froztbyte

joined 2 years ago
[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

dunno, I seem to recall I've seen a couple other stinkers from ronacher lately. dude's also full on the LLM bandwagon iirc

probably need to keep a notes file

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 4 weeks ago (6 children)

real fucking weird tweet from ronacher there too

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 4 weeks ago

nice, good collection of links, will help next time I need to find it. couple weeks ago I mentioned it on masto and I had someone Very Huffily reply to me (a situation I resolved by simply blocking them, gfy with that nonsense)

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Xanadu’s micropayment-oriented transclusion-and-royalty system is impossible to correctly implement, due to a mismatch between information theory and copyright; given the ability to copy text, copyright is provably absurd

it kept being funny to me that even while xanadu had already shown the problems with content control the entirety of the NFT craze just went on as if it was full greenfields novel problem

The details lie in the devil, for sure…you’d want the price [of making a change to a document] low enough (zero?) not to incur Trivial Inconvenience penalties for prosocial things like building wikis, yet high enough to make the David Gerards of the world think twice.

some of these people just really don't know their history very well, do they

on a total tangent:

while xanadu's commercial-aspiration history is intimately tied up in why it never got much further, I do occasionally daydream about if we had, and if we could've combined it with more-modern signing and sourcing: daydream in the respect of "CA and cert chains, but for transcluded content", esp in the face of all the fucking content mills used to push disinfo etc. not sure this would work ootb either, mind you, it's got its own set of vulnerabilities and problems that you'd need to work through (and ofc you can't solve social problems purely in the technical domain)

has there been any meaningful advancement or neat new research in agoric computing? haven't really looked into it in a while, and the various blockchain nonsense took so much air out of the room for so long I haven't had to spoons to look

(separately I know there's also been some developments in remote trusted compute, but afaict that's also still quite early days)

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (5 children)

much of the lore of the early/earlier internet being built is also full of some extremely, extremely unhinged stuff. I've had some first-hand in-the-trenches accounts from people I've known active from the early-mid 90s to middle 00s and holy shit there are some batshit things happening in places. often think of it when I see the kinds of shit thiel/musk/etc are all up to (a lot of it boils down to "they're big mad that they have to even consider other people and can't just do whatever they like")

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

I really don't buy the "billing mistake" line - they've been doing the same thing to many other community-org slacks. I've seen with my own eyes the mail that was sent to the ZA tech slack

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago

will keep the offer in mind when I have the spoons and round tuits for it :)

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I’m a bit split on this one

on the one hand, the post as first posted had a lot of “victimised” language (“omg slack is extorting us”) and frankly that felt like bait - esp as many, many volunteer-type orgs that have had similar slack setups have been taking a hammer for months now (as I posted before, a local ZA tech setup was one, and more recently that big k8s one too). there’s enough precedent here that expecting slack to have behaved otherwise (even “honourably”) seems to me to have been almost foolish

on the other, slack 100% only took action once this did hit hype and enough eyeballs, and only reacted since it was an embarrassment

but…yeah. slack hasn’t been a good option for public use for literally years now :|

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

it would be incredible if yud’s one of the types to lose his focus around sauce 3, would do a real kicker to the shine of his grift

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 1 month ago (3 children)

someday(tm) I’ll get around to looking into getting a season pack from the states to here (which possibly might be distinctly non-trivial, and if it is I’ll have bother trying to figure out the logistics of it, which ugh)

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 1 month ago

heard people reached those by just deleting tweets by hand.

yeah, the various backend interactions tied to web controls are extremely low-count limited

you could probably do it by smacking together a userscript (or whatever the fuck is the these-days version of greasemonkey/tampermonkey/??? to use) with a moderately simple algorithm.. open a window, click execute, leave it going by itself for however long it takes to get through everything. it doesn't have to do everything in minutes

I also heard blocklists put a high strain on the twitter so not going to look into removing that

probably the feed compute stuff only has this computational expense incurred for any displayed feeds (pruning off calculating stuff for long-enough-inactive users is one of the cheapest easy gains in that type of content feed), so this might not matter much. don't have enough insight into real ops there to know one way or the other tho

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

it's kinda hilarious how close "steelmanning" (as practiced by some) already is to this, but probably not far enough to be usable for that purpose on its own

1
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by froztbyte@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
 

Not entirely the usual fare, but i figured some here would appreciate it

I often rag on the js/node/npm ecosystem for being utter garbage, and this post is a quite a full demonstration of many of the shortcomings and outright total design failures present in that space

 

Invite up at https://2024.revision-party.net/blog/04-invitation/

~2 weekends away (who cares about the week)

Prepare for watching mathematical black magic!

2
better tools thread (awful.systems)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by froztbyte@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems
 

this is in part because it's for (yet another) post I'm working on, but I figured I'd pop some things here and see if others have contributions too. the post will be completed (and include examples, usecases, etc), but, yeah.

I've always taken a fairly strong interest in the tooling I use, for QoL and dtrt reasons usually (but also sometimes tool capability). conversely, I also have things I absolutely loathe using

  1. wireguard. a far better vpn software and protocol than most others (and I have slung tunnels with many a vpn protocol). been using this a few years already, even before the ios app beta came around. good shit, take a look if you haven't before
  2. smallstep cli. it's one of two pieces of Go software I actually like. smallstep is trying to build its own ecosystem of CA tools and solutions (and that's usable in its own right, albeit by default focused to containershit), but the cli is great for what you typically want with certificate handling. compare step certificate inspect file and step certificate inspect --insecure https://totallyreal.froztbyte.net/ to the bullshit you need with openssl. check it out
  3. restic. the other of the two Go-softwares I like. I posted about it here previously
  4. rust cli things! oh damn there's so many, I'm going to put them on their own list below
  5. zsh, extremely lazily configured, with my own little module and scoping system and no oh-my-zsh. fish has been a thing I've seen people be happy about but I'm just an extremely lazy computerer so zsh it stays. zsh's complexity is extremely nonzero and it definitely has sharp edges, but it does work well. sunk cost, I guess. bonus round: race your zsh, check your times:
% hyperfine -m 50 'zsh -i -c echo'
Benchmark 1: zsh -i -c echo
  Time (mean ± σ):      69.1 ms ±   2.8 ms    [User: 35.1 ms, System: 28.6 ms]
  Range (min … max):    67.0 ms …  86.2 ms    50 runs
  1. magic-wormhole. this is a really, really neat little bit of software for just fucking sending files to someone. wormhole send filename one side, wormhole receive the-code-it-gives the other side, bam! it uses SPAKE2 (disclaimer: I did help review that post, it's still good) for session-tied keying, and it's just generally good software
  2. [macos specifically] alfred. I gotta say, I barely use this to its full potential, and even so it is a great bit of assistive stuff. more capable than spotlight, has a variety of extensibility, and generally snappy as hell.
  3. [macos specifically] choosy. I use this to control link-routing and link-opening on my workstation to a fairly wide degree (because a lot of other software irks me, and does the wrong thing by default). this will be a fuller post on its own, too
  4. [macos specifically] little snitch. application-level per-connection highly granular-capable firewalling. with profiles. their site does a decent explanation of it. the first few days of setup tends to be Quite Involved with how many rules you need to add (and you'll probably be surprised at just how many things try to make various kinds of metrics etc connections), but well worth it. one of the ways to make modern software less intolerable. (honorary extra mention: obdev makes a number of handy pieces of mac software, check their site out)
  5. [macos specifically] soundsource. highly capable per-application per-sink audio control software. with the ability to pop in VSTs and AUs at multiple points. extremely helpful for a lot of things (such as perma-muting discord, which never shuts up, even in system dnd mode)

rust tools:

  1. b3sum. file checksum thing, but using blake3. fast!. worth checking out. probably still niche, might catch on eventually
  2. hyperfine. does what it says on the tin. see example use above.
  3. dust. like du, but better, and way faster. oh dear god it is so much faster. I deal with a lot of pets, and this thing is one of the invaluables in dealing with those.
  4. ripgrep. the one on this list that people are most likely to know. grep, but better, and faster.
  5. fd. again, find but better and faster.
  6. tokei. sloccount but not shit. handy for if you quickly want to assess a codebase/repo.
  7. bottom. down the evolutionary chain from top and htop, has more feature modes and a number of neat interactive view functions/helpers

honorary mentions (things I know of but don't use that much):

  1. mrh. not doing as much consulting as I used to, using it less. quickly checks all git(?) repos in a path for uncommitted changes
  2. fzf. still haven't really gotten to integrating it into my usage
  3. just. need to get to using it more.
  4. jql. I ... tend to avoid jq? my "this should be in a program. with safety rails." reflex often kicks in when I see jq things. haven't really explored this
  5. rtx. their tagline is "a better asdf". I like the idea of it because asdf is a miserable little pile of shell scripts and fuck that, but I still haven't really gotten to using it in anger myself. I have my own wrapper methods for keeping pyenv/nvm/etc out of my shell unless needed
  6. pomsky. previously rulex. regex creation tool and language. been using it a little bit. not enough to comment in detail yet
2
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by froztbyte@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems
 

I don't really know enough about the C64 to say anything one way or the other, but this comment on youtube did okay:

@eightbitguru
1 year ago
2021: We have definitely seen everything the C64 can do now.
2022: My beer. Hold it.

and I'm posting this without even having seen the whole thing yet

 

will this sure is gonna go well :sarcmark:

it almost feels like when Google+ got shoved into every google product because someone had a bee in their bonnet

flipside, I guess, is that we'll soon (at scale!) get to start seeing just how far those ideas can and can't scale

 

archive.org | and .is

this is almost a NSFW? some choice snippets:

more than 1.5 million people have used it and it is helping build nearly half of Copilot users’ code

Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.

good thing it's so good that everyone will use it amirite

starting around $13 for the basic Microsoft 365 office-software suite for business customers—the company will charge an additional $30 a month for the AI-infused version.

Google, ..., will also be charging $30 a month on top of the regular subscription fee, which starts at $6 a month

I wonder how long they'll try that, until they try forcing it on everyone (and raise all prices by some n%)

 

The Mistral 7B Instruct model is a quick demonstration that the base model can be easily fine-tuned to achieve compelling performance. It does not have any moderation mechanism. We’re looking forward to engaging with the community on ways to make the model finely respect guardrails, allowing for deployment in environments requiring moderated outputs.

“Whoops, it’s done now, oh well, guess we’ll have to do it later”

Go fucking directly to jail

2
demoscene: area 5150 (www.pouet.net)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by froztbyte@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems
 

my comment over there just made me recall this

this demo is the next one in a long arc of people doing absolutely remarkable things to the original PC. that series went 8088 corruption (pouet) -> 8088 domination -> 8088 mph and if you've never seen them before, you absolutely should

area 5150 has a recording of the production as well as an audience reaction recording from share day

it's astoundingly awesome

something I really enjoy about the scene is that the more you learn (about the technology, the math, the methodology), the deeper the appreciation of it gets

 

a friend linked this to me earlier today: nitter (someone else maybe archive it? I don't know what tusky has done to birdsite and how to make wayback play nice)

in one lens/view one could see this as just more of the same (if people were already gunning for YC track shit, there's other things already implied etc), but even so: just how bad is(/must) the "belief" (be) for young people to feel this intensely about it?

I'm over here just watching the arc of likely events and I can barely fathom the anger and disappointment that may[0] come about in a few years after this

[0] - "may" because it seems a lot of folks have their anger redirected far too easily; remains to be seen if it can remain correctly directed in future

 

Halm, who according to his social media profiles just graduated from Harvard, tweeted that he’s simply in the arena trying stuff.

"I just wanna buuuuuuuuilllddddd" goes the annoying little fuck even before he's asked any questions about social impact and such

“The goal is to create the most addicting & personalized image recommendation system. V1 is as simple as possible. Future versions trained on current data will enable even more personalized images & user interaction in image generation."

just fuck right off

2
restic (restic.net)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by froztbyte@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems
 

I've been using it for a good while now, but figured it's worth a shoutout incase others don't know it. one of the few pieces of Go-ware I don't substantially hate.

I've previously slapped together a tiny set of shellscripts for my use of it which you're welcome to steal from. also recently seen backupninja as something that can use this, but haven't tried that

 

content: image of google "moderating" (i.e. eliminating, permanently, without apparent recourse) an entry in a user's URL collection/bookmarks. the entry is for kickasstorrents. (archive)

I recall seeing an example of them doing something like this to people's gdocs stuff (and iirc that was on paid account, but I could be misremembering). seems like they're ramping up the where to more coverage of their services/assets

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