Want to wade into the snowy 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 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 so 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.)
My generous statement: Knuth, being a scientist, is used to an "adversary" that plays fair. As we have known for decades, a scientist can be tricked in situations that a magician will see through. This applies all the more now with the Sycophancy Engines, which make mathematics into a casino vacation. Just one more prompt, bro. Just one more prompt.
My less generous statement: Knuth is almost 90 years old. Sure, age doesn't imply a person will become a doddering fool, but people do tend to slow down, to have less energy and more need to spend it managing their health. "Thinking about a problem for a few weeks" counts for less in a situation like that.
My extremely ungenerous statement: Hey, remember when Michael Atiyah claimed to have proved the Riemann hypothesis in 2018? And the community reaction was a pained, "Atiyah is one of the great mathematicians... of the 20th century."