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self

@ self @awful.systems

Posts
10
Comments
268
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Locked

    "Anti-ai arguments literally support eugenics"

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  • in every serious (ie not TikTok or any other right-wing or unmoderated hellhole) anti-AI community I know, bigotry gets you banned even if you’re trying to hide it behind nonsense words like a 12 year old

    meanwhile the people who seem to have dreamt up the idea that AI critical spaces are full of masked bigotry appear to be mostly Neil Gaiman Warren Ellis (see replies), who has several credible sexual assault allegations leveled against him, and Jay Graber, bluesky’s CEO who deserves no introduction (search mastodon or take a look at bluesky right now if the name’s unfamiliar). I don’t trust either of those people’s judgement as to what harms marginalized people.

  • now that's what I call fashtech, vol. 1

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  • that’s a very good post — framing fascism as a supply chain issue helps push back against the rhetoric that software is somehow apolitical by nature, and it’s a good response to the excuses given for the RubyGems takeover

  • now that's what I call fashtech, vol. 1

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  • the first post is the ladybird guy personally welcoming one of the main hyprland transphobes to browser development because he landed a PR in ladybird

    Brendan Eich is the Brave guy but he was also Mozilla’s CEO (and he’s the guy who invented JavaScript and made it fucking suck) when he got caught making a donation to an anti-LGBT organization and got asked to step down. since then he’s used Brave as a vehicle for cryptocurrencies and LLMs.

    Proton’s CEO expressed support for the Republican Party in the US in a public post, and then most likely paid for some shithead to write a medium article unconvincingly arguing that he did nothing of the sort; both the original post and the shitty medium article have been discussed before in the Stubsack.

    lunduke is a far-right crank with a long history who’s currently ranting on Twitter about how open source projects need to eliminate all the wokes; FUTO has done free marketing for ladybird in the past and is now doing the same for lunduke

  • now that's what I call fashtech, vol. 1

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  • god I hope not, I take sanity damage every time I deep dive these fuckers

  • Reactionary Software

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  • yep, see this recent post for receipts (in the answer key) — they’re not even close to not being fash, though they’re still denying it in ways that don’t hold any water at all

  • now that's what I call fashtech, vol. 1

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  • I accidentally omitted the receipt for suckless so check that out in the answer key if you didn’t see it in there before

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th October 2025 - awful.systems

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  • here’s a good summary of the situation including an analysis of the brand new dogwhistle a bunch of bluesky posters are throwing around in support of Jay and Singal and layers of other nasty shit

    here’s Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, getting called out by lowtax’s ex-wife:

    here’s Jay posting about mangosteen (mangosteen juice was a weird MLM lowtax tried to market on the Something Awful forums as he started to spiral)

    Anyone want to hazard a guess at a timeline?

    since Jay posted AI generated art about dec/acc and put the term in her profile, her little “ironic” nod to e/acc and to AI, my guess is this is coming very soon

  • Handmade Network, BSC and finding actual places to learn

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  • thank you! I adapted the post I mentioned and the surrounding thread into a TechTakes post

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th October 2025 - awful.systems

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  • jeff’s follow-up after the backlash clarifies: you wouldn’t know her because he donated right under the limit to incur a taxable event and didn’t establish a trust like a normal millionaire and also the LLM printout only came pointlessly after months of research and financially supporting the unhoused friend and also you’re no longer allowed to ask publicly about the person he brought up in public, take it to email

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th October 2025 - awful.systems

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  • so I got angry

    I really hope atwood’s unhoused friend got the actual infrastructural support you mentioned (a temporary mailing address and an introduction letter emailed to an employer is only slightly more effort than generating slop, jeff, please) but from direct experience with philanthropists like him, I’m fairly sure Jeff now considers the matter solved forever

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th October 2025 - awful.systems

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  • Handmade Network, BSC and finding actual places to learn

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  • this is a great first post, and it touches on a lot of things I've struggled with as well.

    there's a concerted effort on several fronts to grant fascist interests an unassailable position within community-oriented software projects; that effort is usually backed by powerful corporate interests, as you've already seen with DHH and the takeover of RubyGems. simultaneously with that, and nearer to my own heart, the long-running project to make NixOS and nixpkgs unworkable for anyone but corporate and military interests has gone fully mask-off and started coordinating and talking openly about their plans to make Nix fully a fascist project. I have a longer piece I'll be posting tonight about this situation which I can link if there's interest, but in short: this is a coordinated attack, and it uses methods that have been tried and have succeeded many times. programming communities are being turned into fascist pipelines for many of the same reasons the fascists targeted punk and furry communities, but thanks to being founded on horseshit cyberlibertarian principles and unexamined conservatism masquerading as engineering, our open source and educational communities are uniquely primed for takeover.

    for the fascists, of course, any sufficiently isolated community will do. the health of the community and its projects don't matter; the fascists are fine with communities that cannibalize their own and technology that barely works or doesn't work at all. the quality of nixpkgs has dropped sharply since the fascists kicked out the skilled marginalized people keeping the project alive, and every project started by fascists I can think of has been broken and worthless. the fascists don't care: they're here to weaponize a community in both the metaphorical and the very literal senses, and whether or not anything of value is left once they're done is of no concern to them. the isolation works in their favor: it lets them employ all their usual tricks to turn a community on itself. that those tricks were eventually beaten by large parts of the punk and furry communities means there's hope in fighting off these assholes -- but most likely the changes that need to occur will happen in new communities, founded under better principles.

    from your post, it seems you've immunized yourself against the game development to fascist pipeline, which is very lucky. you now know what dogwhistles and tricks to expect from most of the fascists you'll run into in programming communities. I saw that Corbin recommended picking up functional programming or a non-Algol-derived language in a sibling comment and from an educational perspective I can recommend that, but unfortunately a lot of functional programming communities tend to be either utterly pro-AI (because they think they're going to inherit Lisp's prestige) or are being pushed towards fascism (look for weirdos who aren't mathematicians obsessing over how pure lambda calculus is and you'll see the red flags) -- if you want a fresh abyss to stare into, search our instance for posts about Urbit if you want to see our efforts at documenting one of the earliest attempts at entryism into functional programming. of course almost any functional language (other than Urbit) will be more rewarding to learn than whichever reactionary Go-but-memory-unsafe language these guys wanted you to learn as an attempt to isolate you further.

    while I have no general solutions to what's happening right now, there's a few actions I'm taking that I hope will lead to better things:

    • from now on, my software will all be very queer, very political, and utterly poisoned against corporate exploitation.
    • while it's not always practical to switch off of these fuckheads' software immediately (our instance still runs on NixOS, great lock-in they've got going), remember how often we've been told that software communities run on advocacy. these fuckheads don't deserve your advocacy or your labor. as far as is practical, give them the opposite. kill the evangelist in your head.
    • healthier communities exist, and they're worth our time. they're not large, but you'll meet some of the most gifted people imaginable there -- and all of them most likely have an experience or two similar to yours.

    for that last bullet point, I can recommend the better parts of Mastodon -- avoid the tech instances like the plague and focus in on the queer ones with techy users. our instance also has an attempt at a homegrown tech community organized around healthier principles called FreeAssembly, which never quite got off the ground because the fascist takeover of the Nix project happened right after it launched, and then ahaha everything else happened after that, and I never got the chance to kick off that community properly. I still recommend Mastodon because it's established, but if you'd like the same experience as here but in a community more oriented towards posting about personal projects or programming in general, FreeAssembly might be worth a try. I'm finally finishing some of the software I meant to post about way back when we started FreeAssembly, and I'll be writing those up for that community fairly soon.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th September 2025 - awful.systems

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  • he keeps hanging out with fascists and receiving money from organizations that support fascists and something about his personal brand in interviews being wearing “Big Tech is gangstalking me” t-shirts also very much rubs me the wrong way

    ladybird is a ridiculously unserious project (last I heard they were considering a rewrite in Swift and ignoring everyone who told them why that’s a terrible idea, maybe they’ve given up on that by now) and I frankly have no idea why it’s being hyped over Servo as an independent browser project other than a general willingness in tech to play ball with weird little fascists

    e: also this lobste.rs subthread

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th September 2025

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  • this seemed harsh ten years ago, but in 2025? it's quite calm and measured

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  • you have 16 posts on Lemmy and most of them are you Genuinely Curiously JAQing off about shit you already damn well knew before going into the thread so lol no nobody owes you a fucking explanation

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th September 2025

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  • @froztbyte@awful.systems is coming in a bit hot, but they’re not fundamentally wrong. @BlueMonday1984@awful.systems, you’ve received some pointed but good feedback on your writing style recently in MoreWrite and in other threads; I think you’ll be able to make much the same points more persuasively if you incorporate some of that feedback. I also recommend breaking out of doing predictions; I think you might get more mileage and variation out of a journalistic approach, and either way we know from crypto that prediction is a bit of a fool’s errand. these fuckers will remain irrational long after we’ve gone bankrupt, etc.

    I’m not gonna force you to do anything; if posts like these are what you’re comfortable with then it is what it is. I just feel like if you break out of your current pattern, you’re capable of achieving great results.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th September 2025

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  • who the fuck are you again? what in the fucking world made you think your 14 comments and 1 post meant you got to decide who gets to have an account here?

  • this seemed harsh ten years ago, but in 2025? it's quite calm and measured

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  • no

  • this seemed harsh ten years ago, but in 2025? it's quite calm and measured

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  • you know I fucking hate the classism implicit in the common telling of the hitchbot story

    “wow! this robot made it just fine through the richer parts of Europe and Canada but the instant it touched Philadelphia they tore it apart!” good. they had better things to do than engage in your weird fucking roleplay.