today's (later than planned) upgrade to lemmy 0.19.2 provisionally appears to have gone alright. if you see excessive amounts of jank (and your page footer can't decide what version of lemmy it's running on, IE it shows separate FE and BE versions), clear your browser cache and cookies since lemmy doesn't seem to do that cleanly on its own

next up I'm planning to deploy the Proton frontend as an alternative to the default and I'm also going to start pushing code to codeberg (most likely) so stay tuned for that

I’m taking awful.systems down for a bit tomorrow (January 13) around 11 PM GMT because after 16 release candidates and 2 hotfixes, lemmy 0.19.x finally seems like a safe enough upgrade. this is going to be a major one, so I’ll be taking our instance down temporarily to get a database backup before I apply the upgrade. expect exceptional levels of jank!

remember, regardless of how outspoken you are in life, nothing will stop the capitalists from reanimating your defiled corpse into a shitheaded centrist zombie if there’s a buck in it:

“I'd just like to say that as much as I think billionaires are destroying the fabric of society with unchecked greed and blatant self-interest at the expense of basic human rights for everyone else, it is a little strange to me that people get mad at them. People are the ones who gave them the money in the first place," the AI Carlin said.

(editor’s note: the above is supposed to be a joke from the comedy special these fucking assholes hijacked Carlin’s corpse to promote. I can’t find the punchline, but it’s supposed to be a joke)

we had a previous thread on this thing way back when TechTakes moved here, but it deserves a Buttcoin thread too. observe, for your enjoyment(???), an even worse derivative of the reputedly most worthless W3C standard. when you’ve got nothing of value to write about but you need a spec to be taken seriously so you write stuff like this:

The purpose of DIDComm Messaging is to provide a secure, private communication methodology built atop the decentralized design of DIDs.

It is the second half of this sentence, not the first, that makes DIDComm interesting. “Methodology” implies more than just a mechanism for individual messages, or even for a sequence of them. DIDComm Messaging defines how messages compose into the larger primitive of application-level protocols and workflows, while seamlessly retaining trust. “Built atop … DIDs” emphasizes DIDComm’s connection to the larger decentralized identity movement, with its many attendent virtues.

(that typo in the second paragraph of the spec has been there for at least 6 months, cause if anyone went back to proofread this crap they’d probably delete all of it out of embarrassment)

DIDcomm is what happens when crypto folks get invited to join your standards org, and it does to the spec writing process what crypto and AI did to whitepapers: it’s all extreme filler to mask the lack of an idea, built on top of a spec that famously specifies nothing

now that threads is starting to federate, they sure as fuck aren’t with us

threads.net commemorative cocktail:

• glass: old fashioned (lowball)
• pour hard cider from red apples until glass is 3/4ths full
• top with 1 shot of bourbon
• smoke glass with cherry wood
• garnish with sliced lime, or add lime juice to taste
• drink and meditate on what AOL and then Google did to usenet

this is pretty cool. it’s a tutorial with interactive exercises that explores the Nix language as a general-purpose functional programming language, outside of its role as the configuration and package definition language for NixOS. understanding Nix better as a language makes more complicated packages easier to write (and is necessary to understand the guts of nixpkgs and the parts of Nix written in itself), but it also has a number of unique advantages as a programming language within a very specific domain.

this has all my favorite grifts in one! crypto, AI, and the one where you re-scam the victims of your other scam by pretending to be the cops!

to help kick off the new federated home of sneering at crypto and meme stocks, enjoy a mask off look at what these fucking fools intend to do to the nocoiners if they’re ever given an ounce of actual geopolitical power

from the linked github thread:

Your project is in violation of the AGPL, and you have stated this is intentional and you have no plans to open source it. This is breaking the law, and as such I've began to help you with the first steps of re-open sourcing the plugin.

the project author (who gets paid for violating the AGPL via patreon) responds like a mediocre crypto grifter and insists their violation of the law be debated on the discord they control (where their shitty community can shout down the reporter):

While keeping code private doesn't guarantee security, it does make it harder for bad actors to keep up with changes. You are welcome to debate this matter in the MakePlace discord: https://discord.com/invite/YuvcPzCuhq If you are able to convince the MakePlace community that keeping the code open-source is better, I will respect the wishes of the community.

aaaand the smackdown:

Respectfully, I won't attempt to "debate" or "convince" anyone; I'm leaving this pull request and my fork here for others to see and use. It is not a matter of "better"; you are violating a software license and the law. It does not "make it harder" for anyone; Harmony hooking exists, IL modification exists, you can modify plugins from other plugins.

(via Timnit Gebru)

Although the board members didn’t use the language of abuse to describe Altman’s behavior, these complaints echoed some of their interactions with Altman over the years, and they had already been debating the board’s ability to hold the CEO accountable. Several board members thought Altman had lied to them, for example, as part of a campaign to remove board member Helen Toner after she published a paper criticizing OpenAI, the people said.

The complaints about Altman’s alleged behavior, which have not previously been reported, were a major factor in the board’s abrupt decision to fire Altman on Nov. 17, according to the people. Initially cast as a clash over the safe development of artificial intelligence, Altman’s firing was at least partially motivated by the sense that his behavior would make it impossible for the board to oversee the CEO.

For longtime employees, there was added incentive to sign: Altman’s departure jeopardized an investment deal that would allow them to sell their stock back to OpenAI, cashing out equity without waiting for the company to go public. The deal — led by Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital — values the company at almost $90 billion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, more than triple its $28 billion valuation in April, and it could have been threatened by tanking value triggered by the CEO’s departure.

huh, I think this shady AI startup whose product is based on theft that cloaks all its actions in fake concern for humanity might have a systemic ethics problem

a couple of our regulars have expressed interest in having an anti-cryptocurrency sub here. so interest check: reply to this thread if you want us to have buttcoin

edit: also, meme stock bullshit is on topic for our buttcoin (unless the threads get overwhelming, then we’ll split off another sub)

in spite of popular belief, maybe lying your ass off on the orange site is actually a fucking stupid career move

for those who don’t know about Kyle, see our last thread about Cruise. the company also popped up a bit recently when we discussed general orange site nonsense — Paully G was doing his best to make Cruise look like an absolute success after the safety failings of their awful self-driving tech became too obvious to ignore last month