I plan to leave for greener pastures where I can go a day without hearing the word “agentic”.