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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.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th August 2026 - awful.systems (awful.systems)

submitted 5 days ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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 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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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I'd seen that link and didn't even go looking, but wow this is way worse that I would've expected

it's been a while since I last looked (I usually just deploy whatever network I need) but iirc even the typical desktop config distributions of qemu-kvm are a macvtap or link+nat setup

It then detected I run my host kernel with mitigations=off

I wonder if this person even thought to run a nessus/openvas/whatever scan against the same machine

also, quite seriously, what fucking clowning is this to have this be some "I slapped together a test on my desktop" rather than having a lab bench? is it too hard and costly for trail of bits employees to afford a 1u they can pxeboot for experiments? wild

The standard approach for QEMU is to either wire up a TUN/TAP interface or to use passt.

(e: adding)

The standard approach for QEMU is to either wire up a TUN/TAP interface or to use passt.

other typical modes are bridged (e.g. having various vlans available as bridges and then managing vm exposure to vlan by interface attachment), direct interface assignment (hw offload to the guest)

passt is also commonly used for podman, and it's moooostly userspace[0] IP and no real good l2 options

I had an absolute rager[2] of a time figuring out how to make n-many podman containers[3] spin up into an assortment of vlans for realtime multi-vlan testing
of the graaaargh kind
don't do containers, kids. they're bad for your health

(I'm only half joking. it's stunning how badly container-management software and tooling all suck)

[–] corbin@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, networking is such a hassle.

lab bench?

I think that this is really insightful, as it's actually part of the magic trick. Like, normally I'd start by wondering about air-gapping, but there can't be an air gap in the network because the entire trick relies on ChatGPT tokens flowing into the machine under test and into some system shell (in some VM, yadda yadda) and back out again, so of course this is going to be an inherently insecure setup.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

the networking part is fine (I do a looooot of networking), but the software quality and choices (esp with containers) is just extremely meh

re the gapping, eh, there are ways. just off the top of my head: rig up the serial console, screen+camera and usb keyboard signalling (which you can data diode on transmission later via usbnet). and that’s before you go for esoteric side channels and utter silliness

but “I turned off spectre and friends mitigation” is just some extremely funny shit

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago

idly, I do wonder how well an ocr-only clodjeepeetea would work. every time I look in on all these “agent session” tools they appear to be a very mech turk thing of a phenomenal bit of hidden state, and a tiny little bit of visible distraction. feels like ocr-only might break a bunch of the usual tricks that are used to build on for the shiny demo