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.
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.)
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.
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.