YourNetworkIsHaunted @ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

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There are three kinds of programmers. From smallest to largest: Those smart enough to write good math-intensive libraries, those dumb about to think they can, and those smart enough to just use what the first kind made.

You've got to make sure you're not over-specializing. I'd recommend trying to roll your own time zone library next.

First and foremost, the dunce is incapable of valuing knowledge that they don't personally understand or agree with. If they don't know something, then that thing clearly isn't worth knowing.

There is a corollary to this that I've seen as well, and it dovetails with the way so many of these guys get obsessed with IQ. Anything they can't immediately understand must be nonsense not worth knowing. Anything they can understand (or think they understand) that you don't is clearly an arcane secret of the universe that they can only grasp because of their innate superiority. I think that this is the combination that explains how so many of these dunces believe themselves to be the ubermensch who must exercise authoritarian power over the rest of us for the good of everyone.

See also the commenter(s) on this thread who insist that their lack of reading comprehension is evidence that they're clearly correct and are in no way part of the problem.

A lot of the spamming at the SC2 tournament level is about staying warmed up so that when you get into a micro-intensive battle later on where all of those actions might count (splitting your marines to protect from AoE while target-firing the suicide bombing banelings, for example) you can do it. Doesn't make it look less ridiculous, especially in the first couple of minutes before the commentary has anything to really talk about so they try to act like stealing 5 minerals at that stage could somehow decide the game. But there is a slightly more reasonable logic to it than just speed running an RSI to look cool.

The original StarCraft also offers a lot of opportunities to use your "extra" APM to optimize around the godawful AI pathing and other "quirks" of the engine. It's not as bad as, say, DotA in terms of "this was a limitation of the original engine that is now a major cornerstone of playing the game well and if you complain about it you're just bad" but it's definitely up there. As the game goes on you'll usually see players start getting slightly more fast and loose with, say, optimizing the mining at their new base because at that point in the game splitting your focus that much is more detrimental even if you can move that fast.

I definitely ended up in the occasional spectator and campaign player for all that, though. Especially now that I'm starting to have creaky old man wrists of my own.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like he was properly banned, just booted out of his session for having suspiciously-high APM. Now, the true eSports nerds among us will already know that high APM is a staple of high-level play in some games but is also an easy way to check for certain types of cheaters. Because of the association with skill in e.g. StarCraft it also became a very easily gamable metric if for some reason you wanted to feel like you knew what you were doing or show off for your friends and strangers online. For example, certain key bindings let you perform some actions as fast as your keyboard's refresh rate allows by holding down a key or abusing the scroll wheel on your mouse. This can send your measured APM through the roof for a time. My gut says this is what Elon was doing that triggered the anticheat program, rather than any amount of actively gaming or actually cheating.

Please note that the hard-won knowledge of my misspent youth has no bearing on how pathetic it is for the richest man in the world to be doing the same kind of begging for clout that I did at 14, especially since I'm pretty 14-year-old me was frankly better at it.

On one hand giving these people the veneer of science is actively going to undermine public confidence in "science" as a whole and directly make the world a worse place.

On the other hand, money.

I got bounced back to Casey Newton's recent master class in critihype and found something new that stuck in my craw.

Occasionally, they get an entire sector wrong — see the excess of enthusiasm for cleantech in the 2000s, or the crypto blow-up of the past few years.

In aggregate, though, and on average, they’re usually right.

First off, please note that this describes two of the most recent tech bubbles and doesn't provide any recent counterexamples of a seemingly-ridicilous new gimmick that actually stuck around past the initial bubble. Effectively this says: yes, they're 0 for 2 in the last 20 years, but this time they can't all be wrong!

But more than that I think there's an underlying error in acting like "the tech sector" is a healthy and competitive market in the first place. They may not directly coordinate or operate in absolute lockstep, but the main drivers of crypto, generative AI, metaverse, SaaS, and so much of the current enshittifying and dead-ending tech industry comes back to a relatively small circle of people who all live in the same moneyed Silicon Valley cultural and informational bubble. We can even identify the ideological underpinnings of these decisions in the TESCREAL bundle, effective altruism and accelerationism, and "dark enlightenment" tech-fascism. This is not a ruthlessly competitive market that ferrets out weakness. It's more like a shared cult of personality that selects for whatever makes the guys in top feel good about themselves. The question isn't "how can all these different groups be wrong without someone undercutting them", it's "how can these few dozen guys who share an ideology and information bubble keep making the exact same mistakes as one another" and the answer should be to question why anyone expects anything else!

To his frequent "no, people really are this stupid" refrain I would like to add an argument. If it didn't work on enough people to be profitable, the business model wouldn't have persisted and been replicated and refined into the dominant model of online advertising, and/or online advertising would never have been able to become the primary monetization framework for online content. Like, it's fucked how much of the existing Internet is effectively subsidized by exploiting people who don't know better, and I don't think people are really okay with this as much as the system is sufficiently obfuscated that we don't have to notice or think about it.

Economics: the famously apolitical field that examines the distribution and creation of wealth, also a famously apolitical concept.

Ironically this whole exchange is an example of just how cooked American political discourse is. The culture war is so all-consuming that anything outside of that gets largely excised from political action entirely. Then when someone from outside the US tries to point out that basically unrestricted corporate looting and blatant violations of various human rights could be regulated or otherwise countered by political processes, people act like they're speaking Martian.

At best you end up with the Gunther Hermann story from Deus Ex, forced into retirement and made disposable when last generation's top-of-the-line becomes this generation's unusable trash.

Ironically the trolley problem meme here is a great example of the objection: the same set up that puts him in the position to pull the lever also requires that people be tied to the track.

I read this as shrimp warfare and while I'm not sure about WW3, the fifth or sixth world war will be fought between the shrimp and the crows over rulership of the earth.

I am deeply hurt by this post. I thought we were friends here. (/s)

Translation: we realized that with current self-driving tech being so wildly unsafe and unable to adapt to unexpected circumstances without killing and maiming people it's actually critical to make sure the car has a human owner driver to take liability responsibility for the harm that inevitably predictably might result. please don't fine us again

Isn't this the women that conservatives tried to say was so attractive that her success was somehow anti-woke?

I'm definitely out of my depth here, but how exactly does a lefty organism bypass immune responses and still interact with the body? Seems like if it has a way to mess up healthy cells then it should have something that antibodies can connect to, mirrored or not. Not that I'm arguing we shouldn't be careful about creating novel pathogens, but other than being a more flashy sci-fi premise I'm not really seeing how it's more dangerous than the right-handed version.

Also I think this opens up a beautiful world of new scientific naming conventions:

• Southpaw Paramecium
• Lefty Naegleria
• Sinister Influenza

Shout out to the 4-handed man in the background holding either a camera or a cat.

Investors as a general class are usually pretty terrible at staying in their lane and not listening when actual subject matter experts disagree with the guy with a good story. I think the only reason they have any reputation otherwise (compared to e.g. physicists' disease) is survivorship bias.

One of these days we'll get the quantum bogosort working.

They definitely use actual numbers to try and push their agenda. It's a classic case of constructing a category. Like how we're the highest paying company in the industry of high technology, textile workers, teenagers, and dead people. Look at how much good EA-backed interventions like malaria nets are doing! Clearly this means EA-backed programs to make sure Sam Altman develops a computer god before his evil twin Alt Sam-man is also such a good use of resources that you're basically a murderer if you don't give.