Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    Ā·
    28 days ago

    i wouldnā€™t want to sound like Iā€™m running down Hintonā€™s work on neural networks, itā€™s the foundational tool of much of whatā€™s called ā€œAIā€, certainly of ML

    but uh, itā€™s comp sci which is applied mathematics

    how does this rate a physics Nobel??

    • blakestacey@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      Ā·
      28 days ago

      Theyā€™re reeeaallly leaning into the fact that some of the math involved is also used in statistical physics. And, OK, we could have an academic debate about how the boundaries of fields are drawn and the extent to which the divisions between them are cultural conventions. But the more important thing is that the Nobel Prize is a bad institution.

        • blakestacey@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          Ā·
          27 days ago

          Image description: tweet from the official Nobel Prize account. Text reads,

          Congratulations to our 2024 medicine laureate Victor Ambros āœØ

          This morning he celebrated the news of his prize with his colleague and wife Rosalind Lee, who was also the first author on the 1993 ā€˜Cellā€™ paper cited by the Nobel Committee.

          #NobelPrize

          Blake reaction description: sighing and muttering, ā€œyep, assholes will assholeā€

        • bitofhope@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          Ā·
          27 days ago

          Wow. Congratulations to Rosalind Lee for her colleague and husbandā€™s nobel. I can only dream of one day having my spouse be recognized with such prestigious accolade for something we have done.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        Ā·
        27 days ago

        a friend says:

        effectively they made machine learning look like an Ising model, and you honestly have no idea how much theoretical physicists fucking love it when things turn out to be the Ising model

        does that match your experience? if so iā€™ll quote that

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        Ā·
        27 days ago

        yeah, takes from physicists i know range from ā€œwtfā€ to ā€œitā€™s plaaausible with a streeetchā€

        looking through the committee, I see Ulf Danielsson is notable on AI mostly for being skeptical (he writes pop sci books so people ask him about all manner of shit)

    • khalid_salad@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      Ā·
      28 days ago

      https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62r02z75jyo

      Itā€™s going to be like the Industrial Revolution - but instead of our physical capabilities, itā€™s going to exceed our intellectual capabilities ā€¦ but I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control

      šŸ˜©

    • swlabr@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      Ā·
      28 days ago

      This work getting the physics nobel for ā€œusing physicsā€ is reeeeeeal fuckin tangential