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.

8 points

surprising absolutely nobody who’s been paying attention, Fedora has signaled its intent to use generative AI and an LLM in its packaging software

and I wouldn’t give a fuck what IBM’s pet distro does, but Red Hat’s developers have a high amount of control over what ends up in the userland… and bootloader… and pretty much every part of the system but the kernel cause they got told to fuck off, of every Linux distro but the obscure ones

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8 points

I’m not really in on distros and related drama (strong “just fucking use Debian stable” camp), why did Red Hat get told to fuck off from the kernel?

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8 points

I started a job in the last year that really forced me to play around with different distros and sometimes building them. Pretty much my entire experience is “abandon ubuntu, just use debian” and wishing other people would do the same

(Pretty much my entire reasoning is that snap fucked up my dev environment so bad I rage installed debian)

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4 points
*

Ubuntu has been a reasonable Debian for our corporate purposes of late, and we have those vital legacy systems running on fucking 14.04 that nobody is going to pay to reimplement sanely that we are currently lining up to pay Canonical for hyperextended tick-box support while we also put them in a concrete sarcophagus with a 30km exclusion zone

but some of the snap-based distro nonsense has me worrying

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6 points

the example I was thinking of was the incredibly ill-conceived rejected patchset to implement d-bus inside the kernel but I don’t think they’ve really stopped trying since then

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6 points
5 points

Make it a sonnenrad

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9 points

the NATO symbol represents bombing the Chinese data centres

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12 points

the replies I can see in the archive are already a fucking disaster

roko spewed the most nonsensical, fash-coded disapproval you could imagine:

the map should reflect the territory, not the feelings

that’s right roko, uh, maps don’t care about your feelings?

oh god I clicked through to the rest of roko’s comments in that thread and it’s even worse, cw transphobia for anyone who peeks their head in

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9 points
*

I don’t want to hear that I’m irrational from Roko of all people haha.

Dude sure spends a lot of energy on trans people and immigrants and wokeness for someone who thinks that climate change doesn’t matter because “by 2100 we will probably have disassembled Earth long with the rest of the solar system, and climate change will seem very quaint.”

Also is his flirting with white supremacy new, or has he always been that fascist of a weirdo?

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11 points

Also is his flirting with white supremacy new, or has he always been that fascist of a weirdo?

he’s always come off as deeply fascist to me, though it’s possible he’s gone even more mask-off with the white supremacy. I feel that roko’s personal style of saying the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard and claiming it’s brilliant has influenced the e/acc crowd a lot too, so maybe there’s some cross-pollination of ideas there.

“by 2100 we will probably have disassembled Earth long with the rest of the solar system, and climate change will seem very quaint.”

yes, roko, it’s pretty fucking obvious that climate change will seem quaint by 2100

if it doesn’t fucking kill us way before then. that’s what makes it a fucking threat, roko, did your big ol mediocre brain miss that?

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12 points

Roko tries to signal loyalty to both Rationalism and the Far right and creates a dumb sentence.

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11 points

Does anyone here know what Justine Tunney’s deal is? I’d been following her redbean project for a time but came across an article that left me rather startled

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15 points

she is, regrettably, a fascist who reputedly still hides right-wing conspiracy shit in her projects

I unfortunately know that startled feeling well; I used to be a fan of the work she did with sectorlambda and similar projects

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7 points

A friend who worked with her is sympathetic to her but does not endorse her: this is a tendency she has, she veers back and forth on it a lot, she has frequent moments of insight where she disavows her previous actions but then just kind of continues doing them. It’s Kanye-type behavior.

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7 points

well that’s disappointing :( it sucks when terrible people do cool things

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8 points
*

Tragic: The worst person you know developed a succinct alternative to Wordpress.

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13 points

yeah, straight up alt-right techfash and long has been

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15 points

Possibly the worst misunderstanding of quantum mechanics I’ve ever seen. I have no idea how anyone managed to convince themselves that the laws of physics are somehow different for conscious observers.

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11 points

I honestly think anyone who writes “quantum” in an article should be required to take a linear algebra exam to avoid being instantly sacked

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11 points

According to one story at least, Wigner eventually concluded that if you take some ideas that physicists widely hold about quantum mechanics as postulates and follow them through to their logical conclusion, then you must conclude that there is a special role for conscious observers. But he took that as a reason to question those assumptions.

(That story comes from Leslie Ballentine reporting a conversation with Wigner in the course of promoting an ensemble interpretation of QM.)

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7 points

Also there’s a book by Stephen Baxter set in his Xeelee universe which takes this premise for the cult mentality of a terrorist cell

Sorry this doesn’t really add anything, just thought it kinda funny

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4 points
*

Yes, the problem with quantum mechanics is it’s not just your Deepak Chopras of the world that get sucked into quantum woo, but even a lot of respectable academics with serious credentials, thus giving credence to these ideas. Quantum mechanics is a context-dependent theory, the properties of systems are context variant. It is not observer-dependent. The observer just occupies their own unique context and since it is context-dependent, they have to describe things from their own context.

It is kind of like velocity in Galilean relativity, you have to take into account reference frame. Two observers in Galilean relativity could disagree on certain things, such as the velocity of an object but the disagreement is not “confusing” because if you understand relativity, you’d know it’s just a difference in reference frame. Nothing important about “observers” here.

I do not understand what is with so many academics in fully understanding that properties of systems can be variant under different reference frames in special relativity, but when it comes to quantum mechanics their heads explode trying to interpret the contextual nature of it and resort to silly claims like saying it proves some fundamental role for the conscious observer. All it shows is that the properties of systems are context variant. There is nothing else.

Once you accept that, then everything else follows. All of the unintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics disappear, you do not need to posit systems in two places at once, some special role for observers, a multiverse, nonlocality, hidden variables, nothing. All the “paradoxes” disappear if you just accept the context variance of the states of systems.

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16 points

Can an observer be a single photon, or does it have to be a conscious human being?

The former. I’m glad we can stop the article right there and go home.

What the fuck is this question even? What the fuck is “conscious”? Do you think in the double-slit experiment we closed a guy inside the box to watch?

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13 points

Under this, let’s charitably call it, “interpretation”, the Schrödinger cat analogy makes no sense, surely THE CAT is bloody conscious about ITSELF BEING ALIVE??

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15 points

there’s so much quantum woo in that article I want to sneer at, but I don’t know anywhere close to enough about quantum physics to do so without showing my entire ass

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8 points

If you want a serious discussion of interpretations of quantum mechanics, here is a transcript of a lecture “Quantum Mechanics in Your Face” which has the best explanation I’ve ever seen. I’d recommend the first 6 of Peter Shor’s Quantum Computation notes (don’t worry they’re each very short) for just enough background to understand the transcript.

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5 points

awesome! these are going straight to the list of things I should be reading

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9 points

There are some interesting ideas in that general direction (wrapping Bell inequalities within different new types of thought experiment, etc.), but some of the people involved have done rather a lot of overselling, and now bringing in talk of “AI” just obscures the whole situation. Which was already obscure enough.

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11 points

To me, the most sneerable thing in that article is where they assume a mechanical brain will evolve from ChatGPT and then assume a sufficiently large quantum computer to run it on. And then start figuring out how to port the future mechanical brain to the quantum computer. All to be able to run an old thought experiment that at least I understood as highlighting the absurdity of focusing on the human brain part in the collapse of a wave function.

Once we build two trains that can run near the speed of light we will be able to test some of Einstein’s thought experiments. Better get cracking on how we can get enough coal onboard to run the trains long enough to get the experiments done.

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11 points

Well a good thing to remember re quantum mechanics, Schrödinger Cat is intended as a thought experiment showing how dumb the view on QM was. So it is always a bit funny to see people extrapolate from that thought experiment without acknowledging the history and issues with it. (But I think that also depends on the various interpretations, and this means I’m showing a cheekily high amount of ass here myself).

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12 points

Pretty much any mention of a thought experiment in the wild gets my hackles up. “Isn’t it cool that the cat is alive and dead at the same time?” Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up!!! Tho to be honest it might just be schrodinger’s cat that comes up. I wish they’d leave the poor cat alone, and stop trying to poison it.

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9 points

This isn’t a sneer, just want to share this enjoyable presentation about tech and nihilism by Assoc Professor Nolen Gertz at the University of Twente here in the Netherlands https://iai.tv/video/nihilism-and-the-meaning-of-life-nolen-gertz

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