Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
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      Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

      I’m dead. At least the Rust Evangelism Strike Force finally got to have their theocracy

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    from this post (archive)

    App developers think that’s a bogus argument. Mr. Bier told me that data he had seen from start-ups he advised suggested that contact sharing had dropped significantly since the iOS 18 changes went into effect, and that for some apps, the number of users sharing 10 or fewer contacts had increased as much as 25 percent.

    aww, does the widdle app’s business model collapse completely once it can’t harvest data? how sad

    this reinforces a suspicion that I’ve had for a while: the only reason most people put up with any of this shit is because it’s an all or nothing choice and they don’t know the full impact (because it’s intentionally obscured). the moment you give them an overt choice that makes them think about it, turns out most are actually not fine with the state of affairs

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      @blakestacey Super depressed that people were using the rubbish plagiarism machines to edit Wikipedia anyway. I don’t understand the point of contributing if you don’t think *you* have anything to contribute without that garbage.

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        There are the weirdest people who make ‘content’ out there. For example, I saw a ‘how to start the game’ joke guide on steam, so I went to their page to block them (to see if this also blocks the guides from popping up, doesn’t seem so) and they had made hundreds of these guides, all just copy pasted shit. And there were more people doing the exact same thing. Bizarre shit. (Prob related to the thing where you can give people stickers, gamification was a mistake).

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      @blakestacey

      I am disappoint.

      “The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.”

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    I’m just thinking about all the reply guys that come here defending autoplag, specifically with this idea:

    “GPT is great when I want to turn a list of bullet points into an eloquent email”

    Hey, you butts, just send the bullet points! What are you, a high schooler? Nobody has time for essays, much less autoplagged slop.

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      No no no it’s fine! You get the word shuffler to deshuffle the—eloquently—shuffled paragraphs back into nice and tidy bullet points. And I have an idea! You could get an LLM to add metadata to the email to preserve the original bullet points, so the recipient LLM has extra interpolation room to choose to ignore the original list, but keep the—much more correct and eloquent, and with much better emphasis—hallucinated ones.

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    As previously mentioned, the “Behind the Bastards” podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I’m just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.

    This is something I’ve noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There’s a nostalgia for the “old” internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I’ve always thought that’s dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.

    This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.

    • maol@awful.systems
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      I have a lot of time for nostalgia about older versions of the web, but it really ticks me off when people who actively participated in making the web worse start to indulge in nostalgia about the web. Doesn’t Yarvin get a lot of money from Peter Thiel?

      There were women and people of colour on the old web, and feminists and radical anti-racists too - they were just outnumbered and outgunned. One of the earliest projects listed on the cyberfeminism index are VNS Matrix, who were “corrupting the discourse” way back in 1991.

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        To be perfectly fair i was a very callow youth at the time and probably bounced off stuff like that had I come in contact with it.

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      why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest

      I’m thinking combination of you probably having set all your privacy settings to non serviam and most of their sponsors having opted out of serving their ads to non US listeners.

      I did once get some random scandinavian sounding ads, but for the most part it’s the same for me, all iheart podcast trailers.

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      (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest)

      Because they think you live in a real country, not the USA.

      old internet

      I wonder for how many people this is a reactionary impulse, wanting back to the ‘old internet’ they didn’t actually participate in. At least in modern days the flamewar posts are quite limited in length, in the old days they could reach novel sizes. Anyway sure we should go back to the old internet, where suddenly your whole university had no internet because there was a dos attack on the network to force a netsplit on an a random irc channel.

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    So, today MS publishes this blog post about something with AI. It starts with “We’re living through a technological paradigm shift.”… and right there I didn’t bother reading the rest of it because I don’t want to expose my brain to it further.

    But what I found funny is that also today, there’s this news: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-hololens-2-discontinuation-support

    So Hololens is discontinued… you know… AR… the last supposedly big paradigm shift that was supposedly going to change everything.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.

      It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

      Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!

      With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing life’s complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. […], while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.

      (Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)

      It’s interesting that someone thought “smoothing life’s complexities” is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.

      Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out life’s complexities without smoothing out people’s complexities, but it’s not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and that’s if it actually worked, which it doesn’t).

      I’ve felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole it’s hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but it’s a shame we couldn’t as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).

      Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.

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        tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

        call me when I can actually tange them

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        perhaps… one of the most

        Load bearing words!

        life’s complexities

        I don’t think there’s an interpretation of this phrase in which AI actually helps.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        re: how can a chatbot help with life?

        This just their brains on science fiction, they think chatbot can help like the independent AI agents could in the science fiction they half remember. Or at least they think marketing it like that will appeal to people.

        A lot less, ‘Copilot make this list of bullet points into an email’ and more ‘Copilot, lock on to the intruder, close the bulkheads after them and flush it to the nearest trash compactor’.

        I think that ‘giving microsoft the power to do things in my behalf’ is quite an iffy decision to make, but that is just me. Ow look it autorenewed your licenses for you, and bought a subscription Copaint, it even got you a deal not 240 dollars per year, but 120, a steal!

        E: I saw this image and because cursed eyeballs is the gift that keeps on giving, I will link it to yall as well, nsfw warning. This is the AI future microsoft wants

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          I think it’s also a case of thinking about form before function. It’s not quite as bad a case as the metaverse nonsense was, but there’s still a lack of curiosity about the sci-fi they read. In most stories that treat AI as anything less than a god, the replacement of people with artificial tools is about either what gets lost (the I, Robot movie, Wall-E) or the fact that effectively replacing people requires creating something with the same moral worth (Blade Runner, I, Robot, the Aasimov collection, etc).

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          I am neutral on MSFT - to me it’s a bog standard transnational company with better than most working conditions because it’s not making stuff you can make in sweatshops. But it’s really impressive how they’ve gone from the beige-box tyranny of Apple’s 1984 ad, via the “Halloween Papers” era where they were every Linux weenie’s biggest boogeyman, to today’s bland backer of OpenAI. Note that they’re not really advertising it. How many people who are horrified by Copilot’s Recall feature also know they’re the biggest investor in the company that makes ChatGPT?

          From a corporate governance perspective, being so central to the tech industry for so long is kinda impressive.

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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            this is why i keep hammering on how, functionally, OpenAI is a branch of MS and they’re only separate so OpenAI’s reputation doesn’t stain MS.

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            Despite the industry’s deeply ingrained neophilia, I think it speaks to the importance of backwards compatibility and legacy systems.

            I can’t help but think that the genAI craze will end up being a regrettable side-quest along the path to “coding for non-programmers” akin to Visual Basic. But hey, I bet there’s a lot more legacy VB apps being kept alive out there than anyone would be comfortable with.

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              Despite having been one of those Linux weenies back in the day I have a lot of respect for the amount of work MS puts into backwards compatibility, dev tool upkeep, etc. And now they’re actually Open Source! Hell hath frozen over (or they realized no universities wanted to pay Visual Studio licenses and lost a couple of generations of coders to Linux)

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                And now they’re actually Open Source!

                Eh, kind of but also not. VS Code is proprietary, but you have the vscode:vscodium::chrome:chromium thing. Unlike in Chromium’s case, the proprietary version actually comes with some amenities one might actually care about (mainly in the plugin repository).

                You could say Open Source got some big wins in 2010s, leading to MSFT doing their fair share of contributions to Free software and openwashing as much of the rest as they can manage, but let’s not kid ourselves. They wouldn’t need to openwash if most of their stuff weren’t still proprietary. Last I checked MSVC, SQL Server, Azure, Copilot, IIS, Power BI, and the DirectX SDKs were all totally closed and jealously guarded.

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                And now they’re actually Open Source

                sorta, but it’s a veneer in furtherance of other goals (telemetry, market dominance, and control)

                one of the things I do with my computers is run LittleSnitch in always-prompt mode (LS is an app-level firewalling solution on macos), and hooo boy do I hate it when I end up having to open/touch vscode for some reason. the last time I did, I spent most of the first 5 minutes being prompted for (undeclared!) connections vscode attempted to make in the name of telemetry. similar experience with vscodium interacting with packages, and a bunch of their toolchains

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    Small FYI, not a sneer or anything, you can stop reading if you don’t know what the godotengine is. But if you do and hear of the fork, you can just ignore the fork. (the people involved also seem to be rather iffy, one guy who went crazy after somebody mentioned they would like gay relationships in his game, and some maga conspiracy theory style coder. That is going by the 3 normal people the account follows (out of 5) who I assume are behind it).

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        I have no idea what set the drama off btw, I have not really looked into it (could it be that this mod you are talking about was the unofficial mod the godot communication was talking about? Or is that a different mod? And did the redot (wait, re.? please tell me it isn’t a reference to the reeeee thing) people really pick the side of the n-word mod?)

        I did see that the guy who started redot basically only forked it and then went ‘any devs wanna take over this fork?’ Very I started the wiki, without even starting a wiki.

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            The bikeshed should be RED!

            Lol Edit (emp mine): “We need to remove the Godot branding from everything to differentiate this from Godot. For starters we can change the default IDE theme. I think a dark theme with red accents would make sense. Godot is associated with cooler colors, so warmer colors seem good.”

            Of course black with red. The engine for edgy 17 year olds. (I wanted to make a joke about Razer gaming peripherals here, but looks like they switched mostly to rainbows and greens, damn wokes!)

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              Apologies for crappy nitpicking on my part, but 4chan millennials really gotta learn to let go of impact font.

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            I want to pull quotes from that thread but it’s so satisfying in context to see the most toxic parts of a gaming community turn on each other

            and dear god are those some ugly fucking logos. my favorite is the one that’s just Redot Engine with a ridiculously overbearing letter R (not gonna repost them here for obvious trademark reasons — I’ve got the feeling these fellas might not have that part figured out)

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          apparently godot posted something about supporting LGBT in games? can’t find the original. then Grummz posted ragebait about it and the chuds flooded their github and discord with fuckwittery

          this is from like 5 min following links after reading your post

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            Looked at Grummz twitter, and looks like Notch is also getting involved. With friends like that.

            Amazing how this new crop of outrage merchants who touched some game code in the past make Derek Smart look measured and well balanced.

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            wait, the “pre-built” engine these little shits are trying to bully a developer for using is fucking Unreal Engine 5?

            all wokes want is to use a notoriously advanced and difficult game engine owned by a right-wing asshole and that’s how they’re gonna destroy gaming. with the engine that gigantic studios use because writing an engine from scratch is a fucking money pit that never ends and you have to have a good fucking reason to do it

            also I’ve been trying to force my hands to not start a Bevy project ever since Tiny Glade (a beautiful, cozy 3D sandbox builder running on the Bevy engine) launched and Bevy is manual as hell (but fun to work with), so this is a good reminder that Godot is cool and I should finally learn it too

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              A common pattern of the angry anti-‘woke’ gamers is that they don’t know how games are made on any level, and they are kept, I think intentionally, in the dark by the people who are stirring the anti-‘woke’ craziness who should know better. And it is about every level, npc ai, engines, financial, external organization structures, community management, how prerelease footage is work in progress, etc etc. It is almost impressive how blind people are towards how their hobby creation works.

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              also, holy fuck the reply guys are a plague on that post. is bluesky normally like that, or is it the blast radius from the gamers deciding they have a problem?

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                dunno if i have an unusual amount of blocked posters, but the ones i can see are fine? bsky is largely le home of le wokisme

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                  that’s probably it — logged out mastodon is probably just as bad. also the most aggressive reply guy’s take is “accounts for public projects should never block anyone and they should be required to debate the people yelling at them” which is, holy fuck, the most blockable thing I’ve ever seen

            • flavia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              Godot is really fun to use and to develop in. They basically gamified documentation writing: they show you tooltips for your custom elements just like the classes provided by the engine with their excellent documentation. The engine has hot code reloading too. I have a puzzle game project that I’m working on now.

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                that sounds awesome! godot in general seems to be a very practical game engine, and at this point I definitely want to do my next little experimental game project in Godot (with Rust, if the tooling for that is at all ready for production) so I have experience with at least one normal object-oriented game engine that isn’t an old unreal engine or idtech under my belt

                like I mentioned, I really like how Bevy works, but in its current state it isn’t really ready for rapid development. a bare Bevy project is literally just the ECS and system scheduler but with no runloop. the defaults get you a lot of basics like a runloop, good renderer, input handling, audio, and such, but from there you still have to decide how everything works in terms of game logic — even with third-party plugins for stuff like physics for example, you still have to write logic for what a collision means to each entity involved. I also don’t think bevy has a unified editor or live code reloading at all yet? so for each game you have to write an editor (which the engine helps with a little bit) and potentially a live reload implementation (which sounds like hell)

            • s3p5r@lemm.ee
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              owned by a right-wing asshole

              Wait, what? Can I get some info or even just the right search terms to force Google to give me useful info? I know he’s done the eye-roll-worthy “no politics in my artform” bullshit but if there’s more I’ve missed, I’m keen to know.

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                most of it’s on Twitter and therefore inaccessible to me, but Sweeney has a habit of falling all over himself to defend musk in nonsensical ways, and musk continuously returns the favor. the two of them boosting each other politically is something that keeps happening — a search for tim sweeney musk or similar should surface more recent examples without flooding you with “no politics in art” results (though that’s a dogwhistle too, so…)

                Sweeney has a wider track record of saying slimy fash shit on Twitter — it’s why he’s a meme on mastodon — but like I said, none of that’s accessible to me anymore. it fucking sucks that both of the programmers I idolized as a naive kid turned out to be huge fucking assholes though

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                  Carmack has always struck me as the kind of cishet white GenX dude that gets more and more pissed that everything’s “political”, I just wanna code, man, why is everyone mad at me that he more or less inevitably falls into fascism. Sure games can be coded as “countercultural” but the genres that Doom and Quake represent are quasi-fascist already.

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                  Ugh. Thanks, yeah that’s good enough for me without even opening xcancel. My search for “Tim Sweeney conservative” only dredged up his land conservation purchases and the “stop being so divisive” / “no politics in art” dogwhistles which had previously made me suspicious, but I had mostly forgotten about. I quit Twitter many years ago so I missed that whole knobslobbering saga and didn’t think to include Musk after skimming today’s shitty Google “search” results.

                  Ah fuck, and Carmack too? Goddamn it. Twist the knife a little harder.

                  Fucking tech bros, always ruining tech.

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            Holy shit that is amazing. The thinnest skins. All of this over the promise by God not to flood the world again.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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        Of course it could get worse.

        Lol at them just removing the godot donation links/list of donors and just replacing it with their own. What a grift.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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      from the godot discord:

      godotclayjohn • 20h ago •

      fund.godotengine.org!

      Obviously I can’t share access to the backend, but the numbers on the side are kept up to date. Last week we went down by about €5,000 when a corporate sponsorship expired.

      Since Friday morning we lost €170/month in sponsorships but gained €1,610/month in new sponsorships. In terms of numbers of people: 10 people have cancelled their donations so far and 74 new people have signed up.

      go woke, go 1400 EUR ahead and lose a pile of shitheads you never wanted

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        the chuds have done their usual thing of throwing themselves on the ground and acting extremely injured by being blocked for violating the CoC of an open source project (via Liam at GamingOnLinux):

        what’s fucked is this is the exact same playbook as NixOS and Python, though this time Godot doesn’t seem to be taking any shit and that seems to be preventing those tactics from working. weird how easy it is to weather shit like this when you have a fucking spine and aren’t trying to retain fascist assholes

        image description

        Twitter posts by Rémi Verschelde (@Akien): I see misunderstanding around Godot blocking some users on its GitHub organization.

        • We’ve blocked 5 accounts so far
        • All opening issues with slurs, harassing contributors (breaching Godot’s CoC and GH’s ToS)
        • Blocking users does NOT prevent download of the engine or source

        Blocking users doesn’t even prevent them from reading issues and PRs, just interacting with them. You can read and download anything from a GitHub repository as an anonymous (not logged in) user. *git clone https://github.com/godotengine/godot… works for anyone with an Internet connection.

        Just adding as some asked - if you want to quote this to people who still believe we’re mass blocking people on GitHub and cutting them off their tech stack, feel free to grab a screenshot. I locked my account while the heat dies down, so you can’t easily link those tweets.

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        ahahaha that’s amazing

        it also pushed me to start learning Godot since its community seems awesome, and that’s definitely showing through on the docs so far — they go into so much depth on why Godot’s designed like it is, and what specifically it’s good for

        I’ve only just started, but it’s reminding me very positively of what Unreal Engine was for a brief period of time: a runtime for a powerful domain-specific scripting language that could be extended by native code when needed, targeting indie devs

        unfortunately Tim Sweeney kind of sucks at designing languages (though he used to do it a lot) so UnrealScript was a real fucking mess, and UE never really captured the indie market (cause you had to pay a fuckload for the privilege of writing native code) so UnrealScript got excised and the engine became “free” (as in free timeshare) and entirely refocused on developers pumping out AAA garbage and other whales (and, more charitably, anyone who needs an engine that can do state of the art graphics)

        Godot, so far, to me feels kind of like an Unreal Engine that didn’t fuck up with the indie market and also isn’t closed source greedware

        also apparently there’s a new Unreal scripting language? it’s got the Haskell guy behind it and it’s functional which is cool, but it’s also already bathed in horseshit:

        Verse is the new scripting language for Unreal Engine, first implemented in Fortnite.[11] Simon Peyton Jones, known for his contributions to the Haskell programming language, joined Epic Games in December 2021 as Engineering Fellow to work on Verse with his long-time colleague Lennart Augustsson and others.[12] Conceived by Sweeney,[13] it was officially presented at Haskell eXchange in December 2022 as an open source functional-logic language for the metaverse.[14] A research paper, titled The Verse Calculus: a Core Calculus for Functional Logic Programming, was also published.[15]

        The language was eventually launched in March 2023 as part of the release of the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) at the Game Developers Conference, with plans to be available to all Unreal Engine users by 2025.[11]

        so I guess Fortnite modders can weigh in on how good Haskell for Gaming is

        e: also, imagine if any of these pro gamers knew Godot is the Cassette Beasts and Cruelty Squad engine

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      Not a lawyer, but wouldn’t that be something her estate could kick up some legal dust about? That’s two dozen kind of fucked up.

  • Steve@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    My current hyperfixation is Ecosia, maker of “the greenest search engine” (already problematic) implementing a wrapped-chatgpt chat bot and saying it has a “green mode” which is not some kind of solar-powered, ethically-sound, generative AI, but rather an instructive prompt to only give answers relating to sustainable business models etc etc.

    See my thread here https://xcancel.com/fasterandworse/status/1837831731577000320

    I’m starting to reach out to them wherever I can because for some reason this one is keeping me up at night.

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      They’re from Germany and made the rounds on the news here a few years back. They’re famous for basically donating all their profits to ecological projects, mostly for planting trees. These projects are publicly visible and auditable, so this at least isn’t bullshit.

      Under the hood they’re just another Bing wrapper (like DuckDuckGo).

      I actually kinda liked the project until they started adding a chatbot some months back. It was just such a weird decision because it has no benefits and is actively against their mission. Their reason for adding it was “user demand” which is the same bullshit Proton spewed and I don’t believe it.

      This green mode crap sounds really whack, lol. So I really wonder what’s up with that. I gotta admit that I thought they were really in it because they believed in their ecological idea (or at least their marketing did a great job convincing me) so this feels super weird.

    • Steve@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      I have sent an email to their press enquiries contact asking for more information, but I don’t know if I have the “press” clout to warrant a response (I know I don’t)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      That is a good username. Also very scummy business practices. I have a quite big dislike for people who pull that kind of shit.

      • Steve@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        Thanks! I thought it shows up on here too. Anyway, you can find me on all the places with that username

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    as seen via jwz, the tail wagging the dog continues (archive) at mozilla

    “if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em” but the wrong way around. I guess they got tired of begging google for money?

    And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet

    this tracks analogously to something I’ve been saying for a while as well, but with some differences. one of the most notable is the misrepresentation here of “the internet”, in the stead of “all the entities playing the online advertising game to extract from everyone else”

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      3 months ago

      Thanks I hate it.

      [Advertising is] the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.

      Content is a scarce resource y’know. Heaven forbid the content farms go out of business; or we might end up having to read Sherlock Holmes isekai fanfiction rather than a content farm’s two paragraphs and three screen-fulls of ads surrounding the tweet du jour. That would be terrible actually quite nice.

      We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history

      WTF. How is it possible for a company to be this self-congratulatory about entering the advertising space?! Someone needs to fork Firefox.

  • froztbyte@awful.systems
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    3 months ago

    from the (current?) prick-in-chief at YC in this post:

    and everyone in our industry owes a debt to open source builders

    nice of you to admit it. now maybe pay down some of that debt by using sending of your piles of money to those projects

    oh, what’s that, you only want to continue taking from it and then charging other people service rent, without ever contributing back? oh okay then

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        3 months ago

        ah, the special non-financial sense, you mean blood debts? I think many of us will be happy to hold tan et co to account for blood debts