[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 3 months ago

Woit is a math guy at Columbia who is mostly known for calling string theory a crock of non-science. I don't think he's sneerable. Sometimes his opinions align with a remark by, e.g., Hossenfelder, but he's not ... brain-cooked by engagement algorithms like she is. I check in on Woit's blog occasionally to see if there's news in the world of math that I missed, and the sense I get is that he made the criticisms he wanted to make and would rather talk about things he finds more interesting, whereas Hossenfelder is desperate for those physics is a corrupt cabal clicks.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago

Seems overly generous both to Christopher Hitchens and to Julia Galef.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 8 months ago

One erratum: the review that goes into how HPMOR's science is bad was by "su3su2u1", not Dan Luu (who just archived it from the original Tumblr).

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 9 months ago

I was tempted to give them their free ticket to the egress for saying "paint their discourse with the purples".

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 1 year ago

Homo sapiens! What an inventive, invincible species. It's only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds! They've survived flood, famine and plague. They've survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life! Ready to out-sit eternity. They're indomitable.

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!

There’s no way someone earnestly spent their time writing over half a million words on a self-insert Harry Potter fanfic as some form of mental masturbation… right?

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 2 years ago

When the AOE enters the Texas compound, there's nothing there.

Just cryptographically locked black boxes. They can take them, but they can't access or use or analyze them, and we just reboot from backups later.

relevant xkcd

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 2 years ago

No, not the forcing values! :-O

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 2 years ago

And yet my crossovers of Daria with The Sandman, They Live and the Amelia Peabody series all remain without a TVTropes presence. Where's my uncritical adulation?!

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 2 years ago

For example, the inaugural Substack post defining effective accelerationisms’s “principles and tenets” name-drops the “Jarzynski-Crooks fluctuation dissipation theorem”

To echo a comment from old!SneerClub: That's not a thing. There are three separate but related ideas (the Crooks fluctuation theorem, the Jarzynski equality and the fluctuation-dissipation theorem) which the author doesn't know are separate, because he hasn't a clue what he's talking about.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Men will literally use an LLM instead of ~~going to therapy~~ writing documentation

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 2 years ago

I think it was Walter Lewin of MIT, not Harvard

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I think this belongs over in TechTakes rather than SneerClub; it doesn't seem TREACLES-focused.

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