this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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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)

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[–] rook@awful.systems 11 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

And on the subject of AI: strava is adding ai analytics. The press release is pretty waffly, as it would appear that they’d decided to add ai before actually working out what they’d do with it so, uh, it’ll help analyse the reams of fairly useless statistics that strava computes about you and, um, help celebrate your milestones?

https://press.strava.com/articles/stravas-athlete-intelligence-translates-workout-data-into-simple-and

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 9 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Definitely saw an ad today for an AI-powered workout machine. It looks like if Bowflex was made by Tesla and promises to "optimize your workout with every rep" or some such nonsense.

I tried to remember the name of it by googling "AI exercise equipment" and despite the slick branding (it's called Tonal btw) it was like 5th on the list. Do you think it's awkward having all these overlapping grifts? In the pre-internet days I'm imagining like 10 unique traveling snake oil salesmen trying very hard to sell their bullshit over everyone else's in the same tiny frontier town without inviting anyone to look too closely at any of them.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

(it’s called Tonal btw)

Oh no this will make Luke-Jr so mad.

Context, Luke-Jr is an early Bitcoin adopter, literal Florida man, and all-around kook. His wikipedia user page used to be a work of art with an ordered list of his obsessions[1], starting with sedevacantism and including Tonal, an early attempt to promote hexadecimal. Here's a long page on the old Bitcoin wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tonal_Bitcoin. Sadly it never caught on, people don't want to say "bong bitcoin" apparently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Luke-Jr&oldid=593942679

[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I’m vaguely remembering this and not sure where to look for confirmation, but wasn’t Luke-Jr the bitcoin maintainer who put his foot down and blocked a design change that would’ve made bitcoin much more efficient because it would have made it inconvenient for him to run a full node on a slow Florida residential cable internet connection?

people don’t want to say “bong bitcoin” apparently.

that’s weird, I’ve known so many guys whose whole personality is bong bitcoin

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

he also got verry angy when bitcoin ordinals were a thing for like two months

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

he used to distribute a Bitcoin client that censored addresses belonging to an early gambling service, people were mad

he's fractally weird

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 4 weeks ago

the lack of self-awareness is definitely something

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 4 weeks ago

Yes he led the charge against the "bitcoin maxis" who wanted to increase the actual block size to contain more info. (this later became Bitcoin Cash). We had to endure stuff like "UASF" (user activated soft fork) for complicated reasons no-one can explain now.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 4 weeks ago

including Tonal, an early attempt to promote hexadecimal

I am so happy I've seen this, it's so bad.

I will now forever pronounce $2^{16}$ as bong.

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 4 weeks ago

yet another way to write shitty python