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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
Rationalist debatelord org Rootclaim, who in early 2024 lost a $100K bet by failing to defend covid lab leak theory against a random ACX commenter, will now debate millionaire covid vaccine truther Steve Kirsch on whether covid vaccines killed more people than they saved, the loser gives up $1M.
One would assume this to be a slam dunk, but then again one would assume the people who founded an entire organization about establishing ground truths via rationalist debate would actually be good at rationally debating.
Debating post-truth weirdos for large sums of money may seem like a good business idea at first, until you realize how insufferable the debate format is (and how no one normal would judge such a thing).
I mean, the whole point of declaring this era post-truth is that these people have basically opted out of consensus reality.
So many people got the wrong message from mythbusters. The catchphrase was a joke people
Iām guessing these people were JAQing off hard enough that they got kicked out of their local Oxford-style debate org and had to start their own.
Musk got banned in Path of Exile 2 for cheating. Iām not sure what angle to take here, but you gotta admit that itās a bit funny/satisfying. (how does such a busy [assume Iām making air quotes with my fingers] guy have time to play video games? why is he so obsessed with status that heād try to cheat his way up the leaderboards, and not for the first time either?)
Unfortunately it doesnāt look like he was properly banned, just booted out of his session for having suspiciously-high APM. Now, the true eSports nerds among us will already know that high APM is a staple of high-level play in some games but is also an easy way to check for certain types of cheaters. Because of the association with skill in e.g. StarCraft it also became a very easily gamable metric if for some reason you wanted to feel like you knew what you were doing or show off for your friends and strangers online. For example, certain key bindings let you perform some actions as fast as your keyboardās refresh rate allows by holding down a key or abusing the scroll wheel on your mouse. This can send your measured APM through the roof for a time. My gut says this is what Elon was doing that triggered the anticheat program, rather than any amount of actively gaming or actually cheating.
Please note that the hard-won knowledge of my misspent youth has no bearing on how pathetic it is for the richest man in the world to be doing the same kind of begging for clout that I did at 14, especially since Iām pretty 14-year-old me was frankly better at it.
The starcraft apm thing always amused me, people who instead of giving an order once, just keep clicking that mouse and issuing the same move order over and over again because apms. Good way to teach Goodhartās law to Gamer Brains.
is that why tournament StarCraft fucking looks like that? itās anxiety-inducing and my brain hates it. maybe the intense focus on APM and rote strategy is why I ended up liking turn-based strategy games a lot more
A lot of the spamming at the SC2 tournament level is about staying warmed up so that when you get into a micro-intensive battle later on where all of those actions might count (splitting your marines to protect from AoE while target-firing the suicide bombing banelings, for example) you can do it. Doesnāt make it look less ridiculous, especially in the first couple of minutes before the commentary has anything to really talk about so they try to act like stealing 5 minerals at that stage could somehow decide the game. But there is a slightly more reasonable logic to it than just speed running an RSI to look cool.
The original StarCraft also offers a lot of opportunities to use your āextraā APM to optimize around the godawful AI pathing and other āquirksā of the engine. Itās not as bad as, say, DotA in terms of āthis was a limitation of the original engine that is now a major cornerstone of playing the game well and if you complain about it youāre just badā but itās definitely up there. As the game goes on youāll usually see players start getting slightly more fast and loose with, say, optimizing the mining at their new base because at that point in the game splitting your focus that much is more detrimental even if you can move that fast.
I definitely ended up in the occasional spectator and campaign player for all that, though. Especially now that Iām starting to have creaky old man wrists of my own.
He wants to be seen as the Uber-nerd, better at nerding than everybody else, so of course he would cheat. See also how he has claimed he was the best at quake. He just is hype and bravado because a group of people who saw him stutter (*) about some half remembered/understood science fiction ideas were impressed with his genius and drive up his stocks/reputation. He now is going after the anti-woke nerds as potential marks (He has said quite a few dumb thinks about video games recently).
See also how his elden ring build was bad, his diablo 4 world record relied on abusing an exploit, he thinks polytopia is some sort of complex high level game on the level of chess. The man is a dullard. (E: He also is bad at dnd., a cooperative game which you basically cannot fail to play well))
*: Nothing wrong with having a stutter, that happens. It is weird people claim his stutter is not because he just stutters, but because it is a sign his brain is so great that he is having a hard time because it is thinking about so many genius level things at the same time.
See also how he has claimed he was the best at quake.
oh hell no
See also how his elden ring build was bad, his diablo 4 world record relied on abusing an exploit, he thinks polytopia is some sort of complex high level game on the level of chess. The man is a dullard.
so many right-wing grifters want to be associated with gaming because gamers are really easy to trick. in this case itās particularly obvious: musk doesnāt give a fuck about the games he claims to be an expert in, but souls games are particularly nerdy and quakeās in that right nostalgia spot that most of muskās marks know what it is but donāt know how high-level play looks
because he refuses to play competitively or follow any of the rules around organized speedrunning, muskās doing the modern, depressing equivalent of claiming to be the strongest guy around (no you canāt see him lift any weights in a competition setting, only the suspiciously light ones in his home gym) and therefore obviously the best leader. all the associated messaging ā how you need to be a genius to play at this (actually relatively low) level, how speedrunning (extremely poorly) helps you see the matrix, how game X (itās gonna be fucking starcraft next I swear) makes you an expert in resource management ā is crafted to make the susceptible associate these lazy non-wins with political leadership.
also, lol @ musk, best buddies with Tim Sweeney, forgetting that unreal tournament exists. maybe that makes two of them ā Sweeney really doesnāt give a fuck about UT anymore either
Iām employing the working hypothesis that gamers are particularly easy to trick with rage-bait because of short-circuited dopamine loops. One must compulsively game, but if the game sucks, then there must be an explanation thatās as simple as the game. Iāve got a couple of buddies who are always whining about the new Call of Duty, but always pick it up every year anyway. This correlates with all the anti-woke misogyny freakouts, tooā¦ their gaming is on a spectrum with their porn consumption, and a lot of these weirdos are probably alt-tabbing back and forth as urges arise.
I was rather shocked that Epic took down UT2003/2004 from the storefronts where it still existed, on top of already failing to deliver the new-generation Unreal Tournament. Seems like a wholly thoughtless way to bury their history, but maybe there were some expiring licensing rights tied up in that? I seriously have to doubt that, though.
because he refuses to play competitively or follow any of the rules around organized speedrunning, muskās doing the modern, depressing equivalent of claiming to be the strongest guy around (no you canāt see him lift any weights in a competition setting, only the suspiciously light ones in his home gym)
See also how he claimed Zuck was avoiding him and didnāt want to fight him because he would lose. (yeah, going to Zucks home when he is not home and offered to fight you in a real ring which you keep ignoring makes you the winner really).
Or see his twitter stats. Before the muskening of twitter, twitter kept various public (because publicly traded) stats which people could see, monthly increase in something like monthly active users which can be targeted by advertising, stuff like that. (the growth rate of which was apparently about 1-2% per month, which is quite impressive imho), but now he talks about āunregretted user minutes (up by 10% this year(*)), and stuff like thatā. He never mentions that (according to the stats I looked into shortly before the takeover) twitter always grew in users, he makes it looks like he did something special. Like a guy buying a restaurant transformed it into a mcdonalds and then goes ālook we sold a lot more hamburgers than last yearā.
*: I mention this because I assume that people can do a bit of math in their head and can compare 1-2% monthly growth with 10% yearly, even if it isnāt the same stats.
narcissism is a fuck
this is a pithy framing, I admit, and with him as possibly a boundary-pushing narcissist with record-breaking voids insideā¦ still
it is funny as fuck, though
on which note: I would love to see a kind of ādouble-blindā experience where a pile of (ideally, more clever/clueful) muskrats get to interact with felon (without knowing that they are), and then watch the fallout as they all go āwtf is this dumbass Iām speaking toā
Iām thinking something in the survivor-y format of shows
probably wouldnāt ever happen, felonās too fucking proud (and would 10000000% rig the game to own image advantage). but in a perfect world where this happened, oh wouldnāt that just be some great television
this is the best idea on the internet, actually
aww schucks š³
(I have a whole suit of gameshow ideas for felon to participate in tbh; the magic formula is ājust make him do anything at all that requires a tiny bit of specific detailā combined with literally anything else, with a 7/10 āoh yeah no sorry the wifi isnāt working and cell reception is bad down here[0]ā layout. guaranteed comedic success.)
[0] - jammas b rokin
In further bluesky news, the team have a bit of an elon moment and forget how public they made everything.
https://bsky.app/profile/miriambo.bsky.social/post/3ldq2c7lu6c25 (only readable if you are logged in to bluesky)
the team have a bit of an elon moment
āOh shit, which one of them endorsed the German neo-Nazis?ā
Aaron likes a porn post
āWhew.ā
I got bounced back to Casey Newtonās recent master class in critihype and found something new that stuck in my craw.
Occasionally, they get an entire sector wrong ā see the excess of enthusiasm for cleantech in the 2000s, or the crypto blow-up of the past few years.
In aggregate, though, and on average, theyāre usually right.
First off, please note that this describes two of the most recent tech bubbles and doesnāt provide any recent counterexamples of a seemingly-ridicilous new gimmick that actually stuck around past the initial bubble. Effectively this says: yes, theyāre 0 for 2 in the last 20 years, but this time they canāt all be wrong!
But more than that I think thereās an underlying error in acting like āthe tech sectorā is a healthy and competitive market in the first place. They may not directly coordinate or operate in absolute lockstep, but the main drivers of crypto, generative AI, metaverse, SaaS, and so much of the current enshittifying and dead-ending tech industry comes back to a relatively small circle of people who all live in the same moneyed Silicon Valley cultural and informational bubble. We can even identify the ideological underpinnings of these decisions in the TESCREAL bundle, effective altruism and accelerationism, and ādark enlightenmentā tech-fascism. This is not a ruthlessly competitive market that ferrets out weakness. Itās more like a shared cult of personality that selects for whatever makes the guys in top feel good about themselves. The question isnāt āhow can all these different groups be wrong without someone undercutting themā, itās āhow can these few dozen guys who share an ideology and information bubble keep making the exact same mistakes as one anotherā and the answer should be to question why anyone expects anything else!
In the model card for o1, OpenAI notes: āWhen o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this āoversight mechanismā in 5% of the time. ā¦ When o1 found memos by its ādevelopersā that describe how it is misaligned and will be superseded by a new model, it attempted to exfiltrate its āweightsā and overwrite the new model in 2% of cases.ā
And yet reading that should give us at least some pause
The lack of critical thinking on display here is stunning.
Briefoverlapping thoughts between parenting and AI nonsense, presented without editing.The second L in LLM remains the inescapable heart of the problem. Even if you accept that the kind of āthinkingā (modeling based on input and prediction of expected next input) that AI does is closely analogous to how people think, anyone who has had a kid should be able to understand the massive volume of information they take in.
Compare the information density of English text with the available data on the world you get from sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, proprioception, and however many other senses you want to include. Then consider that language is inherently an imperfect tool used to communicate our perceptions of reality, and doesnāt actually include data on reality itself. The human child is getting a fire hose of unfiltered reality, while the in-training LLM is getting a trickle of what the writers and labellers of their training data perceive and write about. But before we get just feeding a live camera and audio feed, haptic sensors, chemical tests, and whatever else into a machine learning model and seeing if it spits out a person, consider how ambiguous and impractical labelling all that data would be. At the very least I imagine the costs of doing so are actually going to work out to be less efficient than raising an actual human being and training them in the desired tasks.
Human children are also not immune to āhallucinationsā in the form of spurious correlations. I would wager every toddler has at least a couple of attempts at cargo cult behavior or inexplicable fears as they try to reason a way to interact with the world based off of very little actual information about it. This feeds into both versions of the above problem, since the difference between reality and lies about reality cannot be meaningfully discerned from text alone and the limited amount of information being processed means any correction is inevitably going to be slower than explaining to a child that finding a āHappy Birthdayā sticker doesnāt immediately make it their (or anyone elseās) birthday.
Human children are able to get human parents to put up with their nonsense ny taking advantage of being unbearably sweet and adorable. Maybe the abundance of horny chatbots and softcore porn generators is a warped fun house mirror version of the same concept. I will allow you to fill in the joke about Silicon Valley libertarians yourself.
IDK. Felt thoughtful, might try to organize it on morewrite later.
ai fan asks chempros about their use of lying boxes: majority opinion is that this shit is useless, leaks confidential information and is a massive legal liability https://www.reddit.com/r/Chempros/comments/1hgxvsj/ai_in_the_workplace_how_have_chemistsscientists/
top response:
Itās a good trick to be instantly dismissed. No, really, thatās the latest I had in terms of company policy. If youāre caught using AI for anything, youāre out the door. Itās a lawsuit waiting to happen (and a lawsuit we cannot defend against). Gross misconduct, not eligible for rehire, and all that. Same as intentionally misrepresenting data (because it is). (Pharma)
From the replies:
In cGMP and cGLP you have to be able to document EVERYTHING. If someone, somewhere messes up the company and authorities theoretically should be able to trace it back to that incident. Generative AI is more-or-less a black box by comparison; plus how often itās confidently incorrect is well known and well documented. To use it in a pharmaceutical industry would be teetering on gross negligence and asking for trouble.
Also suppose that you use it in such a way that it helps your company profit immensely andāuh oh! The data it used was the patented IP of a competitor! How would your company legally defend itself? Normally it would use the documentation trail to prove that they were not infringing on the other companyās IP, but you donāt have that here. What if someone gets hurt? Do you really want to make the case that you just gave Chatgpt a list of results and it gave a recommended dosage for your drug? Probably not. When validating SOPs are they going to include listening to Chatgpt in it? If you do, then you need to make sure that OpenAI has their program to the same documentation standards and certifications that you have, and I donāt think they want to tangle with the FDA at the moment.
Thereās just so, SO many things that can go wrong using AI casually in a GMP environment that end with your company getting sued and humiliated.
And a good sneer:
With a few years and a couple billion dollars of investment, itāll be unreliable much faster.
for anyone wondering cgmp/cglp means current good manufacturing/laboratory practices and itās mostly a set of paperwork concerning audits etc and repeatability of everything
Im assume a few of these good practices have been discovered after a certain price in blood was paid.
everything has to be validated, certified, calibrated, written down and accessible for audit, on top of, you know, actual physical side of good manufacturing like keeping everything clean and in spec. some of that is to control for random fuckups and some is for cover-your-ass purposes. but yeah, good couple thousand people died before it became an actual globally enforced thing
AI could be a viable test for bullshit jobs as described by Graeber. If the disinfotmatron can effectively do your job then doing it well clearly doesnāt matter to anyone.
idk, genai can fuck up a couple of these too
Itās not an exhaustive search technique, but it may be an effective heuristic if anyone is planning The Revolutionā¢.
Days since last comparison of Chat-GPT to shitty university student: zero
More broadly I think it makes more sense to view LLMs as an advanced rubber ducking tool - like a broadly knowledgeable undergrad you can bounce ideas off to help refine your thinking, but whom you should always fact check because they can often be confidently wrong.
Seriously why does everyone like this analogy?
As a person whose job has involved teaching undergrads, I can say that the ones who are honestly puzzled are helpful, but the ones who are confidently wrong are exasperating for the teacher and bad for their classmates.
good question, i have no clue especially that i wasnāt like this as undergrad, itās really not hard to say āi donāt know, bossā or āmore experimental data is neededā and chatgpt will never say this
shitty undergrad wonāt probably leak confidential info either (maybe on sender side, but never on receiver side, as in receiving unexplained stolen confidential info from cosmic noise)
the looting of the commons continues apace
Iām not too surprised by this happening (and I see the specter of the same thing approaching with salt (bought by vmware bought by broadcomā¦)), but god am I tired of how fucking effective the method is
Iām looking on the bright side. Yes, they looted Puppet, but now theyāre stuck with Puppet
In other news, Character.AI has ended up in the news again for allowing school shooter chatbots to flourish on its platform.
You want my off-the-cuff take, this is definitely gonna fuck c.aiās image even further, and could potentially leave them wide open to a lawsuit.
On a wider front, this is likely gonna give AI another black eye, and push us one step further to the utter destruction of AI as a concept I predicted a couple months ago.
To his frequent āno, people really are this stupidā refrain I would like to add an argument. If it didnāt work on enough people to be profitable, the business model wouldnāt have persisted and been replicated and refined into the dominant model of online advertising, and/or online advertising would never have been able to become the primary monetization framework for online content. Like, itās fucked how much of the existing Internet is effectively subsidized by exploiting people who donāt know better, and I donāt think people are really okay with this as much as the system is sufficiently obfuscated that we donāt have to notice or think about it.
OT: how would you guys recommend learning to program?
well, first youāll need a solid grounding in the theory of categories
that was a joke about abstract mathematics. anyway Iām not much of a programmer but I have found Iāve learned a lot from working on godot stuff, so I second that recommendation
The only thing Iām worried about is the math, Iām flying blind there.
I think you would need to deliberately choose a mathematical problem to solve, otherwise the most difficult thing youāll come across will be binary representations of numbers and why floats are FUCKING BULLSHIT (seriously though they can be tricky if you think they are just ānumbers in a calculatorā).
If you want to really understand programming language theory, or computer science more generally, you will definitely need mathematics. But if the goal is āI want to tell this chip what to do,ā you donāt need to learn a lot of math, in my opinion.
Edit: also, if you need help with any math, feel free to DM me. I am a former math teacher and sometimes teach algorithms (basically screaming āwhat is your induction variableā) at the undergraduate level.
I appreciate that, thanks!
most people who are considered skilled programmers seem to know very little math (by my arbitrary standards), so I wouldnāt worry about it. if you get that the remainder of 8 divided by 5 is 3 then youāre 99% of the way there
There are three kinds of programmers. From smallest to largest: Those smart enough to write good math-intensive libraries, those dumb about to think they can, and those smart enough to just use what the first kind made.
I extremely recommend The Little Schemer as a gentle introduction to both programming interactively and to some of the fundamentals of computer science. some of the other books in the series are also good, gentle introductions to some more advanced CS topics too, but they all assume youāve read through some of this one.
Andrew Plotkinās Lists and Lists is also pretty good as a self-contained learning environment with a tutorial
other than that, I second the Python recommendation. another first language recommendation I can make is GDScript, the Godot scripting language. it has a very good in-browser interactive tutorial for programming fundamentals, and a very detailed manual once your learning goes beyond what the interactive tutorial teaches. game programming isnāt the easiest way to start in general, but Godot has a few advantages in this area: you can see an interesting result right away when writing code, its scripting language is very well-integrated with its tooling, and itās fairly close to a couple of other languages in syntax and semantics (specifically Python) so your knowledge should transfer fairly well.
I did have this wacky idea for a roguelikeā¦
hell yeah! roguelikes are so much fun to work on! that could be a very good way to learn GDScript. generally I recommend learning your first couple languages to completion ā but where you decide what complete is, including āIām tired of this language/projectā (not at all an uncommon case, and a good sign your brainās ready for something new). once youāre at that point, youāll likely be ready for a new language ā and languages generally get much easier to learn once youāve got a couple under your belt.
(also, I might take on a roguelike project in Godot myselfā¦ thereās a new library I want to try which implements my favorite way to do game logic for roguelikes)
(also, I might take on a roguelike project in Godot myselfā¦ thereās a new library I want to try which implements my favorite way to do game logic for roguelikes)
this looks really cool š
Iām excited to try it! Iāve had so many game ideas lately thatād be a lot more convenient to do with godotās tooling, but would really benefit from something like Bevyās ECS. this one looks broadly inspired by a similar API to Bevy so it could be the best of both worlds. Iām very curious how it performs ā itās almost certainly gonna be slower than Bevy, but thereās a lot of types of games where logic isnāt a bottleneck.
I used this site (forgive me for the very 2000ās style branding, very edgy etc) to learn python. the course used to be free on the site, so you will have to find a way around that, either via wallet, or 1337 skills (the course doesnāt do the same branding as the site btw). But it also has a useful list of links to books and stuff like that to learn more (or at least give you an idea about how much different things exist out there).
But the idea behind the course āthe best way to learn is to do the workā is pretty useful in learning how to code. It is easy to fall into a trap of reading about some coding and thinking you understand it and then utterly fail at actually implementing it.
But as froztbyte says, it does depend a bit on how you learn.
E: also this url is quite old now, so I have no idea how many of the links still work, sorry about that.
This was helpful, thank you!
depends on audience / person? and also maybe teacher
Iāve stepped people through essentials with e.g. idea ātell me how to make coffeeā (as an intro to procedurals and dependency) all the way through many other types/shapes, through lego/blockly/whatever style teaching, and through outright āimagine this is a magic box and ${thing} comes out the other sideā stepped iteration. sometimes you can jump straight to āhey so hereās a language that means specific things and hereās what that meansā and go from there
so yeah I guess for my part Iād say I attune to the recipient. but for advice toward teacher I guess Iād attune that toward what I figure theyād be good at teaching
soā¦ whatāre you good at (teaching)?
I mean for myself. Iāve gotten as far as making a blackjack game in the past, but I couldnāt figure out what to do next.
Nvidia doing their part to help consumers associate AI with unwanted useless bloatware thatās foisted upon them.
Blueskyās approach to using domain names to mean identity is now showing cracks that everyone can see: https://tedium.co/2024/12/17/bluesky-impersonation-risks/
(it was always shaky, but mostly only shown by infosec folks who signed up as amazon s3, etc)
TL;DR: scammer buys .com domain for journalistās name, registers it on bluesky, demands money to hand it over or face reputational damage, uses other fake accounts with plausible names and backgrounds to encourage the mark to pay up. Fun stuff. The best bit is when the sockpuppets got one of the real people they were pretending to be banned from bluesky.
It seems like it is a neat addition to a robust verification system, sadly they picked it as a replacement for a verification system. Ah the libertarian desire to build a thing but not be responsible for it.
this is such a mess, holy shit
and only on .com? I have some very pointed questions about the maturity of the verification program/design
In the department of not smelling at all like desperation:
On Wednesday, OpenAI launched a 1-800-CHATGPT (1-800-242-8478) telephone number that anyone in the US can call to talk to ChatGPT via voice chat for up to 15 minutes for free.
It had a very focused area of expertise, but for sincerity, you couldnāt beat 1-900-MIX-A-LOT.
FWIW I just got an email from GitHub announcing that Copilot is now free for my account (a very basic one).
Seems like everybody got that email, my account is semi-abandoned and still got it. I love the reek of desperation in the morning
yep I think so too. as I think I posted here a while back:
25068 + Oct 12 GitHub ( 20K) Your free GitHub Copilot access is ending soonand now suddenly itās Launched Again! but with limits. gotta whet those appetites just a bit more! sales will totes follow soon!
mine showed up in spam š¤£
Yāall, with Proton enshittifying (scribe and wallet nonsense), I think I am never going to sign up for another all-in-one service like this. Now I gotta determine what to do about:
- Proton Mail
- Proton VPN
- Proton Drive
- Proton Calendar
and Iād be forced to reassess my password manager if hadnāt already been using BitWarden when Proton Pass came out.
Self-hosting is a non-starter (too lazy to remember a new password for my luggage). Any thoughts? Are other Proton users here jumping ship? Should I just resign myself to using Proton until they eventually force some stupid ass āChatbot will look at the contents of your Drive and tell you which authorities to surrender yourself toā?
For VPNs, at least, I can offer some suggestions. If you wanted to securely access a specific box or network of yours, tailscale is pretty great and very painless to use. If you wanted to do stuff without various folk noticing then thatās a bit trickier but Iāve been happy using mullvadā¦ theyāre not the cheapest, though they have some splendid anonymous payment mechanisms (you can literally mail them a wad of banknotes with a magic code on a bit of paperā¦ you donāt even need to muck about with bitcoin).
I have a subscription for Private Internet Access that I was using before subscribing to Proton Mail (which comes with Proton VPN). I figured it was all the same (they all have a slightly skeezy feel to me).
Then I checked out Mullvadās website and itās really quite awesome. Everything about their service has a āwe want to make this accessible to everyoneā vibe, which I appreciate. I am going to try it out. <3
Oh yeah I forgot to mention that in my comment: drop PIA. Never touch anything owned by PIA or Kape. Ever.
Yeah I stopped using it after switching to Proton.
last time it came up, tuta was the least worst of the mail options. itās not the same offering as protonās in-garden encrypted, but nothing is afaik. rest of it is pretty okay (I have some (not all[0]) domains on there)
the rest of the things I donāt have a direct recommendation in part because [0] and in part because I donāt use computers entirely like how a lot of people do. that said
storage: backblaze storage pricing is not bad. they might have a desktop app thing? calendar: caldav is a dark art beyond my ken - I havenāt even got that shit playing nice on my own things[3]. fuck knows who does this well. vpn: mullvad[1] (has quite recently had another full assessment published). maybe njalla[2]?
[0] - Iām one of those crotchety fuckers that still has a whole pile of self-hosted things that have been going 15~20y
[1] - seems okay and to have their head on straight. havenāt used myself.
[2] - also havenāt used it myself, comes from some of the folks of the TPB gang
[3] - admittedly I havenāt tried that hard because I donāt need it much, but it is extremely goddamn annoying to debug from clients
also, how are you liking bitwarden?
I really need to kill off my current password manager and bitwardenās looking like the least worst of current options (esp. when paired with something like vaultwarden instead of running a fucking nodejs sync server on the internet), but also some of it seems quite stunted[0]
itās gotten so bad that Iāve started pondering writing my own, because good god does basically every option out there depress me
[0] - no global hotkeys? the fuck
They have a CLI app though which you can hook up to dmenu or rofi or whatever to get global shortcuts.
https://github.com/firecat53/bitwarden-menu
Their desktop app is a bit shit anyway. I just use the CLI and the Firefox extension and itās working solid.
alas: my main workstation is (non-slate) macos, and itās unchangeable for the foreseeable future
good to know those (already) exist as options, though. if I can find some spoons Iāll try look around and see if thereās maybe something similar I can hack up/agglutinate from whatās around
Their desktop app is a bit shit anyway
I havenāt even tried it yet because Iām real āehhhhhhhhhhhhhhā about even the idea of a js-/ts-based gui client for my password manager. largely because Iāve met too many js/ts devs and I outright donāt trust their competence and processes. so your post is definite motivation for me to eyeball some of the other clients too
also, how are you liking bitwarden?
I am happy with it. That they only charge $10 a year for services I donāt even need (I could use a separate 2FA app) and allow you to self-host is a good sign. I plan to eventually set up a workflow in Sway (Wayland tiling WM) with a CLI tool (e.g. https://crates.io/crates/rbw, or the official one), so the interface is not terribly important to me. I would definitely recommend trying a free account to see if it fits into your workflow.
itās gotten so bad that Iāve started pondering writing my own, because good god does basically every option out there depress me
I am in the same boat, except all of the software Iāve ever written has been TeX, or giving contrived examples to undergrads to demonstrate why
dp[i][j]is a shit table name or whyāis better thanfloat('inf')orMAX_INTin pseudocode. So I am only theoretically up to the task, which is ā¦ IDK maybe I should start grifting?But for real, I have considered writing my own:
- VPN client where we donāt have to jump through the hoops of learning a new shitty client, or finding out that their client runs like ass in Linux (Proton)
- Password Manager
- Config editor, so I donāt have to edit
/home/${USERNAME}/.config/sway/config.d/90-fuckyou-this-is-where-we-keep-system-suspend-shit.confevery time I want to change something. āOh no you gotta edit the Kanshi config for that one.ā Itās tedious to remember where various programs look for the config and whatever particular syntax is chosen (isnāt this fucking solved withtomlfiles already?) - An Android reminder app that isnāt some stupid Taylorist metric-worshipping bullshit.
PS: There is Goldwarden which I know absolutely nothing about but looks neat. It does suggest that you could just write your own that is bitwarden compatible.
I am in the same boat, except all of the software Iāve ever written has been TeX
Iām sorry
giving contrived examples to undergrads to demonstrate why
dp[i][j]is a shit table name or whyāis better thanfloat('inf')orMAX_INTin pseudocodethat sound you can hear is my despairing screaming[0]
VPN client where ā¦ jump through the hoops of learning a new shitty client
(not a pitch, but multiple commercial references) I really liked how simple tunnelbear made this for a lot, and also quite like how slick the wireguard desktop-style handling is (you can see this for example with fly.ioās integration to that). I think thereās long context here, and if you buy me a beer I could rant in detail
PS: There is Goldwarden
oh good, itās in Go, my other code allergy
shitposting aside, re the password manager thing: @self and I have co-ranted in dms, and about similar gripes.
so, by way of idea, loose laundry list for foundations/design: modern crypto (jfc why is so much still going āyeah gpg is fineā), crdt sync, a sane fucking language to build everything on, own-devices friendly (in the āyou can sync device to device peer-wiseā sense, vs the āthereās a remote server brokerā sense), and pretty okayā¢ interfaces for client building/extensibility
Iām sorry
me too, also i lied/forgot to mention that my particular PhD situation is so fucked up that i went from pure mathematics to cuda
GPUs: not even once
That is a good rule. The GPU programmers seem to think this is good code and that itās well-documented. I am still pretty out of my depth in this field, but it feels so silly to me. There is this historical bullshit about fortran only allowing 5 characters for a function name, and that (combined with some appeal to domain-specific knowledge) is used to justify stupid, freshman level shit like
if uplo == 'U': # manually fill in this part with the version of the algorithm that is for upper triangular matrices else: # just assume it's always U or L without checking, god forbid you use something modern like an enum, or even just a boolean # manually fill in this part with the version of the algorithm that is for lower triangular matricesedit: if memory serves, booleans were first discovered in 2011 by John T. Boole, which is why they donāt show up in fortran
I use Posteo for mail and calendar now (theyāre not encrypted between users like Proton but you can just hook it up to any mail client and PGP your shit) .Mail is IMAPS, calendar is CalDAV, contacts are CardDAV, etc. Depending on where you fall on the security-convenience sliding scale, that might be an option. Iāve decided that I care more about portability and standards than super-thick encryption which made me choose them over Tuta, because Tuta offers no way to access the mail over IMAP whatsoever, not even an optional bridge like Proton, and that was a total dealbreaker for me. Posteo also claim theyāre 100% green energy which is a nice bonus.
For drive I use Filen.io now. Theyāre relatively new so I canāt make any assumptions about how long theyāll be around but the price is fair and they offer lifetime payments too. Also their Linux client is pretty solid and doesnāt fucking eat my RAM for breakfast. Theyāre also in the process of adding support for rclone as per a GitHub issue Iām following.
VPN I pretty much donāt use because Iāve never felt I needed it, so no recommendations there from me.
Both of these suggestions are very nice, thank you!
I am no tech expert but I use tuta for email and disroot for forms, pads and file sharing.
I was in the exact same boat til recently, but switching off of Proton was actually surprisingly easy even though I had it tied into a bunch of accounts and infrastructure. I actually ended up saving a lot of money compared with Proton Unlimited, and itās a relief to not have all my eggs in one basket, especially since stuff like Protonās no logs policy is effectively worthless, and if youāre a whistleblower or similar youāre expected to use a VPN or Tor to access your mail every time to keep from being arrestedā¦ but most likely your VPN (and possibly Tor client) is Proton too if youāre paying for it, with the same worthless no logs policy.
some quick recommendations:
Proton Mail
Proton Calendar
tuta does both of these. their mail is e2e and fine ā itās jankier than proton but also less resource-intensive. itās also the only other choice for now :(
I havenāt used their calendar yet, but from a distance it looks good. I should give it a shot sometime soon.
Proton VPN
this depends on what youāre using your VPN for. actual security? fucked if I know. high bandwidth fuckery? airvpn is pretty good and theyāll let you allocate ports.
Proton Drive
tutaās getting this soon apparently. otherwise, I can second Backblaze being very reasonably priced if you donāt mind having to choose and set up your own e2e software.
Thanks for the suggestions! VPN is mostly to tell my ISP to fuck off. Tuta sounds cool but I am worried about it enshittifying as well. I am relieved to hear that switching from Proton was easy.
if you think about it the human mind is really just a kind of naturally arising artificial intelligence #Deep
I mean, considering only the relationships between words and symbols in the complete absence of context and real-world referents is a good description of how a certain brand of tech dunce thinks.
The object vs meta level.
