smiletolerantly, smiletolerantly@awful.systems

Awesome! Have fun. And I know I’m just an internet rando, but feel free to ask here/dm if you get stuck with something. The initial learning cliff definitely exists, but it’s absolutely worth it!

Not really. (When was last time?)

The reason is more that the config language that you have to learn if you want to use NixOS is the exact same you use to package applications for NixOS.

So any user is also just a tiny, non-intimidating step away from being a contributor and package maintainer.

I know for myself, I never packaged for the AUR - just seemed way to intimidating and a lot of new stuff to figure out - but I maintain a bunch of packages and modules in nixpkgs, and they’re all stuff that was “huh, this is cool but not packaged yet; alright, I’ll package it in my private config; oh that was easy, let’s upstream it”.

Nothing else even comes close, except the AUR, but even that not really:

https://repology.org/repositories/graphs

Wait wat. Then how am I supposed to express exactly that? I only realized I was trans close to graduating high school. All my close friends up to that point had been male. Male gender stereotypes influenced what I did in my free time, how I behaved in class, how I saw the world.

It took effort to shed some of that. Maybe it’s because I haven’t heard it used in a transphobic context yet, but “I was male socialized” is, I’d have said up to this post at least, very apt.

1. Signal
2. XMPP
3. Matrix

In that order. I self-host both XMPP and Matrix, and I wouldn’t want to stop using matrix. Spaces, arbitrary amounts of self-chats, and so on are great. I use matrix every day.

But for chatting… It sooner or later fails you. It’s slow. Notifications break. Messages are shown as sent, but somehow do not appear in the recipient’s devices until TWO WEEKS LATER (yeah IDK, happened twice already, in different chats and directions. Best part is, I’m not even federated!). Encryption is great IF YOU KNOW SOME CRYPTOGRAPHY BASICS, and utterly confusing otherwise.

XMPP just works. Especially the calls, holy shit, I had to fight Matrix for so long to make voice and video calls work, and xmpp just… Works. Notifications are way more reliable (as in, have been absolutely perfect). I really like monocles as a chat app on Android. (The downside is: can’t decrypt old messages on new devices, and desktop clients are ugly.)

So why Signal above XMPP?

Because it’s not your fault should something ever break in a vital service. Also the encryption and privacy afforded by it a great.

Straight out in the first book Culture is shown as the bad guy, civilization that is not alive and has to be destroyed. It wins eventually but the point stands: Culture kind of like the Borg, absorbing humanoid species and growing without limits.

No, not really. Very intentionally by Banks, we see the Culture through the eyes of Bora in the first book. Bora hates the Culture, for his own ideological reasons. He believes that the Culture makes people soft and complacent and lacking agency, but we’re shown in the book how he’s wrong.

Further, he allies with the Idirans - a strictly worse civilization: brutal, imperialist, religious zealots who squash the civilizations they capture below their feet, breeding and dumbing them down to serve them.

The Culture is absolutely nothing like the Borg. The Borg forcefully concquer unwilling participants and suppress their individuality to force them into essentially slave labor.

The Culture grows by the merit of people wanting to join it. No-one is forced to. Their ideals are just something resonating with people. Individuals’ needs are fully taken care of, but in complete opposite of the Borg, it’s to enable each member to fully flourish and live their life to their own aspirations, free from material desperations.

I’m sorry, but what you originally wrote is exactly something that would come out of Bora’s mouth, and is just as wrong.

(Btw Banks has talked about how he wanted to first show the Culture through the lens of an enemy, and then dismantle that distorted view.)

No other civilization relies on AI as much. In Hydrogen Sonata you have good description of other civilization that uses digital constructs that are still based on humans, not pure AI. There’s clear distinction between AI controlled Culture and other civilizations. Why other civilizations don’t use AI as much? Because they don’t want be controlled by it.

True, but again, this is something that other civs say about the Culture, not literal reality. Humans, drones and Minds are not equally powerful, sure, not even close; but that there’s no (systemic! Stories sometimes focus on rogue individuals, be they human or machine!) abuse of this, that the Culture is as equitable as can reasonably be imagined, is one of its strengths.

It’s clear AI likes to use people so it manipulates them to do what it wants. Player of Games is clear example of that. In State of the Art AI straight out assassinates a guy who doesn’t want to follow its orders.

Yes, somewhat. The stories intentionally focus on the fringes of the Culture. (Plus, Gurgeh actively decides that he WANTS to get into Contact/SC, knowing that this sort of thing happens, and then is used as a pawn). Regarding the killings: this is part of accepting machine and human equality. If you would bind these superhuman Minds via Three Laws of Robotics or the like, then suddenly we have a class of oppressed machine beings.

I think the main point here is: we focus on the interesting bits and outliers (as Banks himself said), and as I tried to describe above, this issue is not systemic. We see, what, 5 cases like this? In a galaxy of trillions.

In State of the Art Culture is also shows as sterile and boring. Everyone behaves because they don’t have a choice, their actions are meaningless, they don’t really control or anything or advance the civilization.

Somewhat true, but again: you’re mixing what a character expresses about their perception with literal reality. A character, for that matter, who already was on the fringe of the fringens, being an SC agent. It’s also heavily implied that he simply romanticizes earth. Earth is backwater, exciting, chaotic; but if he really just wanted “non-stagnant”, he could have kept his relative safety and went into any of the non-Culture, but alien-acquainted civs.

And heavy, HEAVY disagree on the Culture being meaningless: this even is discussed in the books themselves! The Culture does, from time to time, debate its right to exist; why not sublime? And the answer is, because they’re doing measurable good.

We also see the culture change pretty drastically between, say, Consider Phlebas and Player of Games.

People have more of a sentimental value for AI. It does recognize human as intelligent the same way we recognize that animals are alive. People are sure taken care of but everything is run by AI. People are just pets.

Once again, this is a sentiment expressed by some characters, not literal reality. However, I actually think it’s somewhat close to true. At least in the following sense:

If Minds would stop caring about humanity tomorrow, then Culture citizens would be fucked, the same way your dog would be fucked if you stopped feeding it tomorrow.

However, where the analogy breaks down is that Minds don’t cage, neuter, steal from the wild, or restrict humans and drones. They took over production, transport and so on not because they wanted to keep humans in check, but because to them it’s literally no bother; so why not? Seems like a nice thing to do! I.e. its altruism, and without strings attached.

Note also that the “humans are just pets” argument is expressed multiple times by characters in a derisive way, but never shown to be the truth, and arguably the books show how and why it’s wrong.

Banks and his characters do examine the Culture from various, critical perspectives, which is why I’m so confident to say: the Culture is a Utopia.

(One we’ll never reach.)

No, I’m really happy with fish in general and use its syntax. The only times are things like e.g. a coworker sending me a 3-line script and then not being able to just copy, paste, enter.

Funny, I also went from packer to lazy.nvim, but then hopped off and redid my config in nix. Hadn’t actually heard about the default package manager. That seems like a good thing for the ecosystem!

Okay, you know what… That’s actually better than what I said. Defeat acknowledged.

(However, it still seems a bit silly to me. name="value" will prompt you to enter set name "value", with your exact name/value prefilled. As far as I know, it really is just syntax substitution; or am I wrong here? Are there semantic differences that can’t be translated?)

I’ll second Pocket-ID.

I originally had Authentik setup. It worked well enough. However, their packaging constantly broke and no-one seemed to care.

Switched to Pocket-ID and won’t be looking back. Passkey-based OAuth was all I wanted anyways. (Also, the logins themselves are noticeably faster!)

find modules/nixvim/ -name "*.nix" -type f -exec cat {} + | wc -l
3890

I’d say I’ve spent enough time configuring neovim 😄

(Btw, highly recommend configuring neovim through nixvim if you’re already using nix. Incredibly stable. I had to fix one plugin or another all the time with plain nvim. Now, literally never. Plus, nix run github:<username>/<repo>#nvim on any nix-enabled system, and get dropped into your exact config, keybinds, theme, plugins and all. I’ve set it up to expose language-enabled variants by appending e.g. .go or .python to that command.)

(Sorry my comments tend to go off-topic)

That analogy only holds if they cook the burger for you, hold it in front of you, and go “we don’t make this”, then throwing it out

I just wish fish would accept standard bash syntax in addition.

Like, if you can warn me that “this is not how we set vars in fish, do this instead!” then you could also just, you know, do it.

Ah, I’ve hit an extremely satisfying professional milestone and thought I’d share:

“Being acquainted-enough with the codebase to be able to, with full conviction and a lot of glee, answer my LLM-head colleague simply: ‘Claude is wrong’”.

(Claude was extremely obviously wrong once you spent more than half a second thinking about its claim.)

Why! Why are media so uncritical in their reporting!

https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/openai-ki-hackerangriff-100.html

Sorry, this is in German. It’s about the marketing stunt open ai pulled vis-à-vis “oh no, our new model breached containment and went ahead on its own, yep all by itself, and hacked huggingface! So scary! BTW we’d like to IPO soon and-”

The outlet above, if you’re not aware, isn’t a German news outlet, it’s THE German news outlet. They’re independent of financial interests, in that they’re publicly funded. They have an incredibly solid history of factual reporting.

Which is why it’s so aggregating to see them parrot OpenAI’s claims 1:1.

Also, don’t go in the comments. For every sane “this is obviously a marketing stunt” comment there’s 40+ “we’re cooked” comments sincerely believing this shit.

I’m getting more and more convinced that in the minds of most people, LLMs are alive, waking, thinking beings with intents and an inner life of their own.

You know.

Compared to the much more boring “expensive side-effect free function taking string as input and giving string as output”.

I hate all of this.

I mean… Maybe. But she had two opportunities to do so.

I’m not angry at her in any way, I should clarify. If I was in the same situation? Low paying job, potential for significant additional pay for no extra work? Hard to say no to that.

According to my card statement, Le Crobag (in the Cologne main station).

Oh god, here in Germany, too. Was at a chain bakery in Cologne station a couple of weeks ago, bought something for like 3€. The employee told me “choose on the screen and place your card”, I just automatically placed my card. Nothing happens. “Choose on the screen”.

Oh.

Do I want to tip 15, 25, or 30% for the literally 5 seconds of service I got?

Of course didn’t tip, because wtf.

However, I’m sure in her eyes I was being an asshole. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Every party is incentivized to push for this model.

• payment terminal makers increase the amount of fees they collect
• employees get lured with the promise of making more money
• employers get lured with the idea of being able to reduce expenses wages eventually

(This wasn’t the first time btw, just the most egregious one I’ve encountered)

How about take turns.

Temperatures in my apartment never fell below 32C for a full week straight, including over night with all windows open.