Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 14 April 2024 - eviltoast

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.

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    7 months ago

    this is a lot more damning than the 404 media article let on, and I’m very happy that’s the case

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      6·
      7 months ago

      it is really a damning with a slight hint of praise

      We also note that, while many of the new compositions are trivial adaptations of known materials, the computational approach delivers credible overall compositions, which gives us confidence that the underlying approach is sound

      In closing, we hope the comments presented here will usefully serve the large community of materials scientists and engineers in their continued quest to develop the next generation of useful materials. While we are confident that the tools of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have a bright future in the field of materials discovery, more work needs to be done before that promise is fulfilled.

      the other paper cited is that preprint from el reg article from some two months ago

      also i wouldn’t agree that research on plutonium intermetallics is useless, it’s still a very useful material. granted, in civilian use it’s mostly in form of ceramic plutonium dioxide, and i guess that some (most?) of plutonium alloying chemistry came to be in search of something that could be called stainless plutonium, which would make nuclear weapons design much easier and more reliable. but it’s not completely useless and it can have actual civilian applications

      also authors note that even such noncontroversial thing as writing compound formula in standardized, conventional way and sorting them by compound class was too hard for them