[-] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 21 hours ago

Such a good post. LWers are either incapable of critical thought or self scrutiny, or are unwilling and think verbal diarrhea is a better choice.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 18 points 1 day ago

presented without comment.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 2 points 1 day ago

Guy fused a phylactery and a prophylactic, making a prophylactery.

(apologies for the necro-post?)

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago

I listen to a podcast about black/african american conspiracy theories, and I got a podcast ad from Ed Zitron, so there’s that.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago

The Onion clowns on Ol' Musky constantly, despite his efforts to shut them down. Around the peak space X buzz, they wrote a headline that was like "Musk invents the first infinitely divorceable wife", which he managed to scrub from the internet (or at least, I can't find it within 5 seconds), but other than that, he can only cope and seethe. He knows the onion is funny and can do nothing to become funny himself.

I would label him as anti-humor or humorless. Dishumorous?

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 4 days ago

Before looking this up, I imagined that "gait analysis" was some kind of crackpot manosphere thing like analysing the angles that people lean to in photographs.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago

Wow, that starts bad and gets worse.

It starts with this quote, which is absolutely fine:

But others said the admissions exam and additional application requirements are inherently unfair to students of color who face socioeconomic disadvantages. Elaine Waldman, whose daughter is enrolled in Reed’s IHP, said the test is “elitist and exclusionary,” and hoped dropping it would improve the diversity of the program.

Now for the expert analysis:

Recognizing gifted students is inherently discriminatory.

Yes! This is true, following from the quote, as long as the thing that is "inherently" discriminated for is socioeconomic background. Of course, Animats immediately makes it about race.

[insert common race science stats here] There are other numbers from other sources, but they all rank in that order. There's a huge amount of denial about this. There are more articles trying to explain this away than ones that report the results.

AKA I disagree with the analysis and consensus that all this IQ stuff is socioeconomic rather than genetic.

(Average US Black IQ has been rising over the last few decades, but the US definition of "Black" includes mixed race. That may be a consequence of intermarriage producing more brown people, causing reversion to the mean. IQ vs 23 and Me data would be interesting. Does anyone collect that?)

Jesus fucking christ.

Gladwell's new book, "The Revenge of The Tipping Point" goes into this at length. The Ivy League is struggling to avoid becoming majority-Asian. Caltech, which has no legacy admissions, is majority-Asian. So is UC Berkeley.[3]

Nobody tell this guy that Gladwell is black.

Of course, this may become less significant once AI gets smarter and human intelligence becomes less necessary in bulk. Hiring criteria for railroads and manufacturing up to WWII favored physically robust men with moderate intelligence. Until technology really got rolling, the demand for smart people was lower than their prevalence in the population.

I guarantee that in the not happening future where AI is smarter than humans, chuds like this guy will still be racist.

We may be headed back in that direction. Consider Uber, Doordash, Amazon, and fast food. Machines think and plan, most humans carry out the orders of the machines. A small number of humans direct.

🙄🙄🙄

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 3 points 4 days ago

IIRC elvis’s manager sold “i hate elvis” merch. It’s a long and storied industry

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

yeah filing this under my "ok so you know you can just have kinks, right? like you don't need to intellectually justify your kink. Have you seen a therapist?" folder

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 4 days ago

Tangential: The Better Business Bureau isn't affiliated with any government agency. At its best, it is a consumer advocacy group, but at its worst, it is a racket.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 11 points 5 days ago

billy spears got it right. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

32

Didn’t see this news posted but please link previous correspondence if I missed it.

https://archive.is/XwbY0

15

This is somewhat tangential to the usual fare here but I decided to make a post because why not.

I’ve been listening to the back catalog of the Judge John Hodgman podcast, and this ep came up. This ep is the second crypto based case after “crypto facto” in ep 333.

John Hodgman is a comedian, probs best known for being the “I’m a PC” guy in the “I’m a Mac” ad campaign from ancient times. In the podcast, he plays a fake judge that hears cases and makes judgements. In this ep, “Suing for Soul Custody,” he hears a case in which a husband wants to sell his soul on the blockchain, while his wife does not want him to do that.

Some good sneers against the crypto bro husband (in both this case and the other I linked). Brief spoilers as to the rulings in case you don’t want to listen:

333Judge rules that the husband should continue to mine ETH until his rig burns down his house.

556Judge rules that the guy shouldn’t sell his soul, for symbolic reasons.

Note: I like John Hodgman. He’s funny. He’s not really inside the tech space, but he is good friends with Jonathan Coulton, who is. If all you know of him is the “I’m a PC” ads, he has an entertaining wider catalogue worth checking out.

43

On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price rockets, the bitcoin miners either sell power back to providers at a profit or stop mining for a fee, paid by ercot. Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself. In August of 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin.

Archive link: https://archive.md/O8Cz9

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Kind of sharing this because the headline is a little sensationalist and makes it sound like MS is hard right (they are, but not like this) and anti-EU.

I mean, they probably are! Especially if it means MS is barred from monopolies and vertical integration.

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VoughtCoin (the-boys.fandom.com)

TIL that television program “The Boys” has an in universe cryptocurrency as a satire of, well, cryptocurrency in general but also specifically that time when DJT was selling NFTs. They occasionally tweet about it.

It has a listing on the “BSCScan” crypto tracker under the name “VTC” so someone might have actually minted it? It might surprise some of you that I have no way of telling the realness of such a thing.

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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by swlabr@awful.systems to c/sneerclub@awful.systems

Uncritically sharing this article with naive hope. Is this just PR for a game? Probably. Indies deserve as much free press as possible though.

27

As is tradition I am sharing this link without having listened yet.

39

The video game in question:

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22

Followup to part 1, which now has a transcript!

As is tradition, I am posting this link without having listened to it. (too many podcasts)

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swlabr

joined 1 year ago