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 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.)
probably offtop? bad tech killing people, no need for imaginary robots, just greed https://xcancel.com/hntrbrkmedia/status/1968661471056769252#m https://hntrbrk.com/dexcom/
Nah, its completely on-topic - “bad tech hurting people” has become a major theme of our current times, a bad glucose monitor hurting diabetics is completely expected
idk you could put nestle water draining activities there and it would fit the pattern
A nonprofit that serves teenagers complains about getting mugged by Salesforce. dang dons his shining armor and dashes forth to save the uwu smol bean megacorp from the peasant mob.
I’m a bit split on this one
on the one hand, the post as first posted had a lot of “victimised” language (“omg slack is extorting us”) and frankly that felt like bait - esp as many, many volunteer-type orgs that have had similar slack setups have been taking a hammer for months now (as I posted before, a local ZA tech setup was one, and more recently that big k8s one too). there’s enough precedent here that expecting slack to have behaved otherwise (even “honourably”) seems to me to have been almost foolish
on the other, slack 100% only took action once this did hit hype and enough eyeballs, and only reacted since it was an embarrassment
but…yeah. slack hasn’t been a good option for public use for literally years now :|
It sucks how much time in tech is spend on 'sorry this tool we recommend before suddenly is no longer free, or removed some options (either totally or into the paywall part) so now we will have to look for something else.
Seen it happen to simple csv editors for example.
Slack CEO responded there that it was all a “billing mistake” and that they’ll do better in the future and people are having none of it.
A rare orange site W, surprisingly heartwarming.
I really don’t buy the “billing mistake” line - they’ve been doing the same thing to many other community-org slacks. I’ve seen with my own eyes the mail that was sent to the ZA tech slack
Sabine Hossenfelder claims she finally got cancelled, kind of - Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy cut ties with Sabine Hossenfelder.
Supposedly the MCMP thought publicly shitting on a paper for clicks on your very popular youtube channel was antideontological. Link goes to reddit post in case you don’t want to give her views.
(sees YouTube video)
I ain’t [watchin] all that
I’m happy for u tho
Or sorry that happened
The commentator who thinks that USD 120k / year is a poor income for someone with a PhD makes me sad. That is what you earn if you become a professor of physics at a research university or get a good postdoc, but she aged out of all of those jobs and was stuck on poorly paid short-term contracts. There are lots of well-paid things that someone with a PhD in physics can do if she is willing to network and work for it, but she chose “rogue intellectual.”
Sorry but who the fuck is that? Not one of our common guests here, I need a primer on her
She’s popped up once or twice, owing to how she got on a lot of normal people’s feeds as a science influencer before she couldn’t contain the crank any longer.
Angela Collier: Dyson spheres are a joke.
spoiler
Turns out Dyson agreed.
thanks for linking this, was fun to watch
hadn’t seen that saltman clip (been real busy running around pretty afk the last few weeks), but it’s a work of art. despite grokking the dynamics, it continues to be astounding just how vast the gulf between fact and market vibes are
and as usual, Collier does a fantastic job ripping the whole idea a new one in a most comprehensive manner
Many of our favorute people abuse meth and meth adjacent sustances. In the long term, this behavior visibly degrades dental health.
Therefore, it wont be long until we witness actual real life cases of smartmouth.
Have they ever discussed how much they take on average?
Creative applications for stimulants comesup pretty frequently in techie discussions of nootropics and “stacks” thereof.
This is about as techie as I go as far as internet communities haha.
the talking point about disparaging terms for AI users by choice “I came up with a racist-sounding term for AI users, so if you say ‘clanker’ you must be a racist” is so fucking stupid it’s gotta be some sort of op
(esp when the made-up racist-sounding term turns out to have originated with Warren fucking Ellis)
i am extremely disappointed that awful systems users have fallen for it for a moment
The truth is that we feel shame to a much greater degree than the other side, which makes it pretty easy to divide us on these annoying trivialities.
My personal hatred of tone policing is greater than my sense of shame, but I imagine that isnt something to expect for most.
Side note: The way I’ve seen clanker used has been for the AIs themselves, not their users. I’ve mostly seen the term in the context of star wars memers eager to put their anti-droid memes and jokes to IRL usage.
Same here, I’ve never actually seen the term “clanker” be used in reference to a person using the AI, but the AI itself. Which to me was analogous to going to an expensive bakery and accusing the bread of ripping you off instead of the baker (or whoever was setting prices, which wouldn’t be the bread).
If there was any sort of op going on (which I don’t think there is), I’d guess it would be from the AI doomers who want people to think of these things as things with enough self-awareness that something like “clanker” would actually insult them (but, again, probably not, IMO).
Slightly related to the ‘it is an op’ thing, did you look at the history of the wikipedia page for clanker? There were 3 edits to the page before 1 June 2025.
Starting things off with a newsletter by Jared White that caught my attention: Why “Normies” Hate Programmers and the End of the Playful Hacker Trope, which directly discusses how the public perception of programmers has changed for the worse, and how best to rehabilitate it.
Adding my own two cents, the rise of gen-AI has definitely played a role here - I’m gonna quote Baldur Bjarnason directly here, since he said it better than I could:
-
It’s turned the tech industry from a potential political ally to environmentalism to an outright adversary. Water consumption of individual queries is irrelevant because now companies like Google and Microsoft are explicitly lined up against the fight against climate disaster. For that alone the tech should be burned to the ground.
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People in a variety of fields are watching the “AI” industry outright promise to destroy their field, their industry, their work, and their communities. Illustration, filmmaking, writers, and artists don’t need any other reason to be against the tech other than the fact that the industry behind the tech is openly talking about destroying them.
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Those who fight for progressive politics are seeing authoritarians use the tech to generate propaganda, litter public institutions with LLM “accountability sinks” that prevent the responsibility of destroying people’s lives from falling on individual civil servants, and efforts to leverage the centralised nature of Large Language Model chatbots into political control over our language.
AFAIK the USA is the only country where programmers make very high wages compared to other college-educated people in a profession anyone can enter. Its a myth that so-called STEM majors earn much more than others, although people with a professional degree often launch their careers quicker than people without (but if you really want to launch your career quickly, learn a trade or work in an extractive industry somewhere remote). So I think for a long time programmers in the USA made peace with FAANG because they got a share of the booty.
Not the only. Former USSR and Eastern Europe as well, and it’s way worse there. Typically, SWE would earn about several TIMES more than your college-educated person. This leads to programmers being obnoxious libertarian nazi fucktards.
Hackers is dead. (Apologies to punk)
Id say that for one reason alone, when Musk claimed grok was from the guide nobody really turned on him.
Unrelated to programmers or hackers, Elons father (CW: racism) went fully mask off and claims Elon agrees with him. Which considering his promotion of the UK racists does not feel off the mark. (And he is spreading the dumb ‘[Africans] have an [average] IQ of 63’ shit, and claims it is all genetic. Sure man, the average African needs help understanding the business end of a hammer. As I said before, guess I met the smartest Africans in the world then, as my university had a few smart exchange students from an African country. If you look at his statements it is even dumber than normal, as he says population, so that means either non-Black Africans are not included, showing just how much he thinks of himself as the other, or they are, and the Black African average is even lower).
This is an interesting crystallization that parallels a lot of thoughts I’ve been having, and it’s particularly hopeful that it seeks to discard the “hacker” moniker and instead specifically describe the subjects as programmers. Looking back, I was only becoming terminally online circa 1997, and back then it seemed like there was an across-the-spectrum effort to reclaim the term “hacker” into a positive connotation after the federal prosecutions of the early 90s. People from aspirant-executive types like Paul Graham to dirty hippies like RMS were insistent that being a “hacker” was a good thing, maybe the best possible thing. This was, of course, a dead letter as soon as Facebook set up at “One Hacker Way” in Menlo Park, but I’d say it’s definitely for the best to finally put a solid tombstone on top of that cultural impulse.
As well, because my understanding of the defining activity of the positive-good “hacker” is that it’s all too close to Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things,” and I think Jared White would probably agree with me. Paul Graham was willing to embrace the term because he was used to the interactive development style of Lisp environments, but the mainstream tools have only fitfully evolved in that direction at best. When “hacking,” the “hacker” makes a series of short, small iterations with a mostly nebulous goal in mind, and the bulk of the effort may actually be what’s invested in the minimum viable product. The self-conception inherits from geek culture a slumped posture of almost permanent insufficiency, perhaps hiding a Straussian victimhood complex to justify maintaining one’s own otherness.
In mentioning Jobs, the piece gestures towards the important cultural distinction that I still think is underexamined. If we’re going to reclaim and rehabilitate even homeopathic amounts of Jobs’ reputation, the thesis we’re trying to get at is that his conception of computers as human tools is directly at odds with the AI promoters’ (and, more broadly, most cloud vendors’) conception of computers as separate entities. The development of generative AI is only loosely connected with the sanitized smiley-face conception of “hacking.” The sheer amount of resources and time spent on training foreclose the possibility of a rapid development loop, and you’re still not guaranteed viable output at the end. Your “hacks” can devolve into a complete mess, and at eye-watering expense.
I went and skimmed Graham’s Hackers and Painters again to see if I could find any choice quotes along these lines, since he spends that entire essay overdosing on the virtuosity of the “hacker.” And hoo boy:
Measuring what hackers are actually trying to do, designing beautiful software, would be much more difficult. You need a good sense of design to judge good design. And there is no correlation, except possibly a negative one, between people’s ability to recognize good design and their confidence that they can.
You think Graham will ever realize that we’re culminating a generation of his precious “hackers” who ultimately failed at all this?
re: last line: no, he never will admit or concede to a single damn thing, and that’s why every time I remember this article exists I have to reread dabblers & blowhards one more time purely for defensive catharsis
I don’t even know the degree to which that’s the fault of the old hackers, though. I think we need to acknowledge the degree to which a CS degree became a good default like an MBA before it, only instead of “business” it was pitched as a ticket to a well-paying job in “computer”. I would argue that a large number of those graduates were never going to be particularly interested in the craft of programming beyond what was absolutely necessary to pull a paycheck.
Interesting, I’d go rhetorically more in this direction: A hack is not a solution, it’s the temporary fix (or… break?) until you get around to doing it properly. On the axis where hacks are on one end and solutions on the other, genAI shit is beyond the hack. It’s not even a temporary fix, its less, functionally and culturally.
A hack can also just be a clever way to use a system in a way it wasnt designed.
Say you put a Ring doorbell on a drone as a perimeter defense thing? A hack. See also the woman who makes bad robots.
It also can be a certain playfulness with tech. Which is why hacker is dead. It cannot survive contact with capitalist forces.
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hot off the heels of months of “agentic! it can do things for you!” llm hype, they have to make special APIs for the chatbots, I guess because otherwise they make too many whoopsies?
In collaboration with cryptocurrency outfits Coinbase, MetaMask, and the Ethereum foundation, Google also produced an extension that would integrate the cryptocurrency-oriented x402 protocol, allowing for AI-driven purchasing from crypto wallets.
what could possibly go wrong
In either case, the goal is to maintain an auditable trail that can be reexamined in cases of fraud.
Which is a thing that you only need to worry about if you use these types of agents.
Which in any case you can’t, because
The protocol is built for a future in which AI agents routinely shop for products on customers’ behalf and engage in complex real-time interactions with retailers’ AI agents.
roko’s basilisk but instead of simulating torture it’s simulating mundane purchases. Broko’s Grocerlist
You’ll have to endlessly scroll Amazon and decide whether to buy the identical product from brand YDAKVKR or BNRTGRIV, reading ALL the fake reviews.
The protocol is built for a future in which AI agents routinely shop for products on customers’ behalf
as I was ranting in dm earlier elsewhere, the part about this that especially fucks me off is how much of this is not just simply unnecessary but also strictly worse than what we already used to have!
~15yo ago the entire bloody internet was awash in APIs and accessible interactions! hell, it’s the whole reason shit like Yahoo Pipes and IFTTT became a thing!
(and then after that ~everyone made fucking fences to wall their gardens because they want to Capture Users! to this day I still don’t know if it could’ve gone any other way under how capitalism operates, but fuck it sucks.)
meanwhile so many people (both those who’ve come up Touching Computers, as well as casual users, in the last 10~15y or so (who I typically refer to as the Cloud Generation) typically don’t even have a conception of doing it any other way but The Billable Platform Way. I have long suspected that this won’t hold out (it’s a truism that at some threshold people will start asking “wait why am I paying for this?”) and I am heartened by seeing some indicators of this starting to happen, but… fuck. there’s been so much damage from years of this shit
I still stay hopeful for change (esp. because this current way can’t hold), but I also grimace about what’s coming in the near future (because I know that a fair number of these platforms will be cognizant of the same problem)
Especially considering that the whole “your AI will negotiate with theirs” speaks to the kind of algorithmic price discrimination that you see in Uber and the like, where the system is designed specifically to maximize how much you’re willing and able to pay for a ride and minimize how much the driver is willing to accept for it. Hardcore techno libertarians want nothing more than to make it impossible for anyone to make meaningful informed choices about their lives that might prevent them from being taken advantage of by hardcore techno libertarians.
what could possibly go wrong
Unrelated to this specific topic but more cryptocurrency fails. This reminds me of hardware wallets which, on the wallet show information about the transaction. Which seems smart, so you can make sure the data from your perhaps compromised machine is correct. Only, the problem with these wallets was that they didn’t understand smart contracts. So if you got a smart contract you could still get hacked this way, because the information on the hardware wallet didn’t make sense (there were fixes for this, but think most people only really went in to fix this after the North Koreans made off with billions of fake coins).
There’s an ACX guest post rehashing the history of Project Xanadu, an important example of historical vaporware that influenced computing primarily through opinions and memes. This particular take is focused on Great Men and isn’t really up to the task of humanizing the participants, but they do put a good spotlight on the cults that affected some of those Great Men. They link to a 1995 article in Wired that tells the same story in a better way, including the “six months” joke. The orange site points out a key weakness that neither narrative quite gets around to admitting: Xanadu’s micropayment-oriented transclusion-and-royalty system is impossible to correctly implement, due to a mismatch between information theory and copyright; given the ability to copy text, copyright is provably absurd. My choice sneer is to examine a comment from one of the ACX regulars:
The details lie in the devil, for sure…you’d want the price [of making a change to a document] low enough (zero?) not to incur Trivial Inconvenience penalties for prosocial things like building wikis, yet high enough to make the David Gerards of the world think twice.
Disclaimer: I know Miller and Tribble from the capability-theory community. My language Monte is literally a Python-flavored version of Miller’s E (WP, esolangs), which is itself a Java-flavored version of Tribble’s Joule. I’m in the minority of a community split over the concept of agoric programming, where a program can expand to use additional resources on demand. To me, an agoric program is flexible about the resources allocated to it and designed to dynamically reconfigure itself; to Miller and others, an agoric program is run on a blockchain and uses micropayments to expand. Maybe more pointedly, to me a smart contract is what a vending machine proffers (see How to interpret a vending machine: smart contracts and contract law for more words); to them, a smart contract is how a social network or augmented/virtual reality allows its inhabitants to construct non-primitive objects.
It’s nice to be reminded that the past was also crazy.
much of the lore of the early/earlier internet being built is also full of some extremely, extremely unhinged stuff. I’ve had some first-hand in-the-trenches accounts from people I’ve known active from the early-mid 90s to middle 00s and holy shit there are some batshit things happening in places. often think of it when I see the kinds of shit thiel/musk/etc are all up to (a lot of it boils down to “they’re big mad that they have to even consider other people and can’t just do whatever they like”)
Mark Dery and Paulina Borsook nailed these fuckers square on in the '90s, but nobody reads books
What book is that?
Cyberselfish by Borsook, several books by Dery but particularly Escape Velocity
I’m down with reading books it’s just hard to select them without known reference recommendations
Gonna acquire the works of both, ty :D
largely not available digitally, though someone’s putting together a Borsook reissue
Xanadu’s micropayment-oriented transclusion-and-royalty system is impossible to correctly implement, due to a mismatch between information theory and copyright; given the ability to copy text, copyright is provably absurd
it kept being funny to me that even while xanadu had already shown the problems with content control the entirety of the NFT craze just went on as if it was full greenfields novel problem
The details lie in the devil, for sure…you’d want the price [of making a change to a document] low enough (zero?) not to incur Trivial Inconvenience penalties for prosocial things like building wikis, yet high enough to make the David Gerards of the world think twice.
some of these people just really don’t know their history very well, do they
on a total tangent:
while xanadu’s commercial-aspiration history is intimately tied up in why it never got much further, I do occasionally daydream about if we had, and if we could’ve combined it with more-modern signing and sourcing: daydream in the respect of “CA and cert chains, but for transcluded content”, esp in the face of all the fucking content mills used to push disinfo etc. not sure this would work ootb either, mind you, it’s got its own set of vulnerabilities and problems that you’d need to work through (and ofc you can’t solve social problems purely in the technical domain)
has there been any meaningful advancement or neat new research in agoric computing? haven’t really looked into it in a while, and the various blockchain nonsense took so much air out of the room for so long I haven’t had to spoons to look
(separately I know there’s also been some developments in remote trusted compute, but afaict that’s also still quite early days)
The 17 rules also seem to have abuse build in. Documents need to be stored redundantly (without any mention of how many copies that means), and it has a system where people are billed for the data they store. Combine these and storing your data anywhere runs the risk of a malicious actor emptying your accounts. In a ‘it costs ten bucks to store a file here’ ‘sorry we had to securely store ten copies of your file, 100 bucks please’. Weird sort of rules. Feels a lot like it never figured out what it wants to be a centralized or distributed system, a system where writers can make money, or they need to pay to use. And a lot of technical solutions for social problems.
Quick PSA for anyone who’s still on LinkedIn: the site’s stealing your data to train the slop machines
That reminds me I still need to wipe my reddit an twitter archives. Wonder if wiping it all in one go would cause more trouble for them, or if deleting it slowly (or overwriting with random words in the case of reddit) causes more changes in the datasets and messes with them more like that.
from when I last looked into this: twitter 100% has[0] (unstated) web API ratelimits for various subservices[1], but getting direct API creds became a “give us your actual phone number” thing even before felon took it over…
so I just decided to tombstone my account by making it private, updating bio, and never logging in again
not willing to give them what they want for API access. might at some point go write some web automation to recurringly click a delete button? idunno
[0] - …well, 4 years ago, “had”. probably maybe still does, on whatever parts of the haproxy or whatever config didn’t get absolutely fucking destroyed in felon’s mania to rebrand it to “x” overnight (a process which failed hilariously badly for weeks and I still think fondly of to laugh at)
[1] - when going through the “your interests” list (hidden deep in settings), if you unticked too many boxes too quickly you’d hit a webserver-enforced ratelimit on request limits and then half the webapp would get a bit fucky for an hour. ratelimit was something like 30/min with a 1/m type token-bucket refresh. quite the shitshow
Yeah, I figured I would need some web automation script for that, I have looked into them in the past, but never gotten far with it before something else was more important. Still silly that is needed and will hit the servers harder than an API would. Just strange priorities.
When I looked at ‘your interests’ in the past it was so incredibly wrong I resisted the urge to update it because I though ‘sure if that is what you think is important to me fine’. Gotta make sure the basilisk can’t simulate you ;).
Ratelimits would be the big worry, heard people reached those by just deleting tweets by hand. And the whole like system is broken anyway. If you remove enough of them by hand you get in the situation where tweets show in your list but they do not look like they were liked by that account. (I always had the suspicion the whole likes system, which people got mad over a lot is badly implemented anyway, and that explains the weirdness people saw, a thing this story seems to confirm).
I also heard blocklists put a high strain on the twitter so not going to look into removing that. (Not sure I can even find the list anymore anyway or at least a complete list, mine always stopped after 100 accounts or so, while I block a few more than that).
heard people reached those by just deleting tweets by hand.
yeah, the various backend interactions tied to web controls are extremely low-count limited
you could probably do it by smacking together a userscript (or whatever the fuck is the these-days version of greasemonkey/tampermonkey/??? to use) with a moderately simple algorithm… open a window, click execute, leave it going by itself for however long it takes to get through everything. it doesn’t have to do everything in minutes
I also heard blocklists put a high strain on the twitter so not going to look into removing that
probably the feed compute stuff only has this computational expense incurred for any displayed feeds (pruning off calculating stuff for long-enough-inactive users is one of the cheapest easy gains in that type of content feed), so this might not matter much. don’t have enough insight into real ops there to know one way or the other tho
I for one don’t mind if my reddit crap poisons future LLMs.
I just don’t want to be used and surveilled. Still need to get this shirt
Haha Standplaats moves fast.
New post from tante: The “Data” Narrative eats itself, using the latest Pivot to AI as a jumping off point to talk about synthetic data.
We need a word for when they make up a guy who doesn’t exist and then get mad at him.
I think “making up a guy to get mad at” is already an idiom as is.
You’re not wrong!
Drilling down, it’d be nice if there needs to be a way to capture the level of intentionality involved.
Ben Shapiro starts out with malice afore thought when makes up a guy, because he has a propaganda quota to hit. That’s a strawman.
A rationalist’s guy is an emergent phenomenon that arises from their cultic milieu (sometimes). They run with that misaprehention because of “smartest boy syndrome” and then you can’t tell em anything.
I guess keeping in theme, “vibe replying”
it’s kinda hilarious how close “steelmanning” (as practiced by some) already is to this, but probably not far enough to be usable for that purpose on its own
Had the same thought. -manning implies an ongoing conversation, rather than something to describe a lone weirdo spiraling about a fantasy.
Pretty sure that’s a strawman.
Since this is the solo version, strawmasturbating
Straw-onanism
I mean, I think the relevant difference is that rather than trying to argue against a weak opponent they’re trying to validate their feelings of victimization, superiority, and/or outrage by imagining an appropriate foil.
It’s a straw man that exists to be effectively venerated rather than torn down.
I think I might be missing some context here. Granted without context I’m pretty sure that strawman is still the right word.
The billionaires’ dreams of defeating death with technology have been “realised” by Marvel, which is planning an AI-Poweredtm hologram of him at L.A. Comic Con.
To the shock of nobody, this act of exploitation through digital necromancy is being met with unfiltered disgust.
death will be defeated as long as it stands in the way of profits (man i fucking hate it there)
Recently thought about how this one xkcd has probably done more recruiting for the rat community per unit effort spent making it than that 700k word salad.
Where are we on xkcd? I haven’t looked at it regularly for over a decade now. Nothing personally against the author or comic itself, I just completely deconverted from consuming nerd celebrity content at that point in the past.
I think it’s important to remember that Bayes was a real guy and bayesian statistics is a real useful thing even though Those Guys made it their religion. And they don’t really understand bayesian statistics anyway.
I still read xkcd regularly and think it’s pretty good. I don’t think “we” as a community need to have a particular opinion of Randall Munroe or his work but personally I think he seems alright and I enjoy the things he makes.
Seems like a stretch to assume that comic does anything to recruit rationalists. If you’re not already in the rat pipeline it’s just a pretty good joke about probability and if you are, it’s still a better example of Bayesian reasoning than whatever the rats pretend to do.
He kind of left his prime I think, the humor becoming alternatingly a bit too esoteric or a bit too obvious, and kind of stale in general. Nothing particularly objectionable about the author comes to mind otherwise.
I follow it on RSS, it’s sometime’s funny but not required reading.
I don’t think you can blame the comic’s author for people on HN and elsewhere passing around references to specific comics to make their points.
As to the specific one mentioned here, I don’t remember reading it before.
edit to add sometimes it’s obvious the entire joke is in the alt-text, like so: https://xkcd.com/3143/
maybe this just betrays that i don’t know shit about fuck, but it feels like this xkcd would make more sense if the frequentist did the experiment more than once
Regarding occasional sneer target Lawrence Krauss and his co-conspirators:
Months of waiting but my review copy of The War on Science has arrived.
I read Krauss’ introduction. What the fuck happened to this man? He comes off as incapable of basic research, argument, basic scholarship. […] Um… I think I found the bibliography: it’s a pdf on Krauss’ website? And all the essays use different citation formats?
Most of the essays don’t include any citations in the text but some have accompanying bibliographies?
I think I’m going insane here.
What the fuck?
https://bsky.app/profile/nateo.bsky.social/post/3lyuzaaj76s2o
All of those people, Krauss, Dawkins, Harris (okay that one might’ve been unsalvageable from the start, I’m really not sure) are such a great reminder that you can be however smart/educated you want, the moment you believe you’re the smartest boi and stop learning and critically approaching your own output you get sucked into the black hole of your asshole, never to return.
Like if I had a nickel. It’s hubris every time. All of those people need just a single good friend that, from time to time, would tell them “man, what you said was really fucking stupid just now” and they’d be saved.
Clout is a proxy of power and power just absolutely rots your fucking brain. Every time a Guy emerges, becomes popular, clearly thinks “haha, but I am different, power will not rot MY brain”, five years later boom, he’s drinking with Jordan Benzo Peterson. Even Joe Fucking Rogan used to be significantly more lucid before someone gave him ten bazillion dollars for a podcast and he suffered severe clout poisoning.
Huh, I wonder who this Krauss guy is, haven’t heard of him.
*open wikipedia*
*entire subsection titled “Allegations of sexual misconduct”*
*close wikipedia*
image description
Screenshot of Lawrence Krauss’s Wikipedia article, showing a section called “Controversies” with subheadings “Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein” followed by “Allegations of sexual misconduct”. Text at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Krauss#Controversies
“As a scientist…” please stop giving the world more reasons to stuff nerds in lockers.
Always so many coincidences.
