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)

  • aio@awful.systems
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    5 days ago

    I read one of the papers. About the specific question you have: given a string of bits s, theyā€™re making the choice to associate the empirical distribution to s, as if s was generated by an iid Bernoulli process. So if s has 10 zero bits and 30 one bits, its associated empirical distribution is Ber(3/4). This is the distribution which theyā€™re calculating the entropy of. I have no idea on what basis they are making this choice.

    The rest of the paper didnā€™t make sense to me - they are somehow assigning a number N of ā€œinformation statesā€ which can change over time as the memory cells fail. I honestly have no idea what itā€™s supposed to mean and kinda suspect the whole thing is rubbish.

    Edit: after reading the authorā€™s quotes from the associated hype article Iā€™m 100% sure itā€™s rubbish. Itā€™s also really funny that they didnā€™t manage to catch the COVID-19 research hype train so theyā€™ve pivoted to the simulation hypothesis.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      5 days ago

      Oh the author here is absolutely a piece of work.

      Hereā€™s an interview where heā€™s talking about the biblical support for all of this and the ancient Greek origins of blah blah blah.

      I canā€™t definitely predict this guyā€™s career trajectory, but one of those cults where they have to wear togas is not out of the question.