this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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 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.

Last week’s thread

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

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 19 points 2 months ago (12 children)

i wouldn't want to sound like I'm running down Hinton's work on neural networks, it's the foundational tool of much of what's called "AI", certainly of ML

but uh, it's comp sci which is applied mathematics

how does this rate a physics Nobel??

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 2 months ago (3 children)

They'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.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago

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

Congratulations to our 2024 medicine laureate Victor Ambros ✨

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 'Cell' paper cited by the Nobel Committee.

#NobelPrize

Blake reaction description: sighing and muttering, "yep, assholes will asshole"

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 6 points 2 months ago

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

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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 i'll quote that

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago

That sounds about right, yeah.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago

yeah, takes from physicists i know range from "wtf" to "it's plaaausible with a streeetch"

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)

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