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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
My favorite quote from flipping through LessWrong to find something passingly entertaining:
You only multiply the SAT z-score by 0.8 if you’re selecting people on high SAT score and estimating the IQ of that subpopulation, making a correction for regressional Goodhart. Rationalists are more likely selected for high g which causes both SAT and IQ
(From the comments for “The average rationalist IQ is about 122”.)
<insert rant about lizardman constant here again>, and I say that as a person with a sat score of 1650!
E: ow god the first comments are ‘actually you and scott underestimate the derived IQ’
E: in other related new turns out Cephalopods have a higher IQ that the people on themotte. Article unrelated, just thought it was neat.
I bet if they restricted the survey entrants to people who actually write on LW, the score would have been far lower. Has a single article on there contained even a twinge of a useful idea?
Yes it has had good ideas. As rationalwiki said. The good ideas are not new, and the new ideas are not good.
Zuck wants to get back to his roots
It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do: […] 5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
Narrator: this announcement did not, in fact, ease concerns about bias.
Is that a comedy account? The announcement surely reads as if it was…
To add an insult to the injury meta renames pride themed skins in chat https://labyrinth.zone/objects/e129982d-997e-489b-985a-3ef547b66bf3
It’s not. Surprise! All of Silicon Valley has gone mask off in preparation for the new administration in Washington!
Ah i recall somebody got mad when I mentioned traditionally capitalists will team up with fascists.
Maybe I was naive, but I didn’t expect all this to go that fast and that blatant…
Isn’t this just an economic move dressed up as an ideological one?
If only all those sneaker companies had thought to say they had to move their factories from America to Chinese sweatshops because American workers were too woke.
Just want to share this great term & definition “hyperkludge” coined by Jonathan Korman (@miniver on bsky and masto)
Examples off the top of my head:
- Almost everything about TCP/IP stack
- NETCONF
- YAML
- Most things related to cars and car infrastructure
- Alcohol
- Chiclet keyboards
- Unicode Han unification
- Layer 2 SDN
- Kubernetes
- JavaScript
- Disk partitioning
- UEFI
- Public transit fares
Edit: checked the link and was surprised our lists didn’t have any ones in common (though I considered including MS Excel).
- MS-DOS and Windows, of course…
- but, and this will get some boos, Unix as a workstation OS compared with every other non-windows workstation OS
@self @bitofhope UNIX is arguably the canonical example, see The UNIX-HATERS Handbook
After reading some of the counterpoints here, I began thinking about how I considered Excel a hyperkludge if you qualify it enough. I realized the qualifications apply to every programming language (good ol’ Turing Completeness). I think, in my case, the common scenario of
- this tool[1] is just a proof of concept/prototype
- it costs less to maintain our tool than to write a more appropriate solution from scratch
- our infrastructure is now the tool
had me erroneously criticizing the tool instead of its application[2]. In the case of Excel, I worked a few jobs where the spreadsheets used when the company was small led to an absolute nightmare after the company grew.
I appreciate the thoughtful responses from everyone. <3
1: Usually a spreadsheet, in my experience.
2: Noting that, while “it’s not the tool, it’s the application” is a common refrain from people using tools in shitty ways, there is a distinction between “this is the wrong tool for the job” and “this tool will hurt people”.
ehh. even in the original text it rapidly decays into anything that annoys him is a hyperkludge. Successful things have problems that are only problems of success.
Saying that Excel is not and never was a good solution for any problem feels like a rather blinkered, programmer-brained technique.
I’m surprised that alphabetical lists are included. Maybe my brain has completely rotten, but keeping the data sorted is pretty neat for efficient processing
yeah that is an interesting example. I immediately applied the term to commercial products. Like Notion for example - funny because I always say Notion takes wikis which are well established in their usefulness and just slaps them into saas product with other things like docs and spreadsheets (also well established in their usefulness) - but he calls wikis themselves a hyperkludge but what superior thing did wikis kill by network effects?
Counterpoint: to what extent are hyperkludges actually a unique thing versus an aspect of how technologies and tools are integrated into human context? Like, one of the original examples is the TCP/IP stack, but as anyone who has had to wrangle multiple vendors can attest a lot of the value in that standardization necessarily comes from the network effects - the fact that it’s an accepted standard. The web couldn’t function if you had a bespoke protocol stack hand-made to elegantly handle the specific problems of a given application not just because of the difficulty in building that much software (i.e. network effects on the design and construction side) but because of how unwieldy and impractical it would be to get any of those applications in front of people. The fit of those tools for a given application is secondary to how much more cleanly the entire ecosystem can operate because they are more limited in number.
The OP also talks about how embedded the history of a given problem is in the solution which feels like the central explanation for this trend. In that sense a hyperkludge isn’t a unique pattern that some things fall into and more a way of indicating a particularly noteworthy whorl in the fractal infinikludge that is all human endeavors.
Yud is against seed oils, right? Or was that Siskind? I have a vague memory of the topic coming up but was unable to substantiate it in the 22 seconds of archive-searching that I was willing to do.
Its Yud I think. As someone from Canola-land this shit really grinds my gears.
Ah, here’s the post I was thinking of; I missed it somehow.
OT: I remember linux on the desktop as a meme, but like, when did this actually happen? I don’t think ai noticed.
At some point in the last years, playing games on Linux turned from fiddling three hours with a Wine config to maybe get an hour of 30fps before the next crash into a legit better experience than Windows that works out of the box in most cases. That did sell a lot of people on giving it a try.
I guess it happened when Valve went all-in on Proton. And Microsoft first adding ads into Windows and now forcing their autoplag on everyone helped a bit, too.