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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)


This reminds me of another tech bro many years ago who also thought that expertise is overrated, and things really arenāt that hard, you know? That belief eventually led him to make a public challenge that he could beat Magnus Carlsen in chess after a month of practice. The WSJ picked up on this, and decided to sponsor an actual match with him and Carlsen. They wrote a fawning article about it, but it did little to stop his enormous public humiliation in the chess community. Hereās a reddit thread discussing that incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/nb5b1k/chess_one_month_to_beat_magnus_how_an_obsessive/
As a sidenote, I found it really funny that he thought his best strategy was literally to train a neural network and ⦠memorize all the weights and run inference with mental calculations during the game. Of course, on the day of the match, the strategy was not successful because his algorithm āran out of time calculatingā. How are so many techbros not even good at tech? Come on, thatās the one thing youāre supposed to know!
Lord grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man, etc.
alt text
A screenshot of a tweet by yougov, a uk-based organisation, showing the results of a survey which say
Include in the screenshot is a response by longwall26,
Yea good luck, I am a mediocre white man and the providence didnāt even grant me the confidence.
The Rationalists.
lmao, whatās his lesswrong username?
So pre-teen me reading the Biggles books with the gag about the pilot who tries to do ballistic calculations during a dogfight was saving me from being as stupid as a Californian?