this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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TechTakes

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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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[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

As far as I can tell there's absolutely no ideology in the original transformers paper, what a baffling way to describe it.

James Watson was also a cunt, but calling "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" one of the founding texts of eugenicist ideology or whatever would be just dumb.

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

Some legitimate academic papers and essays have served as fuel for the AI hype and less legitimate follow-up research, but the clearest examples that comes to mind would be either "The Bitter Lesson" essay or one of the "scaling law" papers (I guess Chinchilla scaling in particular?), not "Attention is All You Need". (Hyperscaling LLMs and the bubble fueling it is motivated by the idea that they can just throw more and more training data at bigger and bigger model). And I wouldn't blame the author(s) for that alone.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

what a baffling way to describe it

this is a recurring problem with them/their posts; if you look across history you can see a continual pattern of “de jour grumpword a la $somecommunity” leak forth

I have on occasion asked them to try to make better posts. they don’t seem to give a fuck to do so tho

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 0 points 2 days ago

to the latter part of my comment: both my own and also other peoples’ criticisms just turn into a dead avenue. the applicable poster just ghosts that subthread while happily posting elsewhere

guess there’s no desire to do better!