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.)
hells yeah it’s time for some action - Drew DeVault is organizing a sit-in protest of Jack Dorsey’s keynote at FOSDEM 2025.
eh? I don’t see Jackie D’s keynote in the schedule, did the threat of a sit-in make them delete it? https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/ edit: oh, it’s linked from Drew’s post.
Some news on the people who own/run protonmail. They are pro Trump
proton’s ceo is, at this moment, trying to post through it on multiple official company accounts
thank fuck I switched to tuta
[I hold up a hand to my earpiece and make a horrified face]
a second milkshake has hit the duck (cw: fetishized racism, you know the one)
I’m waiting to hear back from tuta about what the fuck but this might be the reason why I hop providers again
image description (but see cw)
so somebody at tuta had the idea to write this post on their official account on Twitter:
Don’t get cucked by Big Tech’s invasive policies. Keep your private data safe and secure with state of the art end-to-end encryption with Tutanota.
and then the image attached to the post is a cuckold porn meme I started to describe here but won’t??? because describing the image put me in a really terrible mood??? it’s SFW but trust me you don’t want it. the Black men in the picture have had their faces covered by logos for Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook in that order. the white woman in the picture does not have her face covered. impact font bottom text: “YOUR PERSONAL DATA”
Here is their response:
@mav Yes, this was bad. I did not take a screenshot back then (the post was deleted after 30 minutes), but I scrolled all my way through Mastodon to find our apology:
https://mastodon.social/@Tutanota/108910936764865962
https://mastodon.social/@Tutanota/108910937813834878
This was a mistake, we apologized & we made sure that we would never post something similar again.
At Tuta, we foster honesty, respect & diversity.
We are here to fight for privacy & against Big Tech surveillance. We want everyone to get the respect they deserve.
and this:
@shalf We set up guidelines that all team members on social media duty need to adhere to. We also created a social media review group where we post & discuss every proposal before actually publishing. And it has worked fine ever since. :)
Content of Apology
Dear Privacy Fans,
Last week, on Friday, a post was made on our social media profiles which goes against our core values as team members and as a company. This post was made in poor judgement, without stopping and examining the underlying racist and sexist problems posed by this meme template, and it does not represent the culture and environment of the Tutanota Team. After a period of approximately 30 minutes the offensive post was removed from all platforms and a “brief” apology was posted.
This brief apology does not go far enough to address this mistake and we would like to update everyone on how we are working to address this issue internally and how we will make sure that this does not happen again. As a company we are working with all of our team members to foster a culture that respects diversity in all forms. This is both on a personal level between colleagues, but also at an institutional level by working to create structures which allow diversity to flourish.
I mean… it’s an apology, I don’t know what I was expecting. this still feels like a bigger, redder flag than the one cop who called them a honeypot (and at the same time didn’t seem to know what tuta is) — is this really a service I feel safe recommending marginalized people use? probably not, they should use signal. is it even suitable for the “grandma & drug dealer” use case? that question’s a bit more difficult.
could they really have said or done anything to fix this? shit, I don’t know. maybe I need to dig a lot more into who and what tuta actually is. I ran into one of their (former?) developers on mastodon and they seem to outwardly be marginalized and antifascist. if that’s what tuta’s composed of internally, then I’m a lot more able to trust them. until I do that checking though, I don’t think I’ll recommend tuta to anyone who might need it — the opsec risk of trusting your keypair to a company run by assholes is very high, especially in the current climate.
Well, this Andy dipshit gave an absolute dogshit apology on reddit.
Snippets below:
sophistry and bullshitting
First, while the X post was not intended to be a political statement, I can understand how it can be interpreted as such, and it therefore should not have been made. While we will not prohibit all employees from expressing personal political opinions publicly, it is something I will personally avoid in the future. I lean left on some issues, and right on other issues, but it doesn’t serve our mission to publicly debate this. It should be obvious, but I will say that it is a false equivalence to say that agreeing with Republicans on one specific issue (antitrust enforcement to protect small companies) is equal to endorsing the entire Republican party platform.
andy doesn't know his head from the DNC mascot
Second, officially Proton must always be politically neutral, and while we may share facts and analysis, our policy going forward will be to share no opinions of a political nature. The line between facts, analysis, and opinions can be blurry at times, but we will seek to better clarify this over time through your feedback and input.
The exception to these rules is on the topics of privacy, security, and freedom. These are necessarily political topics, where influencing public policy to defend these values, often requires engaging politically.
The operations of Proton have always reflected our neutrality. For example, recently we refused pressure to deplatform both Palestinian student groups and Zionist student groups, not because we necessarily agreed with their views, but because we believe more strongly in their right to have their own views.
Going from, i will not make any more political statements to
I lean left on some issues, and right on other issues
Is funny, also which issues, come on be specific.
fucking hell. well i guess moving all my shit elsewhere has become my midweek project instead of my procrastinate-project.
EDIT: [rereads and comprehends the tuta addendum] well. cool. i think i’m going to reschedule that “move everything” to after my “scream and cry into a pillow”. anyone have any other recs?
I am also in the “scream and cry” phase of this. However, I have already decided on the following replacements for non-email:
- Mullvad VPN
- Ente for photos and photo backup
2a. their authenticator also slaps - Filen for cloud storage[1]
- Bitwarden for password management
4a.Keyguard is great if you are on Android. I am looking into[2] other (non CLI) Bitwarden-compatible password managers for DesktopI should not have suggested Keyguard, since I am not aware if it has been audited. It was probably a mistake for me to use it at all. Sorry everyone.
edit: Should mention that I am also looking into a calendar replacement.
edit2: maybe mailbox.org? They are recommended on PrivacyGuides.org.
1: This is more like a stopgap for me until I confirm they are worth sticking with or find someone better. The 29.99€ 100GB lifetime storage may be worthwhile for this (though I cannot say whether I am confident they will be around in 5 years, this can at least serve as a short-term solution).
2: lassitude
Filen does photos too, so you could consolidate 2 and 3 into one. I went and bought 500 GB lifetime storage on their Black Friday offer. Let’s see if they stick around. So far the experience has been smooth.
And if you mention mailbox.org, let me throw Posteo.com into the mix. Basically the same offer, but where mailbox presents itself a bit more business-like, Posteo seems to market itself towards individuals. I moved my mails there and are quite happy with it, but you have to roll encryption yourself. No auto solutions like Proton or Tuta.
some of the first research science on promptfondlers and model-affine dipshits is starting to see the light of day and, in what will surprise probably 0% of our regulars, it confirms some things
(I have grumped about their desire for outsourced thinking in the past myself)
Thanks for sharing this. Also
using your own head must weigh far too heavy
absolute chef’s kiss
Read a rumor that zuck’s marriage is falling apart, which scans.
A second divorced man is about to hit the tower.
my first thought on hearing the same was “if this is what he’s like in public, imagine what it’s like at home”
This does have “Divorced Dad” vibes tbh
So, the Wikipedia article about “prompt engineering” is pretty terrible. First source: OpenAI. Second: a blog. Third: OpenAI. Fourth: OpenAI’s blog. ArXiv, arXiv, arXiv… 43 times. Hop on over to the Talk page, and we find this gem:
It is sometimes necessary to make assumptions to write an article (see WP:MNA).
Spoiler alert: that link doesn’t justify anything. It basically advises against going off on tangents: There’s no need to rehash the fact that evolution is a fact on every damn biology page. It does not say that Wikipedia should have an article on some creationist fantasy, like baraminology or flood geology, based entirely on creationist screeds that all cite each other.