this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (3 children)
[–] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Every time I hear a moderate AI argument (e.g. AI will be an aid for searching literature or writing code), it's like, "Look, it's impressive that the AI managed to do this. Sure, it took about three dozen prompts over five hours, made me waste another five hours because it generated some completely incorrect nonsense that I had to verify, produced an answer that was much lower quality than if I had just searched it up myself, and boiled two lakes in the process. You should acknowledge that there is something there, even if it did take a trillion dollars of hardware and power to grind the entire internet and all books and scientific papers into a viscous paste. Your objections are invalid because I'm sure things are gonna improve because Progress."

I am doubly annoyed when I turn my back and they switch back to spouting nonsense about exponential curves and how AI is gonna be smarter than humans at literally everything.

[–] corbin@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

Closely related is a thought I had after responding to yet another paper that says hallucinations can be fixed:

I'm starting to suspect that mathematics is not an emergent skill of language models. Formally, given a fixed set of hard mathematical questions, it doesn't appear that increasing training data necessarily improves the model's ability to generate valid proofs answering those questions. There could be a sharp divide between memetically-trained models which only know cultural concepts and models like Gödel machines or genetic evolution which easily generate proofs but have no cultural awareness whatsoever.

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Wouldn't f(x) = x^2 + 1 be a counterexample to "any entire (differentiable everywhere) function that is never zero must be constant"? Or are some terms defined differently in complex analysis than in the math I learned?

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 6 points 14 hours ago

entire always means holomorphic on the whole complex plane

[–] flaviat@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've never heard of a function being called entire out of complex analysis. But still, it is zero at i.

[–] Seminar2250@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It's worth noting that, unlike a real function, a complex function that is differentiable in a neighborhood is infinitely differentiable in that neighborhood. An informal intuition behind this: in the reals, for a limit to exist, the left and right limit must agree. In C, the limit from every direction must agree. Thus, a limit existing in C is "stronger" than it existing in R.

Edit: wikipedia pages on holomorphism and analyticity (did I spell this right) are good

[–] aio@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

flaviat explained why your counterexample is not correct. But also, the correct statement (Liouville's theorem) is that a bounded entire function must be constant.

[–] CautiousCharacter@awful.systems 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Or Picard's little theorem, which says that if an entire function misses two points (e.g. is never 0 or 1), then that function must be constant.

[–] aio@awful.systems 2 points 3 hours ago

Oh, I didn't know that!

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 3 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

Who is flaviat? I don't see that handle on this lemmy or Greg Egan's mastodon account, and Egan just re-tooted someone who gives x^2 + 1 as a counterexample.

[–] CautiousCharacter@awful.systems 6 points 19 hours ago (1 children)
[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 3 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

now it works! I do not understand the two sentences "I’ve never heard of a function being called entire out of complex analysis. But still, it (what? - ed.) is zero at i."

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I believe those sentences can be paraphrased as, "The term entire function is only used in complex analysis. The function f(z) = z^2 + 1 is zero at z = i."

[–] flaviat@awful.systems 4 points 14 hours ago

Thanks, i don't speak english natively

[–] Seminar2250@awful.systems 4 points 18 hours ago

the poster is referring to the function f(z) = z^2 + 1