The whole Linux userbase loves x11libre, an initiative to preserve X11 alive as an alternative to Wayland! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you x11libre guy is a Nazi apologist

My T-shirt: there’s 0 good uses for self-driving taxis
Protesters: call self-driving taxis to block streets on the way of the police, then set the damn things on fire
My T-shirt: there’s 1 good uses for self-driving taxis

Yeah I’m not thrilled to get that particular type of attention but I knew the risks when I clicked “publish” on that particular topic.

Clicked the link out of curiosity, saw that the top comment was some soothing rationale on how it’s not unethical to force 3rd world people to clean up after you (under the threat of starvation on the streets) as long as you say good evening to them that makes you a nice guy, then closed the tab again. My weekend is better off not reading the orange site, but even though I wasn’t aiming for a particularly literary or poetic form in this piece, it’s still a type of validation to know that Scott Alexander readers can’t parse my essay style.

Thanks! I did put a lot of effort in this piece for reasons I myself can’t explain, I’m glad it could strike a chord.

é nóis pô x3

I have read Graeber&Wengrow yeah 👍 instant anarchist classic

I mean you can set a type for a column even back in 2016, I’m sure, and then it won’t actually convert. But if you care about that kind of thing chances are you’re using R or something, if you’re doing genetics on Excel at all you’re probably spamming publish-or-perish, and renaming a bunch of genes was, I think, tragically reasonable to prevent against that kind of research further polluting the data pool.

Which is to say, ChatGPT is an opportunistic infection that spread so far because it found a sick body…

Did it, and added illustrations besides (to break that humongous wall of text lol). Thanks for your encouragement!

Please let me commiserate my miserable misery, Awful dot Systems. So the other day I was flirting with this person—leftie, queer, sexy terrorist vibes, just my type—and asked if they had any plans for the weekend, and they said like, “will be stuck in the lab trying to finish a report lol”. They are an academic in an area related to biomedicine, I don’t want to get more specific than that. Wanting to be there for emotional support I invited them to talk about their research if they wanted to. The person said,

“Oh I am paying for MULTIPLE CHATGPT ACCOUNTS that I’m using to handle the”, I swear to Gods I’m not making this up, “MATHLAB CODE, but I keep getting basic errors, like wrong variable names stuff like that, so I have to do a lot of editing and…”. Desperate emphases mine.

And at this point I was literally speechless. I was having flashbacks of back in 2016 when it was this huge scandal that 1 in 5 papers in genetics had data errors because they used Microsoft Excel and it would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell. The field has since evolved, of course (=they threw in the towel and renamed the gene to SEPTIN2, and similarly for other tokens that Excel gets too smart about). I was having ominous visions of what the entirety body of published scientific data is about to become.

I considered how otherwise cool this person was and whether I should start a gentle argument, but all I could say was “haha yeah, mathlab is hard”.

I feel like a complete and utter blowhard saying this, but now that I told you the story I have no other choice but to blurt it out: I am no longer flirting with this person.

Thank you.

I wrote a memoir thing on my brief, dystopic time at Google . I’m not sure if me reminiscing about the time when I sold out fits the topic of the forum, but I think a lot of it qualifies as sneering and might generally interest this audience.

I cannot understand the reason y’all find the couple sneerable, as I look at that tweet and see something I very much would have done to one of my partners if they asked, and the language used by the bottom as the same language my partners might have used to describe the activity. If anything it’s very much on the tame side, for our standards. Promiscuity is me trying to understand what is it that’s so sneerable in the first place. Is it just “lol sex thing weird”? Is it “you’ll regret your tattoo when you get older”? Me and my girls have done so much more intensely weirder sex things and more risqué tattoos. I expect to be ridiculed for it by like, cishet right-wing men, but to find that type of attitude here was shocking.

Like, “virtue signalling” as in the thing that rats accuse us of doing every time we have a motivation they cannot comprehend such as basic empathy, right? As in the rationalist’s stereotypically verbose euphemism for what previous generations of misogynistic male nerds used to call “attention whoring”? Is that the sneerable thing then, that people like showing off when they do an unusual sex thing? Because if so I have like, years of mastodon flirty banter y’all can go sneer at, if we’re branching out from “nerdy fascism bad” to “kink on main bad”.

That’s very much the language my play partners use online, though? I totally post banter like “that submissive was so blanked out that I took advantage of them by doing X”, to which they’ll reply “implying I didn’t evily manipulated you into doing that in the first place”, and so on. This is so commonplace in my communities that I failed to even understand what could be the problem before you pointed it out. I mean, “I forced my famous domme to mark me as a trophy as her #100 simp”? How would you exactly force (non-kink sense) someone to tattoo you anyway, and if you did and were unwise enough to brag about it, presumably the microcelebrity in question wouldn’t like and retweet it? I took it to mean “I was so into the idea of being marked, I’m glad she agreed to my pestering”, and I would bet money if any of my people talked in that exact wording, that’s what everyone would take it as. I mean, otherwise I would probably have been arrested for the frequency of times I say “bye everyone gonna tie someone up and do unspeakably cruel things to them” and whatnot

Ok I have to say, I despise aella but as a promiscuous woman I completely fail to see what’s supposed to be the problem with this particular form of play. That people like having casual sex? That they have slut pride? What.

I probably passed the 100 mark myself several years ago, I’ve hooked up with girls with much more obvious slut tattoos too, and we’re all antifascist anarchists. Is this community ok with sneering at public sexuality now?

The only thing I found vaguely mid in that X is using a tattoo gun rather than scarification, branding, or at least stick-and-poke. But I don’t kink-shame people for being casuals.

If you’re in Germany I like the Mühle Grande a lot. I use it with any random foam from DM and with Astra blades which cost 10€ for a pack of 100. The blades last me over a year.

Huh, I had missed the part in 2020 when Peter Thiel just flat out stated outright that it only makes sense to be in favour of capitalism if you’re a capital owner.

We live in hellworld, please don’t get my hopes up…

jesus fucking christ I think that IDF tweet is the worst thing that has ever existed

oh no :(

poor strange she didn’t deserve that :(

While you all laugh at ChatGPT slop leaving “as a language model…” cruft everywhere, from Twitter political bots to published Springer textbooks, over there in lala land “AIs” are rewriting their reward functions and hacking the matrix and spontaneously emerging mind models of Diplomacy players and generally a week or so from becoming the irresistible superintelligent hypno goddess:

https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/1jixljo/comment/mjlexau/

The problem with FOSS for me is the other side of the FOSS surplus: namely corporate encircling of the commons. The free software movement never had a political analysis of the power imbalance between capital owners and workers. This results in the “Freedom 0” dogma, which makes everything workers produce with a genuine communitarian, laudably pro-social sentiment, to be easily coopted and appropriated into the interests of capital owners (for example with embrace-and-extend, network effects, product bundling, or creative backstabbing of the kind Google did to Linux with the Android app store). LLM scrapers are just the latest iteration of this.

A few years back various groups tried to tackle this problem with a shift to “ethical licensing”, such as the non-violent license, the anti-capitalist software license, or the do no harm license. While license-based approaches won’t stop capitalists from using the commons to target immigrants (NixOS), enable genocide (Meta) or bomb children (Google), this was in my view worthwhile as a rallying cry of sorts; drawing a line in the sand between capital owners and the public. So if you put your free time on a software project meant for everyone and some billionaire starts coopting it, you can at least make it clear it’s non-consensual, even if you can’t out-lawyer capital owners. But these ethical licenses initiatives didn’t seem to make any strides, due to the FOSS culture issue you describe; traditional software repositories didn’t acknowledge or make any infrastructure for them, and ethical licenses would still be generically “non-free” in FOSS spaces.

(Personally, I use FOSS operating systems for 26 years now; I’ve given up on contributing or participating in the “community” a long time ago, burned out by all the bigotry, hostility, and First World-centrism of its forums.)