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BlueMonday1984 @awful.systems

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st December 2024

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 - this one was a bit late, I got distracted)

131 comments

  • after going closed-source, redis is now doing a matt and trying to use trademark to take control over community-run projects. stay tuned to the end of the linked github thread where somebody spots their endgame

    this is becoming a real pattern, and it might deserve a longer analysis in the form of a blog post

    • I don't think the main concern is with the license. I'm more worried about the lack of an open governance and Redis priorizing their functionality at the expense of others. An example is client side caching in redis-py, https://github.com/redis/redis-py/blob/3d45064bb5d0b60d0d33360edff2697297303130/redis/connection.py#L792. I've tested it and it works just fine on valkey 7.2, but there is a gate that checks if it's not Redis and throws an exception. I think this is the behavior that might spread.

      Jesus, that's nasty

      • it is! and “we have no plans to break compatibility” needs to be called out as bullshit every time it’s brought up, because it is a tactic. in the best case it’s a verbal game — they have no plans to maintain compatibility either, so they can pretend these unnecessary breakages are accidental.

        I can’t say I see the outcome in the GitHub issue as a positive thing. both redis and the project maintainers have done a sudden 180 in terms of their attitude, and the original proposal is now being denied as a misunderstanding (which it absolutely wasn’t) now that it proved to be unpopular. my guess (from previous experience and the dire warnings in that issue) is that redis is going to attempt the following:

        • take over the project’s governance quietly via proxies
        • once that’s done, engage in a policy where changes that break compatibility with valkey and other redis-likes are approved and PRs to fix compatibility are de-prioritized or rejected outright

        if this is the case, it’s a much worse situation than them forking the project — this gets them the outcome they wanted, but curtails the community’s ability to respond to what will happen until it’s far too late.

  • John "Animats" Nagle choosing the most racist angle possible to respond to problems in education. The topic is giftedness and yet Nagle needs to start with "Ashkenazi Jews".

    • Wow, that starts bad and gets worse.

      It starts with this quote, which is absolutely fine:

      But others said the admissions exam and additional application requirements are inherently unfair to students of color who face socioeconomic disadvantages. Elaine Waldman, whose daughter is enrolled in Reed’s IHP, said the test is “elitist and exclusionary,” and hoped dropping it would improve the diversity of the program.

      Now for the expert analysis:

      Recognizing gifted students is inherently discriminatory.

      Yes! This is true, following from the quote, as long as the thing that is "inherently" discriminated for is socioeconomic background. Of course, Animats immediately makes it about race.

      [insert common race science stats here] There are other numbers from other sources, but they all rank in that order. There's a huge amount of denial about this. There are more articles trying to explain this away than ones that report the results.

      AKA I disagree with the analysis and consensus that all this IQ stuff is socioeconomic rather than genetic.

      (Average US Black IQ has been rising over the last few decades, but the US definition of "Black" includes mixed race. That may be a consequence of intermarriage producing more brown people, causing reversion to the mean. IQ vs 23 and Me data would be interesting. Does anyone collect that?)

      Jesus fucking christ.

      Gladwell's new book, "The Revenge of The Tipping Point" goes into this at length. The Ivy League is struggling to avoid becoming majority-Asian. Caltech, which has no legacy admissions, is majority-Asian. So is UC Berkeley.[3]

      Nobody tell this guy that Gladwell is black.

      Of course, this may become less significant once AI gets smarter and human intelligence becomes less necessary in bulk. Hiring criteria for railroads and manufacturing up to WWII favored physically robust men with moderate intelligence. Until technology really got rolling, the demand for smart people was lower than their prevalence in the population.

      I guarantee that in the not happening future where AI is smarter than humans, chuds like this guy will still be racist.

      We may be headed back in that direction. Consider Uber, Doordash, Amazon, and fast food. Machines think and plan, most humans carry out the orders of the machines. A small number of humans direct.

      🙄🙄🙄

  • New post from Brian Merchant: No thanks to generative AI, which is about AI-run publisher Spines and their attempt to enshittify the literature world. Pulling a paragraph near the end here:

    For another, the needle can move here; if the noise is loud enough, AI publishing can get slapped with a stigma that can at least help slow the erosion of the industry. Public shame can be a powerful tool, when warranted! So yeah: This is why I’m thankful that we’re building this community, and that there are people out there willing to go to the mat to oppose things like the AI-enabled automation of book production. (I fully resent that ‘AI enabled automation of book production’ is a phrase I had to write in 2024.)

    Giving my thoughts, I feel Merchant and co. have a headstart when it comes to moving the needle here, for two main reasons:

    • AI has been thoroughly stripped of whatever "wow factor" - showing off that your gen-AI system can make books isn't gonna impress Joe Public the way it would've back in '22 or '23.
    • The one-two punch of the slop-nami and the plagiarism lawsuits have indelibly associated "AI" as a concept with "zero effort garbage made of stolen shit" - as a consequence, using or supporting it will immediately disgust a good portion of the crowd right out of the gate
131 comments