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dgerard@awful.systems

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 28 April 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 7 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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.

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

What the heck did I just read because it appeared to be a proof that hourglasses can't possibly work if you look away from them for a moment.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Hourglasses work by inverse Weeping Angels rules, doncha know?

I should also have mentioned the part where they say that the entropy of the "uniform distribution over (0,x)" is the base-2 logarithm of x. This is, of course, a negative number for any x they care about (0 < x < 1), and more strongly negative the smaller x becomes.

Argh. These people just don't know any math and never call each other out for not knowing any math, and now I have to read MIT OpenCourseWare to scrub the feeling out of my brain.

[–] aio@awful.systems 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I think there is in fact a notion of continuous entropy where that is actually true, and it does appear to be used in statistical mechanics (but I am not a physicist). But there are clearly a lot of technical details which have been scrubbed away by the LW treatment.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The fact that the naive continuous version of the Shannon entropy (just replacing the sum with an integral) can go negative is one reason why statistical physicists will tell you not to do that. Or, more precisely: That's a trick which only works when patched up by an idea imported from quantum mechanics.

[–] aio@awful.systems 5 points 7 months ago

yea i did try to read the lecture notes and got reminded very fast why i don't try to read physics writing lol

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 4 points 7 months ago

This sounds like the setup to a Greg Egan book.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Object permanence is calling…