Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
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No, all you lawyers explaining to me how the practice of law works in the U.S., you would totally benefit from GPT. Complete with bonus:
- Everyone explaining to me that lawyers actually read all the documents in discovery is really trying to explain to me, a computer scientist with 20 years of experience[1], how GPT works!
- [1] Does OP have actual tech expertise? The answer may (not) surprise you!
- You lawyers admit that sometimes you use google translate and database search engines, and those use machine learning components, and all ML is basically LLMs, so I'm right, Q.E.D.!
- Lawyers couldn't possibly read everything in discovery, right?
- Lawyers couldn't possibly pay for professional translation for everything, right?
- Even when it's mandated by the court?
- Really?
- and many, many more
I just want to latch onto one more thing there:
GPTs are great at transforming information. Transformations include compression, decompression, and inter-language translation, among others.
Okay mister computer scientist, sure, what is "transforming information"? From what you're saying it appears like you're describing basically any map from information to other information. But AMONG OTHERS that includes a map going from NO INFO to CONFIDENT BULLSHIT. And I do agree LLMs are amazing at it.
Here, I'll sketch it out for you in fucking LaTeX:
$\emptyset \mapsto \mathit{Nonsense}$
This thread is an unending source of amusement.
Someone there found his ORCID and... It's not great: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2835-3521
He has basically nothing published, but has like 40 different "preprints", read PDFs he uploaded to arxiv with no peer review.
I use these tools daily. I have also built software which utilizes genAI. I have also worked on fine-tuning GPTs. I have written extensive [sic!] on the topic. I also have formal training in mathematics, computer science, engineering, and anthropology1. [emph. mine]
🤡
1 No he doesn't? His Education lists A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science, and B.S. in Mathematics, that anthropology claim seems completely made up.
A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science
wait, wait. that's basically the bootcamp level of education, no?
I know essentally nothing about the US education system but...
If you're gonna pull credentalist bullshit, maybe at least have the credentials? You took us there mate, I wouldn't be pulling your degrees up if you didn't first talk about how formally educated you are...
(nothing wrong with that per se, i don't have any c. s. degree anyways and yet i work in the field for years. but the gall of a dude who has finished a few two-year courses to tell fucking law professionals that they don't know enough… this is indeed the threadnought-level of recklessness.)
the sheer hubris of that individual putting out preprints, as if making this available before peer review would hasten chatgpt rapture (none of that shite will be ever published)
Those "papers" are gold, they're mostly a few pages long, and they span such a wild range of topics as:
- How to calculate a mean of numbers?
- What is a number?
- Atheism is actually a religion.
- Ethereum is a store of energy.
I've never seen someone in such a dire need of a wedgie, come on man, you spend the hours of your life writing your farts into LaTeX and generating DOIs for them, this isn't healthy.
They’re all blog posts that refer to no actual work, my favorite is the one where he advocates for his blog posts to be accepted to journals: Call to Research: A need for a new paper format
This is mostly whining about how he’s totally an academic and people should take him seriously.
Jesus cinnamon crunch Christ. At least the blog posts are mercifully short. He somehow manages to have antivaxx nonsense there as well??
This is doubly funny because that already exists, at least in Computer Science, and is called a vision paper. You still need to put in a lot of work, perhaps more, into the bibliography and, you know, actually having compelling stuff to say.
nothing wrong with papers a few pages long, as long as they are concisely written and have supplementary information 10x that size. my last paper is 5 pages long, of which the last one are references only, and has 60+ pages of SI
Dunno, the funniest thing about them to me is that they're still divided into 7-8 sections, each one-paragraph long. Just a guy who was never told he was wrong in his life and his idea of what research looks like.
Ethereum is a store of energy.
fucking WHAT
I am unfairly misrepresenting that for sneer purposes but if you want to see what happens when someone with typical cryptobro brainworms gets access to a paper-looking PDF template:
he also has a personal site, it's linked on researchgate. i took psychic damage reading this, somebody force him to touch grass
oh goddess, he's already a bleeding muppet, and going to be a major crank. from the researchgate profile:
I am an aspiring polymath and a rōnin scholar. I also tend to look at questions, rather than fields of study, as a research question often does incorporate many disparate topics. Research interests include the psychological and anthropological nature of religion, vaccine efficacy and impact on asymptomatic carriage, and the application of paraconsistent logic to scientific research.
rōnin! fucking! scholar!
Hey, he didn't update the website to include his research interest in AI, huh, wonder how long he's been a samurai of that
eh i've seen that before at least once and i'm inclined to believe there's much more of it that nobody cares to notice. on r/chemistry and r/organicchemistry there was a dude, 19, dramatic bitch, who read surface level philosophy and tried getting into ochem for some obscure reason. turns out he wanted to make some anticancer drugs and needs guidance. cool fine maybe get degree in ochem first so you don't do any stupid avoidable mistakes. he won't listen
he tried to get into uni but if i have to guess he got rejected? in any case he didn't learn anything but over time got into contact with some research group, at least that's what he claimed and started homelab. (you'd guess that some medchem research group at uni would have a wet lab, but it must be in other country and you've never seen them).
so anyway our misunderstood hero starts cooking "anticancer" "meds" in his living room. how does he know it works, did he made this, sent samples to biologists who would test it for him, or maybe compchem group would simulate it out? nope, he'd just got an idea that it will work and that's just as good, you know, his supreme rationality unrecognized by academic cabal guided him there. so he starts cooking, but does not know how. this included shit like distilling some flammable solvent on wicker table without clamps or anything that would actually make glassware stable. so every other step he asks for advice on really basic shit like he'd learn in second year university course (BSc), or in first year of work in organic chemistry lab, his synthesis is avoidably dirty, his purifications are trash, three steps in he has painted himself into corner, yields drop to zero and he has no idea why or what now. this usually means that entire synthesis was shite from the beginning and it's time to go back to the drawing board.
(did i mention that he was a dramatic bitch? so he picked it up because he wanted to do something Good for Humanity, and if he fails then well he could just as well commit sewer slide. his first idea involved radioisotopes btw, all in his living room mind you. then objective shifted to "anti-rabies antiviral" where he missed the point of about everything he wanted to do. then went back to "anticancer")
anyway this was his breaking point, after something like three or four people tried to explain politely that he really should get a degree first and set some objective that is not obviously pulled from his supremely rational ass, he started insulting everyone and what eventually earned him sitewide ban was a tirade about how he'd genocide everyone who doesn't recognize his genius, given opportunity (he compared himself to milosevic (he was serb))
anyway he also had medium blog and posted dick picks with face included from the same account. he made another one, but it's since abandoned. allegedly he also had 2 or 3 accounts before that
mind, i know the type from my usenet days. in polish usenet we had that crank called, i kid you not, expert, who presented himself as expert in almost everything.
some time later one bored person did an official query, and learned that apparently the fucker managed to get himself onto the state-approved list of expert witnesses in the area of computing (unclear if that predated his usenet antics or not)…
(that was mid-to-late 1990s, the cocom was just in the process of being lifted, and the judiciary really did not have much knowledge about the technical aspects of computing)
if his claim of "20 years studying math" is anywhere close to accurate he's already off the deep end, unless he's counting in everything from kindergarten up. considering he's a cryptobro it already happened pre-pandemic
jaysus, mary, joseph and the wee donkey. (ESPECIALLY the wee donkey.)
he's the very model of a modern crypto-douchebag.
he does seem to have carefully cultivated case of engineer disease
also it's not "almost all" preprints, it's all preprints, just one repository calls these papers
he didn't discover yet predatory journals, it all could have been published for a small fee like with this one (contains mind numbing level of conspiracy-theoretic rambling and related brainworms) hxxps://uraniumisagenocidegiant[.]com/ (you have been warned)
There's one classified as "SSRN Electronic Journal 2023 | Journal article", I thought this was something like a predatory journal, hence the "almost", but now that I clicked on it I think this is just an arxiv-like website that calls itself an "electronic journal"? No fucking idea.
yeah that one is sneaky but it's a repository, not a journal with peer review
Amazing.
I could "publish" my homeworks from the 5yrs of college onto arxiv and that'd be a more scientifically valuable endeavour. Better formatted, too.
that
\hbox overfullon the subsection title was painful, wasn't it?
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. You're also mansplaining to an expert. While I admit that I am not an expert on law and am listening when corrections related to LAW and the practice of LAW are concerned, you do not want to admit your lack of understanding of this technology.
My god DANIEL, no, people are not mansplaining to you, unless that's a mask for a Danielle.
EDIT: Down the thread he responds to Kathryn Tewson, an actual expert, with
Yeah I'm not obligated to answer every question by a horde of people. You should change your name to Karen, because you sure act like a fucking entitled white bitch.
This guy has such a punchable face, even though I've never seen him. I can just tell.
Kathryn Tewson
Iirc, She is not just an expert, but she is so good at law that while she didn't practice law, but just commented about her interpretations of the law (as ANAL) people hired her and paid for her law degree. She has both talent and expertise.
Daniel's a very nice and likable guy, but he's also a bitcoiner
studied maths and CS for 20 years, all he has to show for it on his orcid is BSc and bunch of lousy preprints (with blockchain!). jfc. in that amount of time, people can finish entire PhD degrees, starting from high school, twice over
on top of that pile of shite sits a preprint titled "A Scholar's Year in Review: Navigating the Convergence of AI, Economics, and Physics in 2023". might be a bit grandiose and bordering on word salad. why the fuck does he think he needs to release preprints. if he had anything worthwhile to say, it would pass peer review
he also has researchgate
Looking to network with other researchers in a diverse array of fields for collaboration and discussion.
bet you would want to, you time-waster
aand his crowning achievement seems to be dead startup where he tries to put covid on blockchain, it has coin and everything. it's even associated with worldcoin and so with sam altman. curious that
This is also a very qucik hypthetical that I wrote up just to show a point not to argue a fucking legal case.
"Guys I totally didn't expect the lawyers to respond like lawyers when reading my Chat-GPT generated garbage"
Except... I admitted I was not a lawyer and not an expert, and rather than working to communicate they kept latching onto errors related to law, while they confidently made statements about the nature and functionality of ML technologies like LLMs and NMTs.
"Why are all the lawyers being so mean to me?? I'm just saying they could all be replaced by chatbots"
Ah shit, ML spelled backwards and wrong is LLM, they got me good.
I wish I was surprised at what the main account was posting about when I looked into it 😵💫