self

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[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago (4 children)

also fair enough. you might still enjoy a scroll through our back archive of threads if you’ve got time for it — there is a historical context to transhumanism that people like Musk exploit to further their own goals, and that’s definitely something to be aware of, especially as TESCREAL elements gain overt political power. there are positive versions of transhumanism and the article calls one of them out — the Culture is effectively a model for socialist transhumanism — but one must be familiar with the historical baggage of the philosophy or risk giving cover to people currently looking to cause harm under transhumanism’s name.

[–] self@awful.systems 14 points 4 days ago

let them eat prompts

[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago (7 children)

fair enough!

but I don’t actually enjoy arguing and don’t have the skills for formalized “debate” anyway.

it’s ok, nobody does. that’s why we ban it unless it’s amusing (which effectively bans debate for everyone unless they know their audience well enough to not fuck up) — shitty debatelords take up a lot of thread space and mental energy and give essentially nothing back.

wherever “here” is

SneerClub is a fairly old community if you count in its Reddit origins; part of what we do here is sneering at technofascists and other adherents to the TESCREAL belief package, though SneerClub itself tends to focus on the LessWrong Rationalists. that’s the context we tend to apply to articles like the OP.

[–] self@awful.systems 13 points 4 days ago (9 children)

There is a certain irony to everyone involved in this argument, if it can be called that.

don’t do this debatefan here crap here, thanks

This, and similar writing I’ve seen, seems to make a fundamental mistake in treating time like only the next few, decades maybe, exist, that any objective that takes longer than that is impossible and not even worth trying, and that any problem that emerges after a longer period of time may be ignored.

this isn’t the article you’re thinking of. this article is about Silicon Valley technofascists making promises rooted in Golden Age science fiction as a manipulation tactic. at no point does the article state that, uh, long-term objectives aren’t worth trying because they’d take a long time??? and you had to ignore a lot of the text of the article, including a brief exploration of the techno-optimists and their fascist ties (and contrasting cases where futurism specifically isn’t fascist-adjacent), to come to the wrong conclusion about what the article’s about.

unless you think the debunked physics and unrealistic crap in Golden Age science fiction will come true if only we wish long and hard enough in which case, aw, precious, this article is about you!

[–] self@awful.systems 21 points 6 days ago (1 children)

it’s appropriate that you think your brain works like an LLM, because you regurgitated this shitty opinion from somewhere else without giving it any thought at all

[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 6 days ago

it can’t be that stupid, you must be using yesterday’s model

[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 6 days ago

nobody asked you to come in here and advertise for perplexity, but you couldn’t fucking help yourself could you

[–] self@awful.systems 4 points 1 week ago

you seem really fucking annoying

[–] self@awful.systems 18 points 1 week ago

imagine discussing a topic

[–] self@awful.systems 28 points 2 weeks ago

if you’re considering pasting the output of an LLM into this thread in order to fail to make a point: reconsider

[–] self@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago

we didn’t ask for LLM slop, thx

[–] self@awful.systems 16 points 3 weeks ago

under no circumstances is “my favorite stochastic parrot got it right / I reran the prompt and it worked this time hmmmm wonder why” an interesting post

 

(via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)

surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive

even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down

 

we’re seeing a bit of spam come in from lemmy.world. if you happen to see any (and a lot of it seems to be in DMs), make sure to flag it. that’ll let both us and the originating instance’s mods know. if we get a bunch of reports and it seems like lemmy.world isn’t cleaning things up properly, we’ll take further steps to limit the amount of spam we get

 

Amaranth is a simple-but-expressive hardware description language (the type of language you use to define integrated circuits for FPGAs, ASICs, and similar hardware) implemented as a Python DSL. I'm not the biggest Python fan, but Amaranth is worth it -- even though it's in heavy development and its documentation is incomplete, it's by far the most comprehensible HDL I've ever used, and I've tried many of them.

its documentation is incomplete since the language is under heavy development, but its language guide is still the best gentle introduction to HDL concepts I've read, and its tutorials are written for an older version of the language (sometimes called nMigen) but are still excellent -- in particular, Robert Baruch's tutorials combine design fundamentals with formal verification (which itself is usually considered an advanced technique, but Amaranth streamlines it), and the Vivonomicon RISC-V tutorials are worth a read too

 

You could get a robot limb for your blown-off limb

Later on the same technology could automate your gig, as awesome as it is

Wait, it gets awful: you could split a atom willy-nilly

If it's energy that can be used for killing, then it will be

It's not about a better knife, it's chemistry and genocide

And medicine for tempering the heck in a projector light

Landmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes

Cameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness

We can not be trusted with the stuff that we come up with

The machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons, um

Technology, focus on the other shit

3D-printed body parts, dehydrated onion dip

You can buy a Jet Ski from a cell phone on a jumbo jet

T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y, it's the ultimate

the subject matter of Aesop Rock's latest album felt relevant to our instance's interests

 

this one should hopefully fix the remaining token issues folks have been having, though I'm not seeing anything in the commit log about fixes for the other session and pagination issues we've noticed. as always, let me know if anything looks broken. I'm still working on getting Photon deployed, which might be a good workaround for the frontend breakages we've been seeing.

 

today's (later than planned) upgrade to lemmy 0.19.2 provisionally appears to have gone alright. if you see excessive amounts of jank (and your page footer can't decide what version of lemmy it's running on, IE it shows separate FE and BE versions), clear your browser cache and cookies since lemmy doesn't seem to do that cleanly on its own

next up I'm planning to deploy the Proton frontend as an alternative to the default and I'm also going to start pushing code to codeberg (most likely) so stay tuned for that

 

I’m taking awful.systems down for a bit tomorrow (January 13) around 11 PM GMT because after 16 release candidates and 2 hotfixes, lemmy 0.19.x finally seems like a safe enough upgrade. this is going to be a major one, so I’ll be taking our instance down temporarily to get a database backup before I apply the upgrade. expect exceptional levels of jank!

 

now that threads is starting to federate, they sure as fuck aren’t with us

threads.net commemorative cocktail:

  • glass: old fashioned (lowball)
  • pour hard cider from red apples until glass is 3/4ths full
  • top with 1 shot of bourbon
  • smoke glass with cherry wood
  • garnish with sliced lime, or add lime juice to taste
  • drink and meditate on what AOL and then Google did to usenet
 

this is pretty cool. it’s a tutorial with interactive exercises that explores the Nix language as a general-purpose functional programming language, outside of its role as the configuration and package definition language for NixOS. understanding Nix better as a language makes more complicated packages easier to write (and is necessary to understand the guts of nixpkgs and the parts of Nix written in itself), but it also has a number of unique advantages as a programming language within a very specific domain.

 

from the linked github thread:

Your project is in violation of the AGPL, and you have stated this is intentional and you have no plans to open source it. This is breaking the law, and as such I've began to help you with the first steps of re-open sourcing the plugin.

the project author (who gets paid for violating the AGPL via patreon) responds like a mediocre crypto grifter and insists their violation of the law be debated on the discord they control (where their shitty community can shout down the reporter):

While keeping code private doesn't guarantee security, it does make it harder for bad actors to keep up with changes. You are welcome to debate this matter in the MakePlace discord: https://discord.com/invite/YuvcPzCuhq If you are able to convince the MakePlace community that keeping the code open-source is better, I will respect the wishes of the community.

aaaand the smackdown:

Respectfully, I won't attempt to "debate" or "convince" anyone; I'm leaving this pull request and my fork here for others to see and use. It is not a matter of "better"; you are violating a software license and the law. It does not "make it harder" for anyone; Harmony hooking exists, IL modification exists, you can modify plugins from other plugins.

 

a couple of our regulars have expressed interest in having an anti-cryptocurrency sub here. so interest check: reply to this thread if you want us to have buttcoin

edit: also, meme stock bullshit is on topic for our buttcoin (unless the threads get overwhelming, then we’ll split off another sub)

 

update: the fix for this was stupid, please let me know if anything still looks broken

it's looking like our federation with other servers may have fallen over sometime during the week. we're currently debugging; right now we're seeing that threads seem to federate between lemmy instances (and federate into mastodon when requested specifically), but comments aren't federating in either direction

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