TechTakes

With betting markets I often think, so they have all just forgotten the idea of assassination markets?

, 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?

I’m pretty confident of a significant backlash against queer communities in North America in the near term.

It is very disturbing and scary.

They're explicitly carving out an exception to target sexual/gender minorities. And I wonder, given how they are often among the first groups being targeted, and then other groups follow, how long until they add more exceptions? How long until Meta modifies the rules further to e.g. explicitly allow racism too?

Meta/Facebook has never been a good company. But the path they have actively chosen now is so much more evil than before.

I've been around the internet a long time, and even back then when throwing slurs at each other and "making fun" of marginalized groups was, if not accepted, at least tolerated because it was considered some poor attempt at humor, I don't remember ever seeing a rule or passage in any netiquette stating it that explicitly.

It was always "we don't censor speech but don't be an asshole" with a giant asterisk about what both censoring and being an asshole meant, but I don't think I've ever seen even the worst places say, "we explicitly allow hate speech, go ahead".

Holy fucking shitballs.

Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day.

same here. the thing is, I think a lot of us are on awful.systems because we’ve seen far too much of how fascism operates and spreads online. this is an antifascist place; it’s so core to the mission that we don’t publish it as a policy (because a policy can be argued against and twisted and the fash kids love doing that), we just demonstrate it in a way that can’t be ignored. so seeing the first or second (I don’t keep track of these things) most popular social media platform publish a policy whose only purpose is to be used as a weapon against marginalized people, for it to be written in a matter-of-fact “this is just how it is” way, and for essentially nobody outside of the fediverse to push back on it in any real way — that is shocking.

See this is why I try to do my reading here at night, because now when I feel sad and angry for the rest of the day it's gonna be like 5 hours tops.

yud, a technofascist, recently forming opinions against seed oils forms a poop ouroboros with the wellness to fascism pipeline.

Its Yud I think. As someone from Canola-land this shit really grinds my gears.

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

1. this tool^[1]^ is just a proof of concept/prototype
2. it costs less to maintain our tool than to write a more appropriate solution from scratch
3. 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.

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.

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).

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

Oh yeah. I recently wanted to configure something in pipewire... the idea was simple: just creating a boot-persistent audio loopback, i.e. connecting an audio input to an output. I gave up for now after looking at the config examples for that in the documentation. How can such a simple thing need such complex configuration?

As for losing configs, I've started to put all my hand-edited config files in a git repo on my NAS so at least I only have to figure out things once.