Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 28 April 2024
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
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.
If we instead have a lot of particles in our first box, we might describe it as a box full of gas. If we connect this to another box and forget where the particles are, we would expect to find half in the first box and half in the second box. This means we can explain why gases expand to fill space without reference to anything except information theory.
No, you can't, because you're still presuming that gases do expand, i.e., that merely connecting two containers is enough to mix their contents. Otherwise, you're saying that if you fill one bottle with orange juice and another with vodka, and then forget which is which, you've made a screwdriver.
Then it gets weird and confused, talking about a box divided in two parts, with green particles on one side and pink ones on the other.
We might expect the partition to move some, but not all, of the way over, when we forget as much as possible.
Forgetting where things are doesn't give you psychoflexitive powers!
And from the comments:
My current understanding is that QM is not-at-all needed to make sense of stat mech.
No. If you don't incorporate quantum mechanics (or at the very least take some results of quantum mechanics as valid), you will get statistical mechanics very wrong rather quickly. Your results for the thermal properties of gases will get worse the more you calculate. You'll convince yourself that magnets are impossible. Etc.
For all that Yud has been praising the Feynman books ever since HPMOR at least, he doesn't seem to have inspired his fans to actually read the Lectures on Physics.
This is how The Sequences teaches you to think. Construct a thought experiment and use your feelings about how things "should" work to come to a conclusion.
Hourglasses work by inverse Weeping Angels rules, doncha know?
I should also have mentioned the part where they say that the entropy of the "uniform distribution over (0,x)" is the base-2 logarithm of x. This is, of course, a negative number for any x they care about (0 < x < 1), and more strongly negative the smaller x becomes.
Argh. These people just don't know any math and never call each other out for not knowing any math, and now I have to read MIT OpenCourseWare to scrub the feeling out of my brain.
Another problem: They claim to derive the idea of pressure by having proved that the number density (particles per volume) is the same on both sides of the partition. But this is only the right condition for equilibrium if the temperatures are equal on both sides. This is what happens when you don't check your revolutionary new method against the ideal gas law....
A related issue that I doubt they've ever thought through: In statistical mechanics, the probability densities are defined on phase space, meaning that they're functions not just of position, but also momentum. They wouldn't be the first to get confused about this, helped along by oversimplified illustrations of "high entropy" and "low entropy" states that ignore the momentum part. But when you're reinventing a subject, it helps to avoid students' misconceptions about it.
Well it’s one thing to see someone tie red strings on a corkboard to try explain gases, and it’s another to see people in the comments buy into the idea. But then again, we are in the presence of acausal roboticists
That guy defending the book in the comments by going 'he is 19, I also thought the same when I was 19 and only realized later that he was intended to be the bad guy'. Oof... (And double oof as his comments goes from 'I didn't get this message at 19, and now 15 years later, I get why others dislike the book, without really making it 100% clear that he himself also considers Humbert the bad guy. (In the few times I had the misfortune of talking to pedophiles, this is the type of squirrelly language they use. Not that this means the person is a pedophile, I assume he isn't and just expresses himself poorly there, he just gives off a dodgy feeling with that one comment. Anyway, think the devil has enough lawyers).
Edit:
I would esp be wary of playing devils advocate for somebody who writes this in their design document:
Afterword 1
There are three kinds of beauty:
[ first kinds excluded ]
Beauty by perversion. In "The 120 Days of Sodom", the main characters liked to play weddings where the male groom was dressed up like a female bride, while the female bride was dressed up like a male groom.
That is a very odd example to pick from that book. Certainly considering everything the past few decades.
(I have no opinion on the language itself, didn't even look at it as I don't really think creating new languages is that interesting. I'm always reminded of the XKCD competing standards comic).
of course big parts of the orange site are tripping over themselves to call this language clever and… maybe I’m in a particularly bad mood, but I just don’t see it. the syntax looks like a fucking disaster (and I like ML-style languages) and the features seem to be a grab bag of features from existing languages and CS research. it’s basically the kind of testbench language you design to explore the problem space and never release, but here it is with a webpage and a name and papertrail in the docs that point to the designer being a real shithead.
it’s possible I’m being unfair to the language (its designer definitely seems like a shithead) — is there anything coherent here that I’m just missing?
Pale Fire sounds awful and lacks any flair. That's exactly what an ordinary programmer with no taste would name their work.
As opposed to an extraordinary programmer with great taste who chooses the most easily misinterpreted novel by Nabokov instead, one that has spawned an entire seamy subculture. Got it, HN.
Never heard of the person, let's see what the only true wiki has to say...
Diana Santos Fleischman (1981–) is an evolutionary psychologist, eugenicist, anti-vegan and utilitarian who holds numerous controversial viewpoints. She is a transphobe and supporter of polyamory/polygamy and human biodiversity (HBD). Fleischman was a speaker at the far-right pro-natalist Natal Conference in 2023. She has written for Quillette and is the current podcast host for the far-right Aporia Magazine.
Jesus Howard Christ, what a wild ride.
Also learnt today "human biodiversity" is a weird racist dogwhistle. At first it sounded like promoting fucking people from far away instead of, idk, your cousins, to promote genetic diversity, but that'd be too normal I guess.
Mein Gott, I would have assumed you knew about HBD bs when you somewhat regularly post here. Sorry that you were one of the 10.000 today. But yeah that euphemism for scientific racism has being going around in the bloggosphere for 15+ years or so. It even shows up on the neo-reaction map (see also our dear friends in green near the top left).
Are people in rich countries happier on average than people in poor countries? (According to GPT-4, the academic consensus is that it does, but I'm not sure it's representing it correctly.)
Turns out AI is an existential threat, but only to LWs last bit of credibility of learning people to think better and to work against AIs messing up in a big way.
"Should we nuke all datacenters to stop runaway AI? According to GPT-4, the concensus is that this would not stop it"
imagine if anyone ever had studied any of this, and we could read those studies? it would be awesome! alas.
alas, we'll have to ask for tea-leaf derivation from the mass teacup collector. ssshhhhhhh, don't ask about whether the tealeaves get disturbed during collection, they're tetchy about that!
Virtual Veterans is an AI-driven chatbot that, when interacted with, assumes the persona of a World War I soldier, named ‘Charlie’. It uses AI techniques and algorithms to provide a guide to rich collections of resources from State Library of Queensland, Trove (Queensland digitised newspapers) and the Australian War Memorial.
This SCP Wiki entry riffs on our favorite fan fiction extruder cum doomsayer. It is the deepest, weirdest cut, it relies on having some familiarity with SCP Wiki lore, and it is also very NSFW.
Okay, that was actually funny, even though I understood zero of the in-world references. Is the whole SCP project like that or is this one an outlier?
I was of the impression that it's just X-files meets bad creepypasta (I remember the one from years back where some paper-mâché statue chased you around when you weren't looking at it) and never paid much attention to it.
This seems a bit typical for an scp apart from the length (which does work as a meta criticism on Rationalist writing), the focus on a real life irrelevant person, and the weird strawmanning of that person. (Not a big fan of making Yudkowsky into an allpowerful god who acts like a 20-40 year old far right hentai addicted incel (Otoh, if you used the real Yudkowsky as a model this would get mean and distasteful (from the writers side I mean) really fast, so that is a good choice) who is then re-purposed by the foundation into living a fulfilling life in consensus reality (aka, the implication is that in the real world their trick worked, and he is now using his godlike powers to fight the acausalrobotgod, critihype). The idea that to stop him we also created the patriarchy and misogyny also missed the mark a little bit imho, but they saw a previous SCP and used it so it does fit). Seeing flawed Rationalist rationalizations of their dubious actions made this explicit was amusing however.
I'm sure Yudkowsky was just as amused as we were when reading this, and considering a picture of his was used, and how the SCP files think about consent like things, I assume he was at least asked for permission.
Edit, anyway if you want to know more about the SCP files, or want to read some of their best more accessible writings (imho, and take into account this is the 'more accessible SCP files' writings not a general accessible writings remark), I talked about the There Is No Antimemetics Division storyline in a previous comment.
edit2: Hahah, lol, I partially agree (on why the thing is bad, not their opinions about r/sc) with this sneerclub hater. congrats on failing the intellectual turing test palindromordnilap, im almost tempted to make an account just to post in agreement with them.
There are also some nicely logically contradictory ones that are cleverly done. One SCP in particular cannot be defined, as the act of doing so changes its nature again.
There's a YouTuber called Dr Bob who does an exceptional amount of work animating and narrating SCPs.
When the first big wave of musk stanning started, there was a strain of “we should be proud” remarked at (and sometimes by) ZAians. It always irked me because from the getgo I saw the charlatan, and over the years as it’s gotten worse…well, y’know.
I don't know how well this fits here, but, well I don't know where else to post nixos drama. So without further ado:
NixOS drama
Quick introduction: nix is package manager that allows you to reproducibly build any piece of software. It has been exploding in popularity over the past few years and has gotten to the point of receiving commercial endorsement. It has also received endorsement from more controversial companies, and this is where issues start to brew
A few days ago, after the success of an open letter condemning nixcons sponsorship of Anduril, a new open letter showed up. This time it discusses the creator of nix, Eelco Dolstra, and how he is becoming detrimental towards the goals of the nix community. The letter is not quite as well received as the anti-anduril letter, mostly because of its padded length and aggressive tone. I think delroth captures my personal feelings towards this letter.
Furthermore, Eelco has dropped a response, which ends in him suggesting users to move away from the community-run nix foundation and towards his consulting company, Determinate Systems. Needless to say I don't like this call towards division at all.
we have some running commentary on FreeAssembly, a smaller community on the same instance as TechTakes for open source collaboration. I don’t mind having posts about the open letter here too though; what happens to Nix will have an impact on our instance, because it’s a NixOS deployment and because I (the infrastructure admin) have previously been fairly active in the Nix community.
for the record (and to summarize the other thread), there’s not a lot of gray to my stance: anduril, eelco, and friends can fuck off, and I regret letting folks convince me that the systemic problems I’d heard about from marginalized folks in the Nix community were minor or solved. we unfortunately know what the Nix project will look like if it continues down this path: it’ll become something a lot like Urbit, which is a grim fucking fate for something I think is still technologically worthwhile.
Which more people should be comfortable with doing tbh. It's amazing how our culture moved towards editorialising and couching everything in ambiguities when "nazi punks fuck off" is all you need for most day-to-day moral quandaries.
well, dolstra's actions vidicated the open letter completely; also i really hate using the dismissive phrase “drama” for something that is actually a large issue with open source project governance and acceptance of blood money.