this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026
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The post Xitter web has spawned so 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.)

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 4 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

The future of AI in Ubuntu

This post has all the usual cliches, exaggerations, lies, and unfounded optimism you'd expect in a blog post about a company forcing AI down their workers and user's throats. I'll try to avoid sneering at every sentence.

Delegating elements of Site Reliability Engineering to an agent does not necessarily introduce an entirely new class of risk; it should inherit the constraints of existing production systems. Well-run production environments already rely on strict access controls, audit trails, and clear separation between observation and action. [...] In that sense, the challenge is less about “trusting the agents”, and more about building trust in the same guardrails we already apply to any production system.

This might sound good to at first, but falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. There is a reason that companies don't open their intranets to the public despite having fine-grained access controls. Or in other words, "I'm getting a lot of questions already answered by my 'does not necessarily introduce an entire new class of risk' T-shirt.

Imagine being able to ask your Linux machine to troubleshoot a Wi-Fi connection issue, or to stand up an open source software forge that’s pre-configured, secured, and reachable over TLS.

And right after arguing that LLMs are safe if you have a perfect permissions model, now he's proposing letting one #yolo configure a git server or something? This is the sort of thing that could easily easily lead to random security issues.

I suspect that "Troubleshoot a wi-fi connection issue" will work about as well as existing network troubleshooting wizards (e.g. terribly), and that we don't actually need to reinvent the software wizard but less deterministic.

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

the post itself is talking about vapourware too: fortunately none of these features will really land this year in any usable form.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

still looking at Debian over 26.04

will be disappointing because Xubuntu really is just that little bit nicer than stock Xfce, but oh well

[–] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 2 points 55 minutes ago (1 children)

The main issue I have had with Debian+XFCE is that a high DPI display will not display the login dialog at the same DPI settings as the desktop environment, which is pretty annoying. Everything else so far has just kind of worked.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 51 minutes ago* (last edited 51 minutes ago) (1 children)

As compared to Xubuntu?

I believe Xfce is still on X11 and Wayland is still "experimental" this cycle.

I considered Alpine, but I got actual work to do and I already have enough lib issues with OpenShot. (Even in an AppImage, which should be safe from that shit. Flatpak behaves tho.)

[–] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 1 points 31 minutes ago

more as someone who has recently installed Debian onto a laptop last month. Honestly last time I used Xubuntu was on a candy G4 tower around 2007.