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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    8 days ago

    Maybe Iā€™m being overzealous (I can do that sometimes).

    But I donā€™t understand why this particular experiment suggests the multiverse. The logic appears to be something like:

    1. This algorithm would take a gazillion years on a classical computer
    2. So maybe other worlds are helping with the compute cost!

    But I donā€™t understand this argument at all. The universe is quantum, not classical. So why do other worlds need to help with the compute? Why does this experiment suggest it in particular? Why does it make sense for computational costs to be amortized across different worlds if those worlds will then have to go on to do other different quantum calculations than ours? It feels like thereā€™s no ā€œsavingsā€ anyway. Would a smaller quantum problem feasible to solve classically not imply a multiverse? If so, what exactly is the threshold?

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      8 days ago

      I mean, unrestricted skepticism is the appropriate response to any press release, especially coming out of silicon valley megacorps these days. But I agree that this doesnā€™t seem like the kind of performance theyā€™re talking about wouldnā€™t somehow require extra-dimensional communication and computation, whatever that would even mean.

      • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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        7 days ago

        I mean, unrestricted skepticism is the appropriate response to any press release, especially coming out of silicon valley megacorps these days.

        Indeed, Iā€™ve been involved in crafting a silicon valley megacorp press release before. Iā€™ve seen how the sausage is made! (Mine was more or less factual or I wouldnā€™t have put my name on it, but dear heavens a lot of wordsmithing goes into any official communication at megacorps)