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)
Max Tegmark has taken a break from funding neo-Nazi media to blather about Artificial General Intelligence.
The first clause of the opening line, and we've already hit a "citation needed".
He goes from there to taking a prediction market seriously. And that Aschenbrenner guy who thinks that Minecraft speedruns are evidence that AI will revolutionize "science, technology, and the economy".
You know, ten or fifteen years ago, I would have disagreed with Tegmark about all sorts of things, but I would have granted him default respect for being a scientist.
The first image in that second link is perhaps the most incoherent political cartoon I've ever seen. Why is Uncle Sam as played by Angry Jeff Bridges wearing the Chinese flag as a cape??
After he started rambling about his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, it was obvious his brain was cooked.
Arrow of time and all that, innit? And God help me, I actually read part of the post as well as the discussion comments where the prompt fondlers were lamenting that all it takes is one rogue ai code to end the world because it will "optimize against you!" I assume Evil GPT is constructing anti matter bombs using ingredients it finds under the kitchen sink.
This is just straight-up gossip, but why not:
Tegmark used to go around polling physicists at conferences about which interpretation of quantum mechanics they prefer. A colleague of mine said that they were sitting near Tegmark and saw him fudging the numbers in his notes — erasing the non-Many Worlds tallies from those who said they supported Many Worlds as well as others, IIRC.
A tally mark that has been shifted unethically in order to win a nerd fight is now called a tegmark.
Bless. You know I'm here for the hot goss.
According to the Wikipedia article on Bell's theorem, the physicist Tsung-Dao Lee "came close to" inventing it independently. Word from people who would know is that he actually got it, deriving a no-go theorem for local hidden variables that was basically the same as the one Feynman gave much later. But the only documentation for this is in e-mails that have never been published, so nobody can fix the Wikipedia page.
Babe wake up, new missing email scandal just dropped
I remember he went on julia galef's podcast to talk about the MUH and she was like "but what does that mean" and simple questions like that and he flailed, it was painful to hear