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nightsky nightsky @awful.systems
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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd February 2025
  • 404 media: OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us

    My favourite part of the article:

    I will explain what this means in a moment, but first: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd February 2025
  • The best solution right now may be “buy a Macbook and learn MacOS”, which is so depressing.

    Depends on whether you include "my personal data is sent to the manufacturer of the computer against my wishes" in your threat model... Apple does many good things for security, and I wish PC hardware makers would take security-related things even just nearly as seriously as them. But I can't trust Apple anymore either.

    (Explanation: the whole iCloud syncing stuff is such a buggy mess. I don't want it, I don't need it, so I want it off. But I guess Apple just doesn't test enough how well it works when you turn it off, maybe they can't imagine someone not wanting it. The problem is, iCloud sync settings don't stay off. Settings randomly turn themselves back on, e.g. during OS updates, and upload data before you even notice it. I'm not claiming that's intentional, I assume it's just bugs. But I've observed such bugs again and again in the past 9 years, and I've had enough. Still have a Macbook around, but I use it very rarely these days, only when I need some piece of software on MacOS that has no suitable Linux equivalent.)

    While a PC+Linux setup can avoid the specific issue of "don't randomly upload my data somewhere", the setup of it all can be a mess, as you say. And then security is still limited by buggy hardware and BIOS/firmware that is frequently full of security holes. The state of computers is depressing indeed (in so many ways, security just being one of them)...

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd February 2025
  • Is it too early to hope that this is the beginning of the end of the bubble?

    Also, does someone know why broadcom was also hit so hard? Is it because they make various networking-related chips used in datacenter infrastructure?

  • DeepSeek R1 is wildly overhyped, but you can try it at home
  • And people believe this … why?

    Maybe people believe that all the AI stuff is just magic [insert sparkle emoji], and that can terminate further thought...

    Edit: heh, turns out there's science about that notion

  • DeepSeek R1 is wildly overhyped, but you can try it at home
  • screaming about “theft!” and “hacking!!”

    Sounds plausible. Or maybe they will go with a don't use it, because privacy! take. Funny thing is, I actually agree people shouldn't give them their data. But they shouldn't give it to OpenAI either...

  • I gained remote code execution via MIDI messages to trick my synth into playing Bad Apple on its LCD
  • Wow, that's awesome!

    I often think about the many devices I own with closed firmware in them, and the many amazing things these devices could be used for if they were more open and documented. Consider the amazing things people accomplish on old 80s/90s home computers and games consoles, often going way beyond what was thought possible with it at the time... the same could be done with so many other devices. Of course, people already do such hacking - like this example in the blog post. But the barrier for that would be so much lower if it didn't require elaborate reverse engineering (how do people find the time and energy for that....). I have a little collection of 90s synth modules, I would love to modify their firmware, if it was available.

    Sometimes I wish there was a law that forced companies to open up datasheets/internal documentation/etc. for a product when they stop making it... But yeah, can't have that, of course.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd February 2025
  • I had to read “Uber for AI code data” so now you do too.

    Wow, what a fractal of cursed meaning. I don't even understand what it really means, but it feels like understanding it any further would cause considerable psychic damage.

  • DeepSeek R1 is wildly overhyped, but you can try it at home
  • This shows the US is falling behind China, so you gotta give OpenAI more money!

    Fear of a "bullshit gap", I guess.

    Oh, and: simply perfect choice of header image on that article.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • As a fan of physical media, I recently bought another drive as a spare, currently is IMO a good time for that. They still make really good drives in large enough quantities so they're cheap, but that could end any time. Once production stops, they will vanish silently. Learned that lesson back then when floppy drives were suddendly gone... kinda wish I had stocked up a few new ones (for retro computing purposes) when they were still available.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • Sooner or later the only remaining source of reliable digital information will be 1990s multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedias.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • various topics (e.g., AI news, crypto, fitness, personal finance)

    That sure is a specifc selection of topics.

  • Anthropic chief says AI could surpass “almost all humans at almost everything” shortly after 2027
  • Same. They've been a staple in my RSS feed list for so long (and they are one of the few sites where the RSS feed isn't just the headlines). But recently I've been thinking several times already about throwing them out.

  • Anthropic chief says AI could surpass “almost all humans at almost everything” shortly after 2027
  • "Shortly after 2027" is a fun phrasing. Means "not before 2028", but mentioning "2027" so it doesn't seem so far away.

    I interpret it as "please bro, keep the bubble going bro, just 3 more years bro, this time for real bro"

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems
  • PSA: the domain shown in a google search result is not necessarily the domain it will actually link you to.

    Maybe this is common knowledge, but I had no idea before. What an absolutely horrible decision from google to allow this. What are they thinking?? This is great for phishing and malware, but I don't know what else. (Yeah ok, the reason has probably something to do with "line must go up".)

  • People don’t enjoy making music, says AI music CEO being sued for stealing music
  • So much wrong with this...

    In a way, it reminds me of the wave of entirely fixed/premade loop-based music making tools from years ago. Where you just drag and drop a number of pre-made loops from a library onto some tracks, and then the software automatically makes them fit together musically and that's it, no further skill or effort required. I always found that fun to play around with for an evening or two, but then it quickly got boring. Because the more you optimize away the creative process, the less interesting it becomes.

    Now the AI bros have made it even more streamlined, which means it's even more boring. Great. Also, they appear to think that they are the first people to ever have the idea "let's make music making simple". Not surprising they believe that, because a fundamental tech bro belief is that history is never interesting and can never teach anything, so they never even look at it.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th January 2025 - awful.systems
  • Ah, so Google Search runs on UDP, interesting, that must be why it's so unreliable now.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th January 2025
  • Thanks for the heads-up. I couldn't finish reading through all postings in that forum thread, it's all just making me so tired... always the same shit.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th January 2025
  • It is very disturbing and scary.

    They're explicitly carving out an exception to target sexual/gender minorities. And I wonder, given how they are often among the first groups being targeted, and then other groups follow, how long until they add more exceptions? How long until Meta modifies the rules further to e.g. explicitly allow racism too?

    Meta/Facebook has never been a good company. But the path they have actively chosen now is so much more evil than before.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th January 2025
  • Oh yeah. I recently wanted to configure something in pipewire... the idea was simple: just creating a boot-persistent audio loopback, i.e. connecting an audio input to an output. I gave up for now after looking at the config examples for that in the documentation. How can such a simple thing need such complex configuration?

    As for losing configs, I've started to put all my hand-edited config files in a git repo on my NAS so at least I only have to figure out things once.