we need to bring back machinima

I call dibs on being represented by the left pong paddle, lovingly recorded from the analog output of an Atari Pong TTL standup (or FPGA equivalent)

Why Choose AI Pastor?

usually because I’m tired of carne asada

wow, remember when a bunch of random posters came to that security thread to try and gaslight us into thinking the very similar attack described in @dgerard@awful.systems’s blog post wasn’t a security vulnerability? and now it’s a Black Hat talk, aka “you fucked up and now the world knows about it”

“It’s kind of funny in a way - if you have a bot that’s useful, then it’s vulnerable. If it’s not vulnerable, it’s not useful,” Bargury said.

holy fuck that’s damning. LLMs are so worthless on their own that they can’t do anything unless you’ve got everything hooked up to RAG, which is just a wide-open API with access to all your data.

I like the idea of small communities, but a major issue (possibly the biggest issue) as demonstrated by many mastodon servers over the years is longevity. What happens when your admin gets bored/burns out/dies/goes fash/is replaced with an asshole/is unable or unwilling to moderate effectively?

this is something I’ve been thinking on quite a lot myself — how do we (being a small web service without effectively unlimited VC money to burn on cloud credits or an entrenched corporate infrastructure) have continuity in case anything happens? and as an established community, that continuity has to encompass our infrastructure, our data, and the understanding and expectations that make moderation work.

• for infrastructure, we’re somewhat ok — our deployment code is open, and there’s just enough docs that a replacement admin can spin up an identical cluster with a bit of work
• data’s a lot harder. I’d love to regularly publish a dump of our database with the sensitive details redacted to as many places as is practical (there’s a bunch of archive sites for this), but that would open us to a number of garden-variety and lemmy-specific attacks (and I won’t be describing those in public for obvious reasons, but established posters can inquire in DMs). most likely in the short term this’ll involve rsyncing full database and image storage dumps to trusted parties on a regular basis, though I’m open to any better ideas.
• the problem of guaranteeing continuity of moderation is unsolved. the only idea I have in this direction is effectively a guild or co-op model that’d exist to teach and certify moderators and admins how to maintain communities like ours. I haven’t taken any steps in this direction, and there’s a lot to the idea that’s still effectively magic (how should certification work? what systems should be in place in case of bad actors? should this thing itself be a mostly technical solution or a mostly social one?), but it could potentially guarantee moderator continuity for federated systems other than ours too.

my thoughts on paully’s output are along the same lines — it’s really a shame that he’s the guy a lot of people learned Lisp from, because it’s very clear he’s just a rich white guy bullshitting on that and every other topic he’s famous for

also, this stood out from a quote in your first linked post:

Server-based deployment of software was a central theme in Graham’s essays, and his continuation-based web framework was an interesting and fairly novel way to create continuity across multiple requests in a single session.

Seaside did this first, though it never got a ton of traction. if naive continuations are how the orange site’s doing sessions and state tracking, that goes a long way towards explaining why it’s so incredibly bad at scaling and has such weird performance characteristics. there’s ways to make continuations more performant in this role, but it takes a degree of low-level understanding paully’s never demonstrated, since his languages have always been built on top of Racket (which is a fine language for making languages! it’s fun as hell! but one day you will run out of runtime to repurpose)

(I should see if Racket finally has good LSP support for #lang languages. I’d seriously use it so much more if I could bring my own editor)

also, holy shit those responses to your second linked post really haven’t aged well at all, have they?

thanks to the EU, those three electronics experts are now 1.5 door-to-door vacuum cleaner salespeople

Tom Clancy’s CrowdStrike sounds like the kind of military fiction I’d accidentally buy from the thrift store

I’ll see what I can find for longer form stuff! the Marques Brownlee review is of course recommended listening if you haven’t yet — he really tore into the thing in a way they never recovered from. I haven’t given it a listen myself, but it looks like the 404media podcast discussed some of the articles they wrote tearing the AI Pin down, which were quite good

and the depressing part is, I’m pretty sure that unlike the R1 this thing won’t have any off-label use cases as a weird hackable gadget or an Android cyberdeck for big Teenage Engineering fans

there’s a button on that site that activates what I’ve decided is Piss Noir mode, because it makes everything monochrome except the buttons and other random elements, which are neon yellow

off you fuck

…I mean look, it’s not that I don’t like wearing my glasses, they’re just uncomfortable (because I don’t wear them)

this is just how I look

ah yeah, the well-known nter2 Rust function that lets you… enter the number 2, you know?

this isn’t sneer material but I’m a bit too exhausted to post a thread specifically for it: I stumbled upon PieFed and it looks really promising — a few of the architectural decisions are similar to ones I’d make, and lately I’ve become a lot more open to running Python in production (and it’s going to be much less awful to hack on too)

this could be a viable path forward if we decide lemmy is a rotten codebase (it is) and PieFed gets closer to feature parity with what we’ve got now

the official word is that we can now sneer on our choice of an enshittified website with weird vibes or a federated nuthouse running on broken software nobody likes. enjoy!

I was honestly gonna defed just by the domain name alone but I was finally able to check out their instance and hoo boy of course there’s a Nazi-looking skull logo

what quaint, 90s flavored racism this is

it can stay in the 90s

no I’ll do it for you

to be honest, I’m getting a weird vibe off the resurrected /r/SneerClub in general. that might just be me though