this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
18 points (90.9% liked)

TechTakes

2212 readers
355 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting 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 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 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago (17 children)

Was reading some science fiction from the 90's and the AI/AGI said 'im an analog computer, just like you, im actually really bad at math.' And I wonder how much damage these one of these ideas (the other being there are computer types that can do more/different things. Not sure if analog turing machines provide any new capabilities that digital TMs do, but I leave that question for the smarter people in the subject of theorethical computer science) did.

The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write), which now leads people who read enough science fiction to see the machine that can't count nor run doom and go 'this is what they predicted!'.

Not a sneer just a random thought.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Not sure if analog turing machines provide any new capabilities that digital TMs do, but I leave that question for the smarter people in the subject of theorethical computer science) did.

Capabilities in the sense that they can compute problems that digital TMs cannot? No, they cannot Capabilities in the sense they'd be more efficient at computing some problems than digital TMs? Hard af to prove or disprove.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah in the complexity theory sense. I think it was already proven that the ... shit sorry can't find the correct words... how analog number storage can have arbitrary precision (?? not sure if that is the correct way to describe it) provide no benefit over digital ones due to various factors. Sorry if it is vague, it has been a long time I ago I really learned about this stuff.

load more comments (15 replies)