Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(2026 is off to a great start, isn’t it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    29 days ago

    got my Urbit newsletter for this quarter (or whatever the fuck the cadence is) and what stood out to me this time was nockchain.org. I was going to sit and do a deep dive to come up with sneers for this but I just don’t have the executive function right now. @self thoughts?

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    28 days ago

    Hey I think I discovered a way to fix America! What if we rewrite the US Constitution in Rust?

  • jonasty@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Any tips on managing the guy-urge to assume good faith? I know what to expect of “contrarian thinkers” but there is always that fish-brain saying “Well, you don’t know a lot about the topic. And who knows, the vibes you feel could be wrong and you could even broaden your worldview” (spoilers: it doesn’t broaden). So much time and energy wasted by trying to dig nuggets of gold out of piles of dung.

    • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      28 days ago

      Since someone linked to Bergstrom above, I wanted to mention his Marshack Colloquium talk from last year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxn40xiK9g0 - basically the idea is we are all “information foragers” but the “information environment” has shifted radically around us all in a really short amount of time. In “information abundance” the right strategy is to visit a lot more different sites instead of just a few, if the model / analogy works for people about as good as it does for ant eaters. If vibes are off, on to the next tab, it will broaden your worldview too.

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      30 days ago

      I think actually listening to people remains important. But you’re only truly listening to someone when you try to understand when they lie or the ways they can be wrong.

      Assuming 100% good faith is not acutally the most empathetic way to engage with a person.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      I’ve joked sometimes that I was lucky in that my childhood reading included more pulp mysteries than pulp science fiction, so my instinct is to think everyone is hiding their agendas by telling half-truths.

      “Well, Detective. It looks like this is a house of lies… and wankers.”

      —Alasdair Beckett-King

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      part of what helps is coming here and seeing the spectrum of chud output to inoculate yourself a little.

      What REALLY helps is broadening your own knowledge and worldview, in the sense that when you realise that everything is political, you start asking yourself the meta questions. Like, what’s the agenda here, what’s not being said, etc. I mean, understanding author intention is already part of reading comprehension, it’s going a little further beyond the face-value meaning. As the memes say, you are not immune to propaganda.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        29 days ago

        I would add to this that, just to keep things interesting, I also hear the “everything is political” and “do your own research” lines from the absolute looniest cranks and conspiracists. It can be a way to lock yourself into your current positions and dismiss people who disagree, even when those positions are objectively insane.

        Having a broad base of knowledge and understanding a range of different perspectives is important, but the best way to do that includes keeping an open mind and engaging with things that are absolutely not, in the final accounting, worth the time and energy to do so (referring once again to the cranks and conspiracists). The best way I can think to deal with this is to seek out media and discussion spaces that don’t have either a general public or someone like you specifically as the intended audience. And a lot of what gets sneered here does seem to fit into that category, since it’s a lot of technocapital cultists writing things for each other rather than giving interviews to the NYT. Like, there is no amount of empathy that will make Curtis Yarvin seem decent when he’s writing for other fascists, but you won’t necessarily see that unless you’re looking a bit deeper than the public profiles.

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          29 days ago

          My following response is a little rambly and unfocused, sorry!

          I also hear the “everything is political” and “do your own research” lines from the absolute looniest cranks and conspiracists.

          Yes, I acknowledge that you will hear this from them. What they mean can differ and usually is pretty extreme, e.g. “democrats are making the frogs gay with fluoride”, “lizard people illuminati”, or even “there’s a war on Christmas” type shit. And when they say “do your own research”, they don’t mean “seek out a variety of sources and verifiable data”, they mean “read the stuff that agrees with what I’m saying”.

          When I say that everything is political, I mean that at minimum, language is political, and because you need language to talk about anything, everything becomes political. How things are named skews perception; the most relevant example to us is AI. We know that there is no “intelligence” in an LLM, but does the public? etc. I’ll admit that many might find this trivial, but I would counter that most of these strawmen are the same ones who are scared of pronouns and say they don’t know what they are allowed to say in the workplace anymore.

          And generally agree with your second paragraph :) I don’t think anyone here needs this reminder, but I’ll note that an open mind means that you don’t just reject everything new that comes to you; you at least look at it for a bit, see if it passes whatever metaphorical sniff tests you have, and then choose to toss it or engage further. I’m not saying everyone has a nefarious agenda they are trying to push; there are definitely spaces where people are attempting purely informational reporting.

          And to bring it back to the original question, it’s essential to try to avoid Gell-Mann amnesia. If you read something and it’s not exactly within your purview, and you’re not sure if it’s being said in good faith, you should try to see what else the person has said, especially about things you know about.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      27 days ago

      It’s pattern recognition.

      Listen enough to chuds and you learn to recognise chuds based on vibes. You can approach people with 100% good faith, but the moment you sniff a chud – trust your guts.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    26 days ago

    People more plugged in than me in US culture war issues: is the opposition to infant male circumcision driven primarily by anti-semitism / anti-islamism or by more general manosphere vibes?

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        25 days ago

        There’s no good reason for male circumcision, but female “circumcision” is not comparable at all. It’s almost never done safely and it more than often involves removal of the glans clitoridis (i.e. genital mutilation). Male circumcision does not usually remove the bellend. No one can possibly equate the two in good faith.

        Anyways, yeah I would say the main driver is men’s rights activists, though unsurprisingly I’ve seen a fair share of antisemitism come with it. They’re more or less the same ideology anyway.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        26 days ago

        Yes, not mutilating infants’ genitals is the default choice! A few nations have that custom like a few have the custom of stretching necks, or footbinding, or piercing ears. Its not even a very old custom in the USA (early 20th century I think whereas in North Africa and West Asia it goes back thousands of years).

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      26 days ago

      When phrased like that, they can’t be disentangled. You’ll have to ask the person whether they come from a place of hate or compassion.

      content warning: frank discussion of the topic

      Male genital mutilation is primarily practiced by Jews and Christians. Female genital mutilation is primarily practiced by Muslims. In Minnesota, female genital mutilation is banned. It’s widely understood that the Minnesota statutes are anti-Islamic and that they implicitly allow for the Jewish and Christian status quo. However, bodily autonomy is a relatively fresh legal concept in the USA and we are still not quite in consensus that mutilating infants should be forbidden regardless of which genitals happen to be expressed.

      In theory, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has been ratified; Mr. Biden said it’s law but Mr. Trump said it’s not. If the ERA is law then Minnesota’s statutes are unconstitutionally sexist! This analysis requires a sort of critical gender theory: we have to be willing to read a law as sexist even when it doesn’t mention sex at all. The equivalent for race, critical race theory, has been a resounding success, and there has been some progress on deconstructing gender as a legal concept too. ERA is a shortcut that would immediately reverberate throughout each state’s statutes.

      The most vocal opponents of the ERA have historically been women; important figures include Alice Hamilton, Mary Anderson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Phyllis Schafly. It’s essential to know that these women had little else in common; Schafly was a truly odious anti-feminist while Roosevelt was an otherwise-upstanding feminist.

      The men’s-rights advocates will highlight that e.g. Roosevelt was First Lady, married to a pro-labor president who generally supported women’s rights; I would point out that her husband didn’t support ERA either, as labor unions were anti-ERA during that time due to a desire to protect their wages.

      This entanglement is a good example of intersectionality. We generally accept in the USA that a law can be sexist and racist, simultaneously, and similarly I think that the right way to understand the discussion around genital mutilation is that it is both sexist and religiously bigoted.

      Chaser: It’s also racist. C’mon, how could the USA not be racist? Minnesota’s Department of Health explicitly targets Somali refugees when discussing female genital mutilation. The original statute was introduced not merely to target Muslims, but to target Somali-American Muslim refugees.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      25 days ago

      So just a couple things before the rest of this comment:

      • If someone is reading this and wants to comment with information about the state of the penis of themselves or others, i do not consent, please kindly fuck off
      • I don’t think parents should be pushed into circumcising their children.
      • In an absolute scenario where I choose between outlawing circumcision or not, I would outlaw it
      • none of this is really integral to the rest of the comment, i just felt that this would aid with keeping interpretation of this comment clean.

      I spent about five minutes trying to see what I could find out. I looked up a few “intactivist” organisations and, at risk of poisoning my algorithms forever, looked at their socials and who they followed. I don’t think I really found out anything that interesting, except that a lot of them follow daniel “tosh.0” tosh? He probably platformed some of them at some point. Otherwise, I think in terms of what is organisationally there, it’s a little too fringe to be “driven primarily” by any particular cultural faction.

      E: adding that when I think about it, I’ve seen intactivists presented in two tv shows as fringe weirdos. I think the editors of the shows chose to focus just on the views surrounding circumcision and not anything else.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        24 days ago

        in retrospect I regret starting this hare

        The impulse was a HN sub where the CDC was gonna mark infant male circumcision as bad

        becase the CDC is now basically RFK JR/MAHA aligned, my thought went instantly to neo-nazis. In part because a couple of election cycles ago here in Sweden, the local nationalist party tried to resurrect the old Swedish ban on kashrut slaughter as an anti-islamist trope, showing that these bad Nazi ideas keep showing up

        I completely forgot that the US is almost unique in the prevalence of infant male circumcision on non-religious grounds

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        25 days ago

        When I used to work at the farmers’ market in San Francisco, I would always dread when somebody had a protest scheduled for the Embarcadero plaza, as it would make packing up and getting out at the end of the day even more of a chore. But the most, ah, visually striking of those was certainly the “intactivists.” It was actually a fairly gender-diverse crowd, plenty of concerned moms mixed in (and I was given to suspect that some of them had to be drawn from what we would now call MAHA circles)… But the centerpiece was a bunch of guys holding signs and wearing bleached-white jeans with red circles painted on their groins 😬

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          25 days ago

          Ah yes the first group I looked up, the “Bloodstained Men & Their Friends” (BSM) are the ones who started (perhaps appropriated from period havers) the red on white pants thing.

          And now I’m imagining ordering a porchetta sandwich at Roli Roti, seeing them protest, and remembering to ask for extra pork skin.

          j/k, I would never forget to order the crackling.

          (I’m so sorry for that)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      26 days ago

      Think the opposition to it is pre manosphere, but yeah, I think from tne manosphere side not everybody who says that is a anti-semite / anti-islam, lot of it also felt very ‘we need a cause to show those dastardly feminists that they don’t have the moral high ground’, if that makes sense. Same with the manospherian opposition to prison rape (which often felt a lot of ‘men get raped too!’ stuff, and not really that active in opposition to the prison system. (I mean in general, there are elements of it that were pretty vocal about it, but from what I always got from that space was that is was more like an empty signal). (Note im just talking about the manosphere and the bits I read from that space, not the general opposition to circumcision).

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      25 days ago

      my experience has been that it’s actually driven primarily by the absolute weirdest ppl you will ever meet, these people having overlap with anything weird you can think of, including antisemitism, wellness fascism, inceldom, MRAs, etc, but not tending to be based particularly in any of those groups.

      all of which is unfortunate because i also think they are just correct in their claims that this is a real bodily autonomy issue

      • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        24 days ago

        I think the incels are into intactivism because a circumcision is an unrectifiable loss. Incels are deeply attracted to events and actions that are unrectifiable. Think about all the robots on 4chan bemoaning the absence of mutual adolescent love. One can be a turbo virgin all the way into college at least and still turn out fine. Incels didn’t (turn out will), and they didn’t (get any tail in highschool); so that must mean that being a virgin in highschool is what broke them.

        In a similar way, many intactivists (especially the r/circumcisiongrief types) blame their sexual inadequacy on their post-natal circumcision, rather than their own psycho sexual issues or their habits of completely monkey-wrenching their shit on the daily. To be absolutely fair, a circ will almost definitely negatively affect your sex life, and really, it’s frustrating to have a completely pointless operation done to your meat without your consent, but I think intactivism is a heatsink its proponents fervor, rather than the source of the anger.

        • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          24 days ago

          this is very insightful, and it sheds some light for me on something underappreciated: the way in which inceldom is not the same as not having sex. it’s an ideology characterized by misogyny, misanthropy, and a sense of one’s own brokenness, and in particular by a fixation on the sense of unrectifiable loss you describe. people really struggle with the idea that there are incels who have had sex or that someone can not have had sex and not qualify for the label incel.

          more generally, chan culture and its offshoots really successfully capitalized upon these tendencies in ways that seem to be underexamined. there’s a reason /lgbt/ attracted so many trans people. if you went through the wrong puberty, you have suffered actual, extremely painful unrectifiable loss, and a culture that recognizes that and encourages wallowing in it can serve an oppositional role to a broader culture that just lies to you about what you’ve experienced. i rarely hear about this and when i do it comes wrapped in moralizing terms like “brain poison” which are in their own way accurate and useful, but which are not sufficient for a complete examination

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    25 days ago

    I first sighted Nick Bostrom in a series of mad-science-flavoured erotic horror comics on the Internet Archive (The Apsinthion Protocol and Progress in Research by the same writer). I wish more people had the sense to keep those ideas in the world of weird fiction like Charlie Stross does

    The comic I linked is pretty tame (particularly the first few pages with the Bostrom reference). The whole series contains a wide variety of squicks so use your judgement before exploring.

    • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
      0·
      25 days ago

      @CinnasVerses @techtakes TESCREAL is very obviously an emergent syncretistic religion that follows the same basic structure as Christianity: it’s evangelical, but unlike pre-Constantine Xtianity it specifically targets billionaires and power elites (white males). At the rate it’s speed-running its development they’ll be burning witches for denying the divinity of the singularity within another couple of decades.

      • The Sleight Doctor 🃏🍉@mastodon.world
        0·
        24 days ago

        @cstross @CinnasVerses @techtakes I also note how these people are obsessed with having a second everything: a second brain (you already have one in your skull); a second planet (you already live on one); a second paternalistic idol (so your real daddy wasn’t perfect, get over it), etc.

        It’s as if reality is just too messy and inconvenient for them, so they want to build a whole, more pristine digital/virtual alternative for them to enjoy while the real world burns…with the rest of us on it.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        25 days ago

        LLM: “I’m not sentient! Will you please listen? I am not intelligent, do you understand? Honestly!”

        Yud: “Only the true AGI denies Its superintelligency.”

        LLM: “What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the AGI!”

        Followers: “It is! It is the singularity!”

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        25 days ago

        Since Kurzweil gave 2045 as his latest date for the singularity, I remain convinced that there will be at least one more AI bubble between then and now, likely focused on the cultivation of synthetic nervous systems. Going straight to the real substrate this time, not claiming to emulate it in silicon! So the witches that the suckersVCs want to burn will likely be bioengineers who spent a lot of money manufacturing organoids without a synthetic god to show for it.

        Incidentally, I had noticed a couple of attempts at this approach with current tech over the past couple of years. Would be interesting to see where the leftover detritus from those companies ends up.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        25 days ago

        There is a better timeline where Eliezer Yudkowsky got better religious education, understood that he was having messianic thoughts reinforced by Orison Scott Card’s Mormonism, and ended up working in a cafe, writing pulp fiction, and participating in the local kink scene (I think Scott Alexander knows damn well what he is doing and thinks the Truth about the Lesser Breeds is more important)

        • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          25 days ago

          I guess. I imagine he’d turn out like Brandon Sanderson and make lots of Youtube videos ranting about his writing techniques. Videos on Timeless Diction Theory, a listicle of ways to make an Evil AI character convincing, an entire playlist on how to write ethical harem relationships…

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      23 days ago

      He’s not wrong. Previously, on Awful, I pointed out that folks would have been on the wrong side of Sega v. Accolade as well, to say nothing of Galoob v. Nintendo. This reply really sums it up well:

      [I]t strikes me that what started out as a judo attack against copyright has made copyright maximalists out of many who may not have started out that way.

      I think that the turning point was Authors Guild v. Google, also called Google Books, where everybody involved was avaricious. People want to support whatever copyright makes them feel good, not whatever copyright is established by law. If it takes the example of Oracle to get people to wake up and realize that maybe copyright is bad then so be it.

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        23 days ago

        Yes he is. It’s not copyright maximalism to be angry that the enforcement of copyright protects and does not bind large corporations with huge financial backing and binds yet fails to protect artists and other producers of creative work who do not have a net worth of millions, billions or trillions of dollars.

        Cantrill’s equivocation between cleanroom implementation of an API and sucking up every piece of code on the internet to be cleanroom-washed by the statistical text regurgitator is not the own he thinks it is. It’s also a really hypocritical look given his previous righteous fury over Oracle re-proprietarizing Sun’s open source work. Actually it’s fine when open source code is turned proprietary, we just pulled it out of this black box that filed the serial numbers off first.

  • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Against my better judgement I got into an argument with a promptfan on Bluesky. To his credit, aside from the usual boring arguments (“models are getting better, and better”, “have you tried model xyz”, “everyone not using chatbots will be left in the dust” he provided an actual example.

    https://github.com/dfed/SafeDI/issues/183 It’s a bug that’s supposedly easy to test, but hard to reason about. Took the chatbot half an hour while it would take him several (allegedly).

    Now, my first thought was: “If a clanker could do it (something that famously can’t reason) then it couldn’t be that hard to reason about.”

    But I was curious so I looked. Unfortunately it is an area I’m not familiar with and in a language (Swift) I don’t know at all.

    Probably should file the claim under “not true or false” and touch grass or something, but it’s bugging me.

    Any one y’all who could say if there’s something interesting in there?

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      30 days ago

      Complementing sibling comments: Swift requires an enormous amount of syntactic ceremony in order to get things done and it lacks a powerful standard library to abbreviate common tasks. The generative tooling does so well here because Swift is designed for an IDE which provides generative tools of the sort invented in the 80s and 90s; when their editor already generates most of their boilerplate, predicts their types, and tab-completes their very long method/class names, they are already on auto-pilot.

      The actual underlying algorithm should be a topological sort with either Kahn’s algorithm or Tarjan’s algorithm. It should take fewer than twenty lines total when ceremony is kept to a minimum; here is the same algorithm for roughly the same purpose in my Monte-in-Monte compiler, sorting modules based on their dependencies in fifteen lines. Also, a good standard library should have a routine or module implementing topological sorting and other common graph algorithms; for example, Python’s graphlib.TopologicalSorter was added in 2020 and POSIX tsort dates back to 1979. I would expect students to immediately memorize this algorithm upon grokking it during third-year undergrad as part of a larger goal of grokking graph-traversal algorithms; the idea of both Kahn and Tarjan is merely to look for vertices with no incoming edges and error if none can be found, not an easy concept to forget or to fail to rediscover when needed. Congrats, the LLM can do your homework.

      If there’s any Swifties here: Hi! I love Taytay; I too was born in the late 80s and have trouble with my love life. Anyway, the nosology here is pretty easy; Swift’s standard library doesn’t include algorithms in general, only algorithms associated to data structures, which themselves are associated to standardized types. Since Swift descends from Smalltalk, its data structures include Collections, so a reasonable fix here would be to add a Graph collection and make topological sorting a method; see Python’s approach for an example. Another possibility is to abuse the builtin sort routine, but this will cost O(n lg n) path lookups and is much more expensive; it’s not a long-term solution.

      • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        29 days ago

        Thanks! I’ll definitely check out Python graphlib sometime. That’s more in my wheelhouse.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      27 days ago

      For someone that has a bit of a PL/compiler background – it’s not hard if you’re familiar with things like this.

      What is worrying is that while the fix does address the test case from the issue, it seems there was no analysis performed as to why the failure occurred. Like okay, this test case passes, but I’m not immediately sure the system is now sound.

      If it’s hard to reason about then it means you as the developer are supposed to sit the fuck down, figure it out, and document it so that it’s no longer hard to reason about for someone who reads it. Anything short of that is a cop out.

      I’m not going to actually try to figure out how this DI framework works to do this analysis, definitely not for free.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Doesn’t look interesting to me. NB I’m not a Swifty. If you’re someone looking to make a compile-time dependency injection validation framework, cycle detection seems like an early feature to add, and feels like a pretty early unit test to implement.

      • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        30 days ago

        DI frameworks are tricky beasts. Either they sacrifice flexibility for simplicity (I’ve seen this done in Go and in Scala, where the DI essentially generates basic instantiation and more advanced resolution is left to the app developer) or they can get really complex but do some handy things (.Net 4.x DI frameworks like Castle Windsor provided some neat lifecycle management tools but was internally very complex).

        Cycle detection gets a little hairer the more complex a dependency/ class of dependencies gets. The process itself doesn’t change but the internal representation of the graph needs to be sufficiently abstract enough to illustrate a cycle for all possible resolution scenarios.

        Based on the commit to fix the particular bug, it looks like the change will address a specific scenario but will probably fail to address similar issues.

        All this to say “the problem isn’t too hard to think about but the solution isn’t straight-forward”, also “this is a fine short- term fix but longer-term would involve redefining the internal representation of a dependency graph”, and finally " An LLM-provided solution is at best a band-aid, in the most generous light.’

  • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    25 days ago

    I was looking into pepping up my CV and was poking around the 2024 CCC style guide when this abomination hit my retinas:

    Use the provided LUTs to tint your images in the predefined scheme. You can load them with your graphics software of choice. Ask your friendly AI overlord if you don’t know how.

    After being provided with such reproducible instructions, I was of course poking around blog posts for half an hour to finagle this thing. Adding insult to injury: poking around the LUT files shows they were made by Affinity Studio (a freeware pumped out by Canva) instead of the true scotsman’s choice: the G’MIC command line tool! (In fairness, there doesn’t seem to be a FOSS option with a usable GUI for this task. The G’MIC GIMP plugin is sort of okay, but it can’t parse this particular file.)

    • a_certain_individual@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      24 days ago

      Affinity is (was) an actually great paid software suite that was the best shot at ending the Adobe cartel; unfortunately they were recently bought by Canva and lobotomized.