Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024 - eviltoast

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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • V0ldek@awful.systems
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    5 months ago

    This thread is an unending source of amusement.

    Someone there found his ORCID andā€¦ Itā€™s not great: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2835-3521

    He has basically nothing published, but has like 40 different ā€œpreprintsā€, 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]

    šŸ¤”


    1 No he doesnā€™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.

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      Those ā€œpapersā€ are gold, theyā€™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.

      Iā€™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 isnā€™t healthy.

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 months ago

        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

        • V0ldek@awful.systems
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          5 months ago

          Dunno, the funniest thing about them to me is that theyā€™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.

          • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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            5 months ago

            he also has a personal site, itā€™s linked on researchgate. i took psychic damage reading this, somebody force him to touch grass

            • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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              5 months ago

              oh goddess, heā€™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!

              • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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                5 months ago

                eh iā€™ve seen that before at least once and iā€™m inclined to believe thereā€™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 donā€™t do any stupid avoidable mistakes. he wonā€™t listen

                he tried to get into uni but if i have to guess he got rejected? in any case he didnā€™t learn anything but over time got into contact with some research group, at least thatā€™s what he claimed and started homelab. (youā€™d guess that some medchem research group at uni would have a wet lab, but it must be in other country and youā€™ve never seen them).

                so anyway our misunderstood hero starts cooking ā€œanticancerā€ ā€œmedsā€ 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, heā€™d just got an idea that it will work and thatā€™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 heā€™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 itā€™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 ā€œanti-rabies antiviralā€ where he missed the point of about everything he wanted to do. then went back to ā€œanticancerā€)

                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 heā€™d genocide everyone who doesnā€™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 itā€™s since abandoned. allegedly he also had 2 or 3 accounts before that

                • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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                  5 months ago

                  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)ā€¦

                  • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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                    5 months ago

                    (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)

              • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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                5 months ago

                if his claim of ā€œ20 years studying mathā€ is anywhere close to accurate heā€™s already off the deep end, unless heā€™s counting in everything from kindergarten up. considering heā€™s a cryptobro it already happened pre-pandemic

              • V0ldek@awful.systems
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                5 months ago

                Hey, he didnā€™t update the website to include his research interest in AI, huh, wonder how long heā€™s been a samurai of that

        • V0ldek@awful.systems
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          5 months ago

          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.

    • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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      5 months ago

      A.S. in Engineering, A.S. in Computer Science

      wait, wait. thatā€™s basically the bootcamp level of education, no?

      • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        (nothing wrong with that per se, i donā€™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 donā€™t know enoughā€¦ this is indeed the threadnought-level of recklessness.)

        • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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          5 months ago

          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)

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        I know essentally nothing about the US education system butā€¦

        If youā€™re gonna pull credentalist bullshit, maybe at least have the credentials? You took us there mate, I wouldnā€™t be pulling your degrees up if you didnā€™t first talk about how formally educated you areā€¦

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      5 months ago

      he does seem to have carefully cultivated case of engineer disease

      also itā€™s not ā€œalmost allā€ preprints, itā€™s all preprints, just one repository calls these papers

      he didnā€™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)

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
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        5 months ago

        Thereā€™s one classified as ā€œSSRN Electronic Journal 2023 | Journal articleā€, I thought this was something like a predatory journal, hence the ā€œalmostā€, but now that I clicked on it I think this is just an arxiv-like website that calls itself an ā€œelectronic journalā€? No fucking idea.

          • V0ldek@awful.systems
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            5 months ago

            Amazing.

            I could ā€œpublishā€ my homeworks from the 5yrs of college onto arxiv and thatā€™d be a more scientifically valuable endeavour. Better formatted, too.