this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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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.

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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.

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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.

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(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (11 children)

I know it's Halloween, but this popped up in my feed and was too spooky even for me 😱

As a side note, what are peoples feelings about Wolfram? Smart dude for sho, but some of the shit he says just comes across as straight up pseudoscientific gobbledygook. But can he out guru Big Yud in a 1v1 on Final Destination (fox only, no items) ? 🤔

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 11 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)
[–] self@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago

I knew Wolfram was a massive asshole, but I didn’t know or forgot that Mathematica was based on appropriated publicly-owned work:

In the mid-1980s, Wolfram had a position at the University of Illinois-Urbana's Beckman Institute for complex systems. While there, he and collaborators developed the program Mathematica, a system for doing mathematics, particularly algebraic transformations and finding exact-form solutions, similar to a number of other products (Maple, Matlab, Macsyma, etc.), which began to appear around the same time. Mathematica was good at finding exact solutions, and also pretty good at graphics. Wolfram quit Illinois, took the program private, and entered into complicated lawsuits with both his former employee and his co-authors (all since settled).

and on that note, Symbolics did effectively the same thing with Macsyma (and a ton of other public software on top of that, all to drive sales of their proprietary Lisp machines), but a modernized direct descendent of the last publicly-owned version of Macsyma named Maxima is available and should run wherever Common Lisp does. it’s a pretty good replacement for a lot of what Mathematica does, and the underlying language is a lot less batshit too

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