my strong impression is that surveillance advertising has been an unmitigated disaster for the ability to actually sell products in any kind of sensible way — see also the success of influencer marketing, under the (utterly false) pretense that it’s less targeted and more authentic than the rest of the shit we’re used to
but marketing is an industry run by utterly incompetent morally bankrupt fuckheads, so my impression is also that none of them particularly know or care that the majority of what they’re doing doesn’t work; there’s power in surveillance and they like that feeling, so the data remains extremely valuable on the market
you’re right, I’m giving them way too much credit — the full thought is almost definitely “There is no greater story than people’s relentless and dogged endeavor to overcome repressive regimes and replace them with their own repressive regimes, but this time with heroin and sex tourism”
what if we made the large language model larger? it’s weird nobody has attempted this
also this is all horseshit so I know they haven’t thought this far ahead, but pushing a bit on the oracle problem, how do they think they solved these fundamental issues in their proposed design?
- if verifying answers are correct is up to the miners, how do they prevent the miners from just generating any old bullshit using a much less expensive method than an LLM (a Markov chain say, or even just random characters or an empty string if nobody’s checking) and pocketing the tokens?
- if verification is up to the requester, why would you ever mark an answer as correct? if you’re forced to pick one correct answer that gets your tokens, what’s stopping you from spinning up an adversarial miner that produces random answers and marking those as correct, ensuring you keep both your tokens and the other miners’ answers?
- if answers are verified centrally… there’s no need for the miners or their models, just use whatever that central source of truth is.
and of course this is avoiding the elephant in the room: LLMs have no concept of truth, they just extrude plausible bullshit into a statistically likely shape. there’s no source of truth that can reliably distinguish bad LLM responses from good ones, and if you had one you’d probably be better off just using it instead of an LLM.
edit cause for some reason my brain can’t stop it with this fractally wrong shit: finally, if their plan is to just evenly distribute tokens across miners and return all answers: congrats on the “decentralized” network of /dev/urandom to string converters you weird fucks
another edit: I read the fucking spec and somehow it’s even stupider than any of the above. you can trivially just spend tokens to buy a majority of the validator slots for a subnet (which I guess in normal cultist lingo would be a subchain) and use that to kick out everyone else’s miners:
Only the top 64 validators, when ranked by their stake amount in any particular subnet, are considered to have a validator permit. Only these top 64 subnet validators with permits are considered active in the subnet.
a third edit, please help, my brain is melting: what does a non-adversarial validator even look like in this architecture? we can’t fucking verify LLM outputs like I said so… is this just multiple computers doing RAG and pretending that’s a good idea? is the idea that you run some kind of unbounded training algorithm and we also live in a universe where model overfitting doesn’t exist? help I am melting
If you remember early bitcoin, some people would say it’s money, some people would say it’s gold. Some people would say it’s this blockchain … The way that I look at Bittensor is as the World Wide Web of AI.
it’s really rude of you to find and quote a paragraph designed to force me to take four shots in rapid succession in my ongoing crypto/AI drinking game!
How does Bittensor work? “When you have a question, you send it out to the network. Miners whose models are suited to answer your question will process it and send back a proposed answer.” The “miners” are rewarded with TAO tokens.
“what do you mean oracle problem? our new thing’s nothing but oracles, we just have to figure out a way to know they’re telling the truth!”
Bittensor is enormously proud to be decentralized, because that’s a concept that totally makes sense with AI models, right? “There is no greater story than people’s relentless and dogged endeavor to overcome repressive regimes,” starts Bittensor’s introduction page.
meme stock cults and crypto scams both should maybe consider keeping pseudo-leftist jargon out of their fucking mouths
e: also, Bittensor? really?
an introduction to gibberish.awful.systems
welcome to gibberish.awful.systems, a platform for long-form writing and blogging hosted on awful.systems and running on WriteFreely. thi...
we have a WriteFreely instance now! I wrote up a guide to why it exists, why it's so fucking janky, and what we can do to fix it.
fucking imagine coming back to a place you’re not welcome with this “eeehhh you’re being a bit aggressive tbh” shit
I think your response is a bit aggressive TBH.
nah, an aggressive response is me telling you to fuck yourself as I ban you for a second(!) time for making these exact terrible fucking posts
I’ve saved many hours of work with it, in languages I don’t really even know.
maybe by next ban you’ll figure out why your PRs keep getting closed
congrats on asking jeeves
is it bad to be bad at a system designed for exploitation? maybe your grandma had a point
what’s wild is in the ideal case, a person who really doesn’t have anything to hide is both unimaginably dull and has effectively just confessed that they would sell you out to the authorities for any or no reason at all
people with nothing to hide are the worst people
maybe it was a mistake to lionize a corporate monopolist to the level where we ostracized people for not being “good” at using their trap of a product
update: email, backups, and writefreely
this is somewhat of a bigger update, and it's the product of a few things that have been in progress for a while:
email should be working again as of a couple months ago. good news: our old provider was, ahem, mildly inflating our usage to get us off their free plan, so this part of our infrastructure is going to cost a lot less than anticipated.
backups
we now have a restic-based system for distributed backups, thanks to a solid recommendation from @[email protected]. this will make us a lot more resilient to the possibility of having our host evaporate out from under us, and make other disaster scenarios much less lethal.
writefreely
I used some of the spare capacity on our staging instance to spin up a new WriteFreely instance where we can post long-form articles and other stuff that's more suitable for a blog. post your gibberish at gibberish.awful.systems! contact me if you'd like an invite link; WriteFreely instances are particularly vulnerable to being turned into platforms for spam and nothing else, so we're keeping this small-scale for instance regulars for now.
alongside all the ordinary WriteFreely stuff (partial federation, a ton of jank), our instance has a special feature: if you have an account, you can make a PR on this repository and once it's merged, gibberish will automatically pull its frontend files from that repo and redeploy WriteFreely. currently this is only for the frontend, but there's a lot you can do with that -- check out the templates, pages, less, and static directories on the repo to see what gets pulled. check it out if you see some jank you want to fix! (also it's the only way to get WriteFreely to host images as part of a post, no I'm not kidding)
what's next?
next up, I plan to turn off Hetzner's backups for awful.systems and use that budget to expand the node's storage by 100GB, which should increase the monthly bill by around 2.50 euros. I want to go this route to expand our instance's storage instead of using an object store like S3 or B2 because using block storage makes us more resilient to Hetzner or Backblaze evaporating or ending our service, and because it's relatively easy to undo this decision if it proves not to scale, but very hard to go from using object storage back to generic block storage.
after that, it'll be about time to carefully upgrade to the current version of Lemmy, and to get our fork (Philthy) in a better state for contributions.
as always, see our infrastructure deployment flake for more documentation and details on how all of the above works.
the marketing fucks and executive ghouls who came up with this meme (that used to surface every time I talked about wanting to de-Google) are also the ones who make a fuckton of money off of having a real-time firehose of personal data straight from the source, cause that’s by far what’s most valuable to advertisers and surveillance firms (but I repeat myself)
(Currently writing some book-like text on the AI bubble, with minimal crypto. I also have some book-like text on smart city scams, which has rather more bitcoin in it.)
fuck yes
AWS’ suggested upgrade path is Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL — which also does audit logs. So as usual, the answer to which database is: just use Postgres.
it’s amazing how often Postgres is the sane implementation for a database-shaped problem, including a search engine just waiting for a competent ranking algorithm and a crawler (yes I’ve considered doing this)
the linked Buttondown article deserves highlighting because, as always, Emily M Bender knows what’s up:
If we value information literacy and cultivating in students the ability to think critically about information sources and how they relate to each other, we shouldn't use systems that not only rupture the relationship between reader and information source, but also present a worldview where there are simple, authoritative answers to questions, and all we have to do is to just ask ChatGPT for them.
(and I really should start listening to Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 soon)
also, this stood out, from the OpenAI/Common Sense Media (ugh) presentation:
As a responsible user, it is essential that you check and evaluate the accuracy of the outputs of any generative AI tool before you share it with your colleagues, parents and caregivers, and students. That includes any seemingly factual information, links, references, and citations.
this is such a fucked framing of the dangers of informational bias, algorithmic racism, and the laundering of fabricated data through the false authority of an LLM. framing it as an issue where the responsible party is the non-expert user is a lot like saying “of course you can diagnose your own ocular damage, just use your eyes”. it’s very easy to perceive the AI as unbiased in situations where the bias agrees with your own, and that is incredibly dangerous to marginalized students. and as always, it’s gross how targeted this is: educators are used to being the responsible ones in the room, and this might feel like yet another responsibility to take on — but that’s not a reasonable way to handle LLMs as a source of unending bullshit.
Lack of familiarity with AI PCs leads to what the study describes as "misconceptions," which include the following: 44 percent of respondents believe AI PCs are a gimmick or futuristic; 53 percent believe AI PCs are only for creative or technical professionals; 86 percent are concerned about the privacy and security of their data when using an AI PC; and 17 percent believe AI PCs are not secure or regulated.
ah yeah, you just need to get more familiar with your AI PC so you stop caring what a massive privacy and security risk both Recall and Copilot are
lol @ 44% of the study’s participants already knowing this shit’s a desperate gimmick though
per capita: your mom
fuck me that is some awful fucking moderation. I can’t imagine being so fucking bad at this that I:
- dole out a ban for being rude to a fascist
- dole out a second ban because somebody in the community did some basic fucking due diligence and found out one of the accounts defending the above fascist has been just a gigantic racist piece of shit elsewhere, surprise
- in the process of the above, I create a safe space for a fascist and her friends
but for so many of these people, somehow that’s what moderation is? fucking wild, how the fuck did we get here
a better-thought-out announcement is coming later today, but our WriteFreely instance at gibberish.awful.systems has reached a roughly production-ready state (and you can hack on its frontend by modifying the templates, pages, static, and less directories in this repo and opening a PR)! awful.systems regulars can ask for an account and I'll DM an invite link!
most of the dedicated Niantic (Pokemon Go, Ingress) game players I know figured the company was using their positioning data and phone sensors to help make better navigational algorithms. well surprise, it’s worse than that: they’re doing a generative AI model that looks to me like it’s tuned specifically for surveillance and warfare (though Niantic is of course just saying this kind of model can be used for robots… seagull meme, “what are the robots for, fucker? why are you being so vague about who’s asking for this type of model?”)
another absolutely fucked thing about the gotcha interview is, they never stop at just one. if you somehow read the interviewer’s mind and asspull the expected (not “correct”, mind you) answer, they’ll just go “huh” and instantly pivot to a different instant-fail gotcha. the point of the gotcha interview isn’t candidate selection; the point is that the asshole interviewer has power over the candidate, and can easily use gotchas to fabricate technical-sounding reasons for rejecting suitable candidates they personally just don’t like.
shit like this is one reason our industry is full of fucking assholes; they select for their own by any practical means. it’s reminiscent of those rigged, impossible “literacy tests” they used to give voters in the south (that is, the southern US), where almost every question was a gotcha designed so that a poll worker could exclude Black voters at effectively their own discretion, complete with a bullshit paper trail in case anyone questioned the process.
(also, how many of these assholes send candidates down a rabbit hole wasting time answering questions unrelated to the position when they don’t get the gotcha right? I swear that’s happened to me more than once, and I can only imagine it’s so nobody asks why most of the interviews are so short)
I start every new day by screaming this is the remix, as required by law
On “Safe” C++: An Odyssey of Sneers
this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:
> This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.
fucking masterful
an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol
Odes & Satires, and other matters of stuff & things.
this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:
>Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.
>I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.
>The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.
infra: email notifications might be a bit spotty
we’ve exceeded the usage tier for our email sending API today (and they kindly didn’t email me to tell me that was the case until we were 300% over), so email notifications might be a bit spotty/non-working for a little bit. I’m working on figuring out what we should migrate to — I’m leaning towards AWS SES as by far the cheapest option, though I’m no Amazon fan and I’m open to other options as long as they’ve got an option to send with SMTP
the Humane AI Pin is fucked
After raising $200 million from investors, Humane has only sold $9 million worth of products and has received $1 million in returned products.
after the predictable failure of the Rabbit R1, it feels like we’ve heard relatively nothing about the Humane AI Pin, which released first but was rapidly overshadowed by the R1’s shittiness. as it turns out, the reason why we haven’t heard much about the Humane AI pin is because it’s fucked:
> Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.
it’s fucked in ways you might not have seen coming, but Humane should have:
>Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone.
AI shovelmaker Nvidia has been looking into making its own AI models. To that end, it’s been vacuuming up YouTube videos like nobody’s business. According to leaked internal communications obtained…
404media: Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI
Internal emails, Slack conversations and documents obtained by 404 Media show how Nvidia created a yet-to-be-released video foundational model.
as I was reading through this one, the quotes I wanted to pull kept growing in size until it was just the whole article, so fuck it, this one’s pretty damning
here’s a thin sample of what you can expect, but it gets much worse from here:
>Internal conversations at Nvidia viewed by 404 Media show when employees working on the project raised questions about potential legal issues surrounding the use of datasets compiled by academics for research purposes and YouTube videos, managers told them they had clearance to use that content from the highest levels of the company. > >A former Nvidia employee, whom 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about internal Nvidia processes, said that employees were asked to scrape videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other sources to train an AI model for Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human” products. The project, internally named Cosmos (but different from the company’s existing Cosmos deep learning product), has not yet been released to the public.
Andreessen Horowitz and the uwuness of little technofascism
The time has come to stand up for Little Tech. Bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech. We believe American technology supremacy, and the critical role that Little Tech startups play in ensuring that supremacy, is a first class political issue on par with any other.
so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:
>Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain. > >Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.
does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.
here’s some more banal shit:
>We find there are three kinds of politicians: > >Those who support Little Tech. We support them. > >Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them. > >Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.
I find there are three kinds of politicians:
- those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
- those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
- those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
Lix: a Nix evaluator fork focused on correctness and doing right by its community
Lix is an independent variant of the Nix package manager, developed by a team of open-source volunteers, and maintained by and for a passionate community of users.
it can’t be overstated how important the Nix evaluator is to the Nix ecosystem; it implements the Nix language and package manager, maintains the store, has a hand in the low-level workings of every Nix tool, and is the focus of the push by Eelco and friends to commercialize Nix and keep it appealing to military-industrial interests.
all of the above is why I joined the Aux CLI SIG, which focuses on maintaining a fork of the Nix evaluator for the Aux ecosystem. but just now I saw the announcement for Lix, a Nix evaluator fork that focuses on modernizing the codebase (including gradually replacing C++ with Rust), maintaining correctness (something the upstream evaluator has been notoriously struggling with lately), and doing right by its community. I found myself nodding along to their description of the project and feeling something I haven’t felt since I read the open letter — I’m finally feeling excited for the future of the technology behind Nix.
I have no idea if Lix will become Aux’s chosen evaluator fork, though the Aux CLI SIG can help determine that collectively (and I’ll have many more details on Aux in a post later tonight). here’s what’s truly exciting though: by following Lix’s install steps and pulling auxpkgs-unstable, we can have a package ecosystem and NixOS fork that’s completely independent of the Nix community, and we can have it right now. I’m so excited by that news that I’m going to spin up a host just to give Lix+auxpkgs a try later tonight.
here’s the Aux thread about Lix; so far, there’s a lot of high-level support and excitement for using it as Aux’s evaluator.
an open letter to the NixOS foundation
this thread fucking sucks for me to have to post, but the linked open letter is an important read. none of the systemic issues pertaining to marginalized folks and commercial/military-industrial interests in the Nix community I’ve previously written about on TechTakes have been solved; in fact, they’ve gotten worse to the point where the Nix community moderation team is essentially in the process of quitting. that’s the beginning to an awful end for a project I like a whole lot.
even if you don’t give a fuck about Nix, the open letter is an important read because the toxicity, conflicts of interest, and underhanded tactics detailed in it are incredibly common in the open source space. this letter could have been written about a multitude of infamously toxic open source projects; Nix is lucky that it has marginalized folks involved who care about the direction of the project and want to make things better, but those people are actively leaving, after being burnt out by the toxic people and structures entrenched in Nix’s community. that’s a fucking tragedy.
the tea protocol is still predictably a gigantic source of PR spam
The tea.xyz protocol first earned an entry on Web3 is Going Just Great in late February, when their plan to reward open source software contributors resulted in crypto enthusiasts with no intention of participating in OSS opening endless pull requests to claim ownership of prominent OSS projects. Th...
who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do
thread your Philthy feature requests
reply with features and bug fixes you'd like to see in Philthy, the lemmy fork that runs on this instance. no guarantees I'll get to any of them soon, but particularly low-hanging fruit and well-liked features can be prioritized.
ask me questions about awful.systems or NixOS!
the awful.systems server cluster runs on an open infrastructure based on NixOS and Nix flakes, and though it desperately needs cleanup in some places, it's still a pretty good example of how to use a Nix flake to deploy NixOS in production. feel free to browse the repo and ask any questions about how it works, or about Nix in general!
also, if I get hit by a bus, this can be used to redeploy awful.systems elsewhere. an existing admin who isn't in the hospital or the grave can import a database backup and get back up and running!
and as always, contributions are welcome.
the r/SneerClub archive welcomes contributions
An archival site for the posts from r/SneerClub, generated from a static data snapshot
the r/SneerClub archive at awful.systems is welcoming contributors. it's a statically-generated site (from this set of archived posts in JSON format) that uses a unique, high-performance Nix-based static site generation system. the current site desperately needs a new stylesheet (especially on mobile), but one area where I really need advice or contributions is the dataset.
currently, the SneerClub archives only pull in data from the bdfr set, which I generated using Bulk Downloader for Reddit right before Reddit killed its API, but I'd love to merge the SneerClub_comments.jsonl and SneerClub_submissions.jsonl files into the data we're using to generate the site, since those have older data from ArchiveTeam. unfortunately, that data set is in a complete different format from the BDFR data. any advice for tools or techniques to merge those two data sets into one (or offers to contribute a merge script) is greatly appreciated.
Philthy, the awful.systems fork of Lemmy, is seeking contributors
Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led organization that aims to help free and open source projects prosper by giving them a safe and friendly home.
the software we use to run awful.systems, which @[email protected] suggested I call Philthy (and I agreed!), is seeking contributors.
like upstream Lemmy, this consists of a Rust backend and a Typescript+React frontend. contributions to both are welcome; use this thread to discuss ideas and collaborate.
here's some contribution ideas off the top of my head (but all reasonable contributions are welcome):
- (frontend & backend) actually rebrand to Philthy, to prevent confusion between us and upstream Lemmy
- (frontend & backend) rewrite
README.mdto emphasize that this is a fork - (frontend) make the page header and footer more configurable; remove various links that aren't relevant to awful.systems
- (backend) delete posts from Mastodon when they're deleted on our end
- (frontend & backend) implement The Firehose, a big admin-only list of the posts and content leaving our instance
- (frontend & backend, ongoing) merge in changes from upstream Lemmy if there are features you wish our instance had
or make suggestions in this thread!
one major blocker preventing folks from contributing to Lemmy-related development I've seen is that a lot of people don't know Rust. if that's the case, I can offer the following:
- the Lemmy codebase is the worst possible place to learn Rust, but I'd love to start a thread for Rust tutorials and shared learning. it's honestly an excellent language in its own right, so I'd love to teach folks about it even if they don't end up contributing to Philthy.
- if you're good with React and/or Typescript and the feature you want to implement has a backend component, I don't mind handling the backend portion if I'm able.
welcome to FreeAssembly: a non-toxic collaborative community
this is a non-toxic place to collaborate on projects (programming, design, art, or otherwise) and share information; effectively, it's the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. this community has been in the planning phase for a long time, but the xz backdoor recently emphasized how severe the toxicity problem in existing open source communities is, and how important it is that we have a place to collaborate that isn't controlled by toxic personalities or corporate interests.
FreeAssembly is starting its existence as a Lemmy community that enables collaboration on externally-hosted projects, but that doesn't necessarily need to be its final form. as we figure out the needs of this community, we can grow to service needs like code hosting and design collaboration. for now, we recommend hosting code on software forges like Codeberg (and we recommend avoiding github if possible, though it's well-understood that this isn't easy for established projects). we also want to explore the best options for designers and artists to collaborate without making them dependent on large corporate infrastructure.
there are some expectations around posting to FreeAssembly. see the sidebar for details.
Amazon’s 'Just Walk Out' grocery stores are dead
Amazon Fresh is moving away from a feature of its grocery stores where customers could skip checkout altogether.
(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
flag any spam you see from lemmy.world (or elsewhere)
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
the Amaranth hardware description language
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