[-] rook@awful.systems 17 points 1 day ago

Flock camera is image available on ddossecrets.

https://ddosecrets.org/article/flock-alpr-camera

Very brief observations from micahflee:

https://bsky.app/profile/micahflee.com/post/3mvo2bss3sk2v

This Flock camera is running obsolete, end-of-life software.

  • It's on Android 8.1, released in 2017, support ended in 2021
  • It's on Android patch level 2018-06-5
  • It's running Linux 3.18, released in 2017

This shit is like 8 or 9 years old, and full of vulnerabilities.

Flock was founded in 2017, apparently made their golden camera image within 12-18 months or so and never updated it since. They might not even have the ability to fix it in-house anymore, even assuming it wasn’t a one-off contractor job in the first place. I know the embedded development is a shit show, but somehow it never ceases to disappoint me how lazy and incompetent the entire goddamn industry is.

Fucking android?

[-] rook@awful.systems 22 points 3 days ago

AI-native. A desktop that loves you back has to know you.

If you are interested in vibe code and want your hardware to love you back, buttplug.io has always been there for you.

My goddamn desktop environment and window manager is there to do a job, not pretend to be my friend whilst burning the goddamn world down.

What the fuck is wrong with these people. Do they ever use a computer to do anything other than flirt with claude. Why can’t they just use windows instead.

[-] rook@awful.systems 3 points 4 days ago

while explicitly forbidding it for communication, commit messages and assets

This is absolutely the best bit of the policy, and clearly shows how much thought went into the whole thing. Everyone knows that ai generated art is shit, so that’s forbidden, ai generated summaries are just inadequate so that’s forbidden too, using a chatbot to communicate with someone is deeply fucking insulting, so that’s forbidden as well, but… uh… using the bo-bot to write your code for you is apparently a-ok! for reasons! in a project which is primarily a a collection of code! 🤠

I can’t imagine why there’s acrimony. The whole thing is entirely coherent and well considered 🤗

33
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by rook@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

In an idle moment, I thought I’d explore the space of ridiculously bad ai company names. Literally the very first dystopia I thought of already has three ai companies named after it, and it hardly seemed worth exploring any further.

Because no one has got around to repealing poe’s law, I cannot tell if these are a bunch of idiot techbros, or people taking the piss out of idiot techbros, so I leave you to judge for yourself. Behold, people who think that “we tortured a child to bring you glossy web UIs” is a great corporate image:

  1. Omelas AI

AI-driven software development. Enterprise platforms delivered at startup speed.

I think they’re a consultancy? “One developer with AI produces what a 30-person agency does. 10+ production platforms in under two years.

  1. Omelas IO

Omelas is the maker of Atreus, the leading AI research companion for foreign policy, national security, and geopolitical risk. Atreus has access to the Omelas database, multidomain intelligence, and unique research methods, yielding unparalleled insights in minutes.

Atreus is the AI workbench purpose-built for intelligence work, fusing unique feeds, open-source intelligence, commercial data, satellite imagery and telemetry data into reports your analysts can act on immediately” which I guess means that they’re palantir wannabes, with the USP that they’ve grossly misunderstood le guin instead of Tolkien.

  1. omelas.tech

Omelas builds software across privacy, social connection, developer tools, and AI — designed and engineered in the Netherlands.

Another consultancy. They claim they make “thoughtful products”, hopefully with more thought than they put into their branding. Proof that inability to understand fantasy and sci-fi isn’t limited to silicon valley, or native english speakers.

[-] rook@awful.systems 24 points 10 months ago

KDE showing how it should be done:

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-www/2025-October/009275.html

Question:

I am curious why you do not have a link to your X social media on your website. I know you are just forwarding posts to X from your Mastodon server. However, I’m afraid that if you pushed for more marketing on X—like DHH and Ladybird do—the hype would be much greater. I think you need a separate social media manager for the X platform.

Response:

We stopped posting on X for several reasons:

  1. The owner is a nazi
  2. The owner censors non- nazis and promotes nazis and their messages
  3. (Hence) most people who remain on X or are clueless and have difficulty parsing written text (one would assume), or are nazis
  4. Most of the new followers we were getting were nazi-propaganda spewing bots (7 out of 10 on average) or just straight up nazis.

Our community is not made up of nazis and many of our friendly contributors would be the target of nazi harassment, so we were not sure what we were doing there and stopped posting and left.

We are happy with that decision and have no intention of reversing it.

[-] rook@awful.systems 30 points 11 months ago

There are various other posts here on the general subject.

https://awful.systems/post/5897965

Omarchy is a deeply uninteresting and partially-assed project that has been thrust into the limelight because if the creator’s political leanings, not because of any merits it might have.

[-] rook@awful.systems 48 points 11 months ago

Shoutout to gleam.run whose web page has always (AFAIK) said

Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.

[-] rook@awful.systems 36 points 1 year ago

It’s just more llm output, in the style of “imagine you can reason about the question you’ve just been asked. Explain how you might have come about your answer.” It has no resemblance to how a neural network functions, nor to the output filters the service providers use.

It’s how the ai doomers get themselves into a flap over “deceptive” models… “omg it lied about its train of thought!” because if course it didn’t lie, it just edited a stream of tokens that were statistically similar to something classified as reasoning during training.

[-] rook@awful.systems 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.

The other thing to be concerned about is how lazy and credulous your legal team are that they cannot be bothered to verify anything. That requires a significant improvement in professional ethics, which isn’t something that is really amenable to technological fixes.

[-] rook@awful.systems 87 points 2 years ago

A real ceo does everything. Delegation is for losers who can’t cope. Can’t move fast enough and break enough things if you’re constantly waiting for your lackeys to catch up.

If those numbers people were cleverer than the ceo, they’d be the ones in charge, and they aren’t. Checkmate. Do you even read Ayn Rand, bro?

[-] rook@awful.systems 25 points 2 years ago

she’s calling a“baby handler”—picture an exoskeleton crossed with a car seat. It’s a late-night soothing machine that rocks, supplies pre-pumped breast milk, and maybe offers a bidet-like “cleaning and drying situation.”For your children, perhaps, this is their first experience of being close to a machine.

Ah yes, famously the worst part of having children: touching them. Urgh. At least we can be pretty certain that this sort of thing will have no negative psychological impacts on babies and young children, who are famously disinterested in their parents, and neglect isn’t a thing!

Or, once the baby arrives, in nipple stickers that nursing parents could apply to track biofluid exchange. If the baby has trouble latching, maybe the sticker’s capacitive touch sensors could help the parent find a better position.

Do you know what the worst thing about breast feeding is? It is hard to monetise! Women just excrete milk! For free! Anyway, what if we could interpose a disposable data-harvesting device into the process, maybe on a subscription basis?

[-] rook@awful.systems 24 points 2 years ago

They’re rebranding American Christian milenaranism. Much like the second coming and/or the rapture, the AGI god will be here Real Soon Now, so please pay your tithes and trust that the church fathers are doing the right thing.

Much like the older cults it mirrors, it isn’t capable of delivering on its promises, but it is capable of doing substantial amounts of regular damage in the meantime, and that’s the only thing worth freaking out about.

[-] rook@awful.systems 32 points 2 years ago

They could have just sat there and slurped up enormous profits from the bubble as all the people who can’t find a use for their “AI” systems buy nvidia hardware, but no. They had to get high from their own supply. I can’t see this boding well for them.

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