TechTakes

Apparently, the OpenMandriva folk (the inheritors of the venerable mandrake/mandriva Linux distro) are now best buddies with Bryan Lunduke (right wing tech grifter and q-anon fan) are decrying the left wing bias of Linux projects with a hilarious “wokeOS shell”

Archive of openmandriva forum post: https://archive.is/2025.01.11-001057/https://forum.openmandriva.org/t/came-here-from-lunduke/5516/1

Lovely juxtaposition of “let’s stick it to the gay fags” and “we’re accepting of everyone and there’s no hate here”. Seems like a classy community all round. It’s a little sad to see how mandrake ended up, but there you go.

WokeOS here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250110234818/https://lindev.ch/wokeos.cpp

It’s pretty tedious and unimaginative. No idea who lindev are.

(eta: wasn’t me who originally found this, but I’m never quite sure whether it’s ok to include sources for this sort of thing given the subject. on the other hand, the op has it as public post that’s been boosted a bunch of times, so here it is: https://tech.lgbt/@GeopJr/113807022917800887)

LessWrongers find cool reception for translated HPMOR copies sent to Russia's highest IQ youth

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onyiPaxnmiDdHn7SR/no-one-has-the-ball-on-1500-russian-olympiad-winners-who-ve

please excuse me while I infinitely recursively scream into the void

Large Generative AI Models in telecommunications

(this shit has been getting airtime at a couple of different networking conferences, and it's all as ridiculous and pointless as you'd blindly guess)

An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out it's much worse:

https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/

[Do not post} Insults, including those about [...] Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”

You can see the full diff from last version if you click "Jan 8, 2025" and yeah it's a doozy.

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. I couldn't really concentrate on work. It's hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isn't dunking on them for it.

On the bright side the policy technically lets you go around calling people insane for being straight or cisgender* if anyone is still on there and wants to get banned from that platform in a blaze of glory.

* or indeed simply having a gender and I'm not sure fascists know how to use words right.

Zuck wants to get back to his roots

It's time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here's what we're going to do: [...] 5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.

Narrator: this announcement did not, in fact, ease concerns about bias.